My understanding was that tech (and I consider Tesla tech even if it's inherently auto) companies were getting away from the stack rank evaluations (save a few). So I'm a bit surprised Tesla is going in that direction.
High demand workers have more opportunities and those that can (the good ones) will find a diff job that does not play this kind of churn game. So I'd thought.
There is no stack ranking involved (as far as I know, at least in SW). That's why when an engineer is evaluated as under-performing this is really about their own (manager-perceived) performance vs the expectation, and there is no question about whether they'd be in an exceptional team. Now instead of a formal PIP that we know won't get anywhere, HR isn't shy about letting go dead-weight. My impression is that the default approach from HR when a manager rate someone as under-performing is that we should let them go, unless the manager wants to setup some sort of PIP.
Occasional underperformance is normal variance as is overperformance. If you can't handle these cases you don't belong in management, and if you fire everyone for underperforming once (your suggestion) you will soon have no workers, and you will cause everyone remaining to underperform.
I think you missed the essence of my comment which was "there is no stack ranking and being evaluated as underperforming is then not a result of stack ranking".
I'm not sure what you mean by `occasional underperformance`? I'm talking about a yearly performance evaluation, in my opinion an overall underperforming for a year is not "occasional", it shows something systemic. The truth is that sometimes we make bad hiring decision (in my group it has been 2-3%). We try to work with them for a few months, set goals, but ultimately you can't always recover everyone.
You haven't defined what you mean by "single occurrence"? To me being low one month, or during a two months project can be a single occurrence, but that wouldn't lead to a "bad perf review" (at least not in my team). Being clearly underperforming for a complete year without changes after setting up intermediate goals for improvements is not a "single occurrence".
When a Sr. Staff which is less productive than other junior engineers, and requires the same level of guidance, something isn't right.
High demand workers have more opportunities and those that can (the good ones) will find a diff job that does not play this kind of churn game. So I'd thought.