I heard about that, some call it the “wasted decade” at MS. Top engineers refused to work together due to the stack ranking, not wanting draw the short end of the stick in the evaluations, when compared to each other.
A company I worked at 10 years ago also dabbled with it a bit, luckily not seriously. It was a consultancy firm who hired top graduates from prestige universities, so it made even less sense. Dude, nobody is average or below here, you hire the best people after grilling them in interviews and a whole day assessment center. The bell curve just doesn’t make sense
It’s an interesting debate, if what we are seeing now is the natural, inevitable progress of capitalism, or it could have gone a better way, but eg. Reagan fucked it up for all of us in the 70s.