Forgive me, but holy crap that sounds even worse! Not only does everybody seem to know the system can't work in practice, they actually have to conspire behind the scenes to prevent the worst outcomes? And the assertion that politics trump rules anytime isn't in any way reassuring either. We all know the kinds of people who excel at office politics and they're usually the most destructive, corrupt and unproductive members of the team!

So to summarize what I heard so far: stack ranking is a terrible system based on flawed assumptions, everybody involved knows it, it doesn't actually measure performance but charisma, and for a company to work with this thing they have to sidestep it anyway?