One of the things I loved about working at Netflix was that the base assumption was that everyone was a top performer. If you weren't a top performer, you were given a severance check.
The analogy we used was a sports team. Pro sports teams have really good players and great players. Some people are superstars, but unless you're at least really really good you're not on the team.
Performance and compensation were completely separate, which was also nice. Performance evals were 360 peer reviews, and compensation was determined mostly by HR based on what it was costing to bring in new hires, and then bumping everyone up to that level.
So at least at Netflix 10 years ago, performance wasn't really distributed at all. Everyone was top 10% industrywide.
The analogy we used was a sports team. Pro sports teams have really good players and great players. Some people are superstars, but unless you're at least really really good you're not on the team.
Performance and compensation were completely separate, which was also nice. Performance evals were 360 peer reviews, and compensation was determined mostly by HR based on what it was costing to bring in new hires, and then bumping everyone up to that level.
So at least at Netflix 10 years ago, performance wasn't really distributed at all. Everyone was top 10% industrywide.