Fight, fight for Empress Marissa: the arena must be refreshed with nerd blood. After pissing everyone at Yahoo! off by making them come into the office, AllThingsD reports Marissa Mayer's latest HR edict is drawing more ire. Employee versus employee.

Yahoo! has recently implemented an archaic bell curve ranking system, compelling employees to artificially spread colleagues over a range of bad to good—even if reality doesn't actually reflect itself on a curve. That's the thing about bell curves: they look so great on paper, but not so much when you're looking around the room and thinking of who might get fired over it. Maybe it's you! And indeed, heads are rolling from the artificial curvature:

According to a multitude of top-ranking posts on an anonymous internal message board used by Yahoo to vent their frustrations to top staff, employees there are becoming increasingly upset by an evaluation system instituted by CEO Marissa Mayer that has apparently resulted in the firings of more than 600 people in recent weeks...the "Quarterly Performance Review" system forces managers to rank some of their staff with designations of "Occasionally Misses" and "Misses," even if it is not the case

Businessweek also points out that this kind of rationalized review is just bad for business. Of course, it's horrible for morale: AllThingsD says livid employees, who are basically being asked to betray their coworkers in the name of statistical neatness, are taking to an internal message board with their gripes:

I feel so uncomfortable because in order to meet the bell curve, I have to tell the employee that they missed when I truly don't believe it to be the case.

Another adds, "More often than I'd like I'm told we are executing a certain way 'because Marissa said so.'" That's probably the literally least comforting thing to be told when you ask why you're ordered to arbitrarily endanger the jobs of your peers.