5 ms·

This sounds insane. Why would you hire a cohort of employees only to fire them later? This may make sense in professional services firms with a pyramid struct

This sounds insane. Why would you hire a cohort of employees only to fire them later? This may make sense in professional services firms with a pyramid structure. That's a situation where "up or out" might make sense. But a dev team? There are just way to many inter-dependencies in software development. Plus, social skills aren't a "must-have" for further development as an engineer the same way they would be for a professional service provider (e.g. lawyer, consultant, accountant). So the political aspect of rank and yank, just serves no purpose. Finally, software is an industry that's growing faster than the old manufacturing firms like GE (where rank and yank was popular). If it's cost pressure that's causing you to fire people, then perhaps you should have outsourced that dev work to begin with. Part of it was obviously both expendable and/or temporary, so not treat it as such?

cperciva 10y ago
This sounds insane. Why would you hire a cohort of employees only to fire them later? The simple answer is "because it's cheaper to hire them and see who works out than to put together a better hiring process". No hiring process is going to be perfect; at scale, companies can reasonably say "X% of our hires aren't going to work out". Consider the situation of university scholarships. At my institution, we offer entrance scholarships based on high school grades, extracurricular activities, and an application essay. If a student doesn't maintain a 3.5 GPA (we have A+ = 4.33, but the average grade awarded across the institution is 2.80) then they lose their scholarship. Every so often someone says "hey, why are we taking their money away? Why are we making them stress out over keeping their grades up?" -- and my answer is always that if they're having trouble maintaining a 3.5 GPA, we made a mistake in giving them the scholarship in the first place. Now, the situation isn't entirely analogous; in particular, if someone has worked at your company for 10 years and repeatedly demonstrated that you didn't make a mistake by hiring them, a single bad year probably doesn't contradict that. But if you know that you have a consistent rate of 10% of your hires turning out to be mistakes, it's not completely unreasonable to go around to your teams and say "those 10 people you hired last year? Figure out which one was the mistake".

cperciva 10y ago

This sounds insane. Why would you hire a cohort of employees only to fire them later? The simple answer is "because it's cheaper to hire them and see who works out than to put together a better hiring process". No hiring process is going to be perfect; at scale, companies can reasonably say "X% of our hires aren't going to work out". Consider the situation of university scholarships. At my institution, we offer entrance scholarships based on high school grades, extracurricular activities, and an application essay. If a student doesn't maintain a 3.5 GPA (we have A+ = 4.33, but the average grade awarded across the institution is 2.80) then they lose their scholarship. Every so often someone says "hey, why are we taking their money away? Why are we making them stress out over keeping their grades up?" -- and my answer is always that if they're having trouble maintaining a 3.5 GPA, we made a mistake in giving them the scholarship in the first place. Now, the situation isn't entirely analogous; in particular, if someone has worked at your company for 10 years and repeatedly demonstrated that you didn't make a mistake by hiring them, a single bad year probably doesn't contradict that. But if you know that you have a consistent rate of 10% of your hires turning out to be mistakes, it's not completely unreasonable to go around to your teams and say "those 10 people you hired last year? Figure out which one was the mistake".