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Sometimes statements of facts may seem incredibly offensive. Others should be able to mention those in a related discussion, even if offensive, because otherwis

Sometimes statements of facts may seem incredibly offensive. Others should be able to mention those in a related discussion, even if offensive, because otherwise the discussion is biased. I use the word "fact" above because I think it is obvious that if firing is hard, low performers accumulate. I'm happy to elaborate if you wish.

Firadeoclus 8y ago
So where do low performers come from and where do they go to when you fire them? What is their flow through the economy? A fired low performer will still look for, and likely find, another job. The assumption there might be that they will learn and try harder, but whether that is the actual effect is much less obvious than you might think. It's also not obvious at all that churn is good for overall productivity of an economy. Can you show that making firing harder or easier causally affects average productivity (or the productivity distribution) in a specific direction?
pluma 8y ago
> I use the word "fact" above because I think it is obvious that Then it's not a fact. That you think "if A then B" is obvious just means you take it for granted and betrays your bias. EDIT: Making it easy to fire people doesn't mean "low performers" won't "accumulate". Case in point: the infamous Microsoft strategy of always firing the bottom 10%, which led to a toxic culture that in turn resulted in talent leaving. Or the apparent necessity for "anti-poaching" agreements between major tech companies.
wirrbel 8y ago
Oh my, someone is doing a little Milchmädchenrechnung here it seems. Of course your "fact" isn't completely wrong in the sense that low performers cannot easily be fired if firing is difficult. You ignore, however, all kinds of other effects: Even high-performers value working at a company, where one is safe from being fired. So you accumulate not only low-performers, but all kinds of performers. Organizations have a high rate of confusion when they try to separate high-performers from low-performers. I once stumbled in a situation where during a reorg I could observe team leads pull their prefered employees from the pool. This were two team leads, and in the same department so everyone knew each other quite well. It was revealing. For one, some of the colleagues I consider most competent (and performing) were actively ruled out by some team leads. Others, that I felt were not contributing much were fought over. Of course, the two team leads had differing opinions on a couple of employees, which made assignment easy. Since you mention firing. I rarely see firing happen due to on-average lower performance. I have seen people being layed off (to polish the budget) but it never seemed to be the case that the people layed-off were really low performers. Only a handful of people I have seen being actively pushed out of a company for performance reasons, and usually this was by offering them a compensation package.

Firadeoclus 8y ago

So where do low performers come from and where do they go to when you fire them? What is their flow through the economy? A fired low performer will still look for, and likely find, another job. The assumption there might be that they will learn and try harder, but whether that is the actual effect is much less obvious than you might think. It's also not obvious at all that churn is good for overall productivity of an economy. Can you show that making firing harder or easier causally affects average productivity (or the productivity distribution) in a specific direction?

pluma 8y ago

> I use the word "fact" above because I think it is obvious that Then it's not a fact. That you think "if A then B" is obvious just means you take it for granted and betrays your bias. EDIT: Making it easy to fire people doesn't mean "low performers" won't "accumulate". Case in point: the infamous Microsoft strategy of always firing the bottom 10%, which led to a toxic culture that in turn resulted in talent leaving. Or the apparent necessity for "anti-poaching" agreements between major tech companies.

wirrbel 8y ago

Oh my, someone is doing a little Milchmädchenrechnung here it seems. Of course your "fact" isn't completely wrong in the sense that low performers cannot easily be fired if firing is difficult. You ignore, however, all kinds of other effects: Even high-performers value working at a company, where one is safe from being fired. So you accumulate not only low-performers, but all kinds of performers. Organizations have a high rate of confusion when they try to separate high-performers from low-performers. I once stumbled in a situation where during a reorg I could observe team leads pull their prefered employees from the pool. This were two team leads, and in the same department so everyone knew each other quite well. It was revealing. For one, some of the colleagues I consider most competent (and performing) were actively ruled out by some team leads. Others, that I felt were not contributing much were fought over. Of course, the two team leads had differing opinions on a couple of employees, which made assignment easy. Since you mention firing. I rarely see firing happen due to on-average lower performance. I have seen people being layed off (to polish the budget) but it never seemed to be the case that the people layed-off were really low performers. Only a handful of people I have seen being actively pushed out of a company for performance reasons, and usually this was by offering them a compensation package.