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In my experience, the larger the company the less painful it is to fire 10%. In large engineering organisations, laying off 10% makes no difference at all on a
by entity345 8y ago
In my experience, the larger the company the less painful it is to fire 10%.
In large engineering organisations, laying off 10% makes no difference at all on anything apart from the ego of managers whose teams shrink.
On the topic, wasn't Jack Welsh/GE that popularised the idea of firing the bottom 10% every single year? Not saying that this is necessarily a good idea but that shows the amount of slack in large organisations.
- JKCalhoun 8y agoMust be great for morale.
- pferde 8y agoIt really is. After every such round, I think to myself "finally!". And things start getting done slightly faster afterwards. Edit: In any big corp, there are usually many employees who act as "barriers" to others. Either because they feel secure enough in their job and don't really care about performing, or because they lost sight of why things are being done, and are focusing on bureaucracy and "processes" for the sake of those two things.
- jjoonathan 8y agoThe rounds of firing reliably identify the low productivity people? I'd have expected the opposite -- that they reliably identify those least able to swing the politics necessary to win high-visibility work, who in my experience are typically high-productivity individuals. If the decimations have been going on for some time, I'd expect them to reliably hit low-performers, but only because the obvious low performers were hired as sacrificial lambs in the first place, which puts the whole exercise deep in "cobra effect" territory.
- pferde 8y agoOf course, it's not 100% accurate, but so far, it looks like there's some good observation behind the firing decisions.
- Spooky23 8y agoIt encourages all of sorts of dysfunctional behavior. I know one guy who would horde orphan teams to use as cannon fodder and protect his core team.