> But it is objective, and it's important that it be so But it's not objective at all. He still subjectively evaluated each individual employee, and fed this i

> But it is objective, and it's important that it be so But it's not objective at all. He still subjectively evaluated each individual employee, and fed this into the program as an input, in order to help him find configurations that fulfill certain conditions. And this is a good thing. I'm not 100% sure what you mean by: > There is always some sort of objective scoring criteria. For larger redundancies these are agreed with employee reps as part of the consultation period. ...but if I am guessing correctly, then this is fortunately NOT what he did here. Any objective metric in a field where there's no clear way to measure performance will always be extremely poor, despite employee reps' / unions' love for them. What would this metric be? I can remember one example (not in CS but in another hard-to-measure-output field), where it is just how long you've worked there. So if there are 5 people doing job X and 2 need to be fired, the newest 2 get fired. I'm entirely confident in a former team lead, now CTO's ability to beat the accuracy of that metric with his subjective evaluation of each individual's abilities (regardless of whether he uses a program to help him optimize based on that information). The problem people have with this is that they think the person making the subjective decision might have some kind of bias. And some bias definitely exists, pretty much 100% of the time. But in reality, even a biased boss who's worked with those people for a while is likely to evaluate SD employees more accurately than some arbitrary metric. If you don't deserve to be fired, but get fired anyway, it's equally unfair whether it was because the boss really likes a shitty employee who should have been fired instead, or because the shitty employee has more tenure at the company and they're firing the newest people, or because they threw a die to pick whom to fire.