8 ms·

The devils advocate answer: Statistically, some of your employees probably aren’t good enough to be worth employing. But managers are human, hard conversations

The devils advocate answer: Statistically, some of your employees probably aren’t good enough to be worth employing. But managers are human, hard conversations are hard, there are lots of incentives to not manage those people out. By having an attrition target and forcing people to cut the bottom 10%, you basically skip over the soft fuzzy human factors keeping people around, and instead fall back to the statistical truth that the worst 10% probably are negative value employees. Not saying I agree with this, but I think that’s the strongest case you can make for it.

evidencepi 5y ago
> 1953: * Mao declared that "95 percent of the people are good," leading the party to target 5 percent in many organizations as "bad elements" who should be purged and repressed. At least hundreds of thousands died. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/07/17/how-many-died-new-evidence-suggests-far-higher-numbers-for-the-victims-of-mao-zedongs-era/01044df5-03dd-49f4-a453-a033c5287bce/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/07/17/h... I also want to point out that a lot ppl who suffered or even lost their lives during such period were actually sabotaged or framed by their peers (neighbors, coworkers), rather than the authority.
NhanH 5y ago
That only applies if the bad employees are uniformly distributed amongst all teams in the company. Otherwise it makes more sense to chop the worst 10% teams.
- rdtwo 5y ago
  That actually makes way more sense. Cutting teams that don’t perform and reforming makes lots of sense
- mjr00 5y ago
  At Amazon, the target was between 4 to 6% when I was there, but it was applied at the larger department level, not individual teams. It was perfectly fine to have a team of 10 where nobody was on a PIP (yes, such things exist!), but when it came to my entire 250-person department, all of the managers were in a room together ranking every employee they had and using "data" (peer reviews and results delivered, mainly) to fight over which employees got into the top and bottom tiers.
  - geekbird 5y ago
    Yep. This creates a lateral sabotage, work stealing and kiss up culture.
- vintermann 5y ago
  W. Edwards Deming posited that management was responsible for more than 85% of the causes of variation. If this is true, I modestly suggest replacing the CEO in roughly 4 out of every 5 months. (Somehow stack ranking logic never gets applied that way.)
bathtub365 5y ago
And as a nice side effect you begin to collect exactly the types of people willing to fire 10% of their workforce every year.
contravariant 5y ago
I can't really imagine a normal work environment where 10% (or any significant percentage) is actively harming the company.
- yelling_cat 5y ago
  It would be like middle school with on-call rotations.
- mring33621 5y ago
  try working at a big bank
praptak 5y ago
There is a gap in this reasoning though. "X% of employees are not worth their salary" does not imply "mandatory firing X% employees is good for the company". In particular quotas flow down into teams with zero percent of people who should be fired. The effect on the remaining 100-X% employees morale is negative.
user_named 5y ago
There is no reason to believe that the lowest 10% performers are the same as the 10% put on PIP/forced attrition.
- sangnoir 5y ago
  ...and humans being humans, it's not going to the same 10% year by year. Going through a rough patch in your personal life? Well, your divorce/dealing with a sick child or parent can have a PIP as a chaser. For a company that's vaunted for it's long-view philosophy, it's a terribly short-sighted policy.
sangnoir 5y ago
Are managers stack ranked too? If not, and assuming the whole scheme works[1], then steady state is accumulation of bad managers, while they keep firing above-average ICs (that are still in their bottom 10). 1. It doesn't work, obviously because they are not in a closed system. Their policies affect their reputation, which will affect their ability to hire ICs who have to contend with an increasingly higher bar to clear.
- malfist 5y ago
  Managers are indeed stack ranked at amazon. Only L7 and above escape this, and typically they don't have an option to PIP/Focus, they're just straight out shown the door.
  - sangnoir 5y ago
    > Managers are indeed stack ranked at amazon. I wish I could have said that's better than the alternative, but it's not. I suspect the ground is always shifting beneath you at Amazon. Even if your performance is fine, a colleague or your manager could get PIP'd
SNosTrAnDbLe 5y ago
This becomes more difficult when you have dont adjust for variables like out of work pressure. For example, the year that I had a kid, my performance was not the best. It took me an year to adjust but now I have bounced back. I wonder how this would have played out in Amazon or similar companies.
- geekbird 5y ago
  You would have been PIPed and sacked in April.
efitz 5y ago
> the statistical truth that the worst 10% probably are negative value employees. Why is this a statistical truth? In a large, Gaussian distributed population MAYBE this is true (but hiring isn’t random, is it?). But the thresholds are not applied to large populations anywhere I’ve worked. It’s pressure applied to management at all levels.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  It assumes that you have perfect measurement. Anyone who knows corporate politics, middle management machiavellianism, and inability to properly instrument development, requirements, scheduling knows this is a fantasy. That means people will devote SUBSTANTIAL amounts of their day-to-day labor in jockeying and positioning. People will be hired (wasted money and time) explicitly to be fired/PIP'd. The jockeying will result in disruption of team development. People will sabotage their coworkers. Trust disappears. Paranoia grows. Blame deflected. Difficult problems won't be tackled because why risk it. Bandaids rather than solutions will result. YOUR BEST PEOPLE WILL LEAVE. Let me emphasize this. You are selecting for people that aren't good, because good people will have OPTIONS and THEY WILL LEAVE. What are you left with? A management hierarchy of sociopaths. A subpar set of employees that furthermore will not cooperate in good faith (in the best case) or actively engage in institutional sociopathic behavior. You will have a cesspool, and cesspools repulse good people. And the signal is right in front of people that apply: the hiring process is abusive hazing with the "raise the bar" bullshit. Staff turnover means abandoned systems. Abandoned systems will be avoided as bad career risk, or reimplemented before the org has gotten good ROI from them. THAT IS NOT GOOD MANAGEMENT. Remember: AWS had a CRAP Christmas. Crap. This is starting to boil up.
  - throwbigdata 5y ago
    To wit: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
    - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
allochthon 5y ago
This kind of performance review funkiness is why I have resisted stepping into managerial roles.
matthewowen 5y ago
Too late to edit, but I just want to reiterate: I don’t actually agree with this, I’m just trying to make the case. All the counterpoints about whether 10% is accurate, whether you get the right 10%, whether they’re evenly distributed, whether there are other costs, why not apply the same logic to managers and execs, etc etc etc, yes, I agree!
steveBK123 5y ago
Sure, at a given point with low attrition this may be true. However if you are forcing the "bottom" 10-15% out every year, you tend to run out of "bottom" people to exit.. unless you are very bad at recruiting (or purposely hiring to fire). Further, in any big organization the weak performers are not evenly distributed. However the PIP / attrition % rates are uniformly forced. So the over performing team has to start cutting into good performers within a year or two, whereas the low performance team can cut and still have many lower performers..
ltfey 5y ago
The true (actual, Marxist red pill) answer: work is exploitation of laborers by capital and "not good enough to be worth employing" isn't really a thing. The bosses make off with so much money, who cares. Maybe there are a few useless people at the bottom sucking off salary. What about the useless ones at the top, though? All this being said, in the context of an organization that actually deserves to exist (a rarity, given that we live under capitalism), it is impossible to say what percentage of people will be ill-fit to their roles, let alone what percentage will be so ill-fit to any role that separation is the only option.

evidencepi 5y ago

> 1953: * Mao declared that "95 percent of the people are good," leading the party to target 5 percent in many organizations as "bad elements" who should be purged and repressed. At least hundreds of thousands died. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/07/17/how-many-died-new-evidence-suggests-far-higher-numbers-for-the-victims-of-mao-zedongs-era/01044df5-03dd-49f4-a453-a033c5287bce/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/07/17/h... I also want to point out that a lot ppl who suffered or even lost their lives during such period were actually sabotaged or framed by their peers (neighbors, coworkers), rather than the authority.

NhanH 5y ago

That only applies if the bad employees are uniformly distributed amongst all teams in the company. Otherwise it makes more sense to chop the worst 10% teams.

rdtwo 5y ago
That actually makes way more sense. Cutting teams that don’t perform and reforming makes lots of sense
mjr00 5y ago
At Amazon, the target was between 4 to 6% when I was there, but it was applied at the larger department level, not individual teams. It was perfectly fine to have a team of 10 where nobody was on a PIP (yes, such things exist!), but when it came to my entire 250-person department, all of the managers were in a room together ranking every employee they had and using "data" (peer reviews and results delivered, mainly) to fight over which employees got into the top and bottom tiers.
- geekbird 5y ago
  Yep. This creates a lateral sabotage, work stealing and kiss up culture.
vintermann 5y ago
W. Edwards Deming posited that management was responsible for more than 85% of the causes of variation. If this is true, I modestly suggest replacing the CEO in roughly 4 out of every 5 months. (Somehow stack ranking logic never gets applied that way.)

bathtub365 5y ago

And as a nice side effect you begin to collect exactly the types of people willing to fire 10% of their workforce every year.

contravariant 5y ago

I can't really imagine a normal work environment where 10% (or any significant percentage) is actively harming the company.

yelling_cat 5y ago
It would be like middle school with on-call rotations.
mring33621 5y ago
try working at a big bank

praptak 5y ago

There is a gap in this reasoning though. "X% of employees are not worth their salary" does not imply "mandatory firing X% employees is good for the company". In particular quotas flow down into teams with zero percent of people who should be fired. The effect on the remaining 100-X% employees morale is negative.

user_named 5y ago

There is no reason to believe that the lowest 10% performers are the same as the 10% put on PIP/forced attrition.

sangnoir 5y ago
...and humans being humans, it's not going to the same 10% year by year. Going through a rough patch in your personal life? Well, your divorce/dealing with a sick child or parent can have a PIP as a chaser. For a company that's vaunted for it's long-view philosophy, it's a terribly short-sighted policy.

sangnoir 5y ago

Are managers stack ranked too? If not, and assuming the whole scheme works[1], then steady state is accumulation of bad managers, while they keep firing above-average ICs (that are still in their bottom 10). 1. It doesn't work, obviously because they are not in a closed system. Their policies affect their reputation, which will affect their ability to hire ICs who have to contend with an increasingly higher bar to clear.

malfist 5y ago
Managers are indeed stack ranked at amazon. Only L7 and above escape this, and typically they don't have an option to PIP/Focus, they're just straight out shown the door.
- sangnoir 5y ago
  > Managers are indeed stack ranked at amazon. I wish I could have said that's better than the alternative, but it's not. I suspect the ground is always shifting beneath you at Amazon. Even if your performance is fine, a colleague or your manager could get PIP'd

SNosTrAnDbLe 5y ago

This becomes more difficult when you have dont adjust for variables like out of work pressure. For example, the year that I had a kid, my performance was not the best. It took me an year to adjust but now I have bounced back. I wonder how this would have played out in Amazon or similar companies.

geekbird 5y ago
You would have been PIPed and sacked in April.

efitz 5y ago

> the statistical truth that the worst 10% probably are negative value employees. Why is this a statistical truth? In a large, Gaussian distributed population MAYBE this is true (but hiring isn’t random, is it?). But the thresholds are not applied to large populations anywhere I’ve worked. It’s pressure applied to management at all levels.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago
It assumes that you have perfect measurement. Anyone who knows corporate politics, middle management machiavellianism, and inability to properly instrument development, requirements, scheduling knows this is a fantasy. That means people will devote SUBSTANTIAL amounts of their day-to-day labor in jockeying and positioning. People will be hired (wasted money and time) explicitly to be fired/PIP'd. The jockeying will result in disruption of team development. People will sabotage their coworkers. Trust disappears. Paranoia grows. Blame deflected. Difficult problems won't be tackled because why risk it. Bandaids rather than solutions will result. YOUR BEST PEOPLE WILL LEAVE. Let me emphasize this. You are selecting for people that aren't good, because good people will have OPTIONS and THEY WILL LEAVE. What are you left with? A management hierarchy of sociopaths. A subpar set of employees that furthermore will not cooperate in good faith (in the best case) or actively engage in institutional sociopathic behavior. You will have a cesspool, and cesspools repulse good people. And the signal is right in front of people that apply: the hiring process is abusive hazing with the "raise the bar" bullshit. Staff turnover means abandoned systems. Abandoned systems will be avoided as bad career risk, or reimplemented before the org has gotten good ROI from them. THAT IS NOT GOOD MANAGEMENT. Remember: AWS had a CRAP Christmas. Crap. This is starting to boil up.
- throwbigdata 5y ago
  To wit: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
  - AtlasBarfed 5y ago

allochthon 5y ago

This kind of performance review funkiness is why I have resisted stepping into managerial roles.

matthewowen 5y ago

Too late to edit, but I just want to reiterate: I don’t actually agree with this, I’m just trying to make the case. All the counterpoints about whether 10% is accurate, whether you get the right 10%, whether they’re evenly distributed, whether there are other costs, why not apply the same logic to managers and execs, etc etc etc, yes, I agree!

steveBK123 5y ago

Sure, at a given point with low attrition this may be true. However if you are forcing the "bottom" 10-15% out every year, you tend to run out of "bottom" people to exit.. unless you are very bad at recruiting (or purposely hiring to fire). Further, in any big organization the weak performers are not evenly distributed. However the PIP / attrition % rates are uniformly forced. So the over performing team has to start cutting into good performers within a year or two, whereas the low performance team can cut and still have many lower performers..

ltfey 5y ago

The true (actual, Marxist red pill) answer: work is exploitation of laborers by capital and "not good enough to be worth employing" isn't really a thing. The bosses make off with so much money, who cares. Maybe there are a few useless people at the bottom sucking off salary. What about the useless ones at the top, though? All this being said, in the context of an organization that actually deserves to exist (a rarity, given that we live under capitalism), it is impossible to say what percentage of people will be ill-fit to their roles, let alone what percentage will be so ill-fit to any role that separation is the only option.