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If you are in a higher paid, tech skill role in a FAANG, the regular cutting of bottom 10% performers should be expected. These are (generally) high-prestige, h

If you are in a higher paid, tech skill role in a FAANG, the regular cutting of bottom 10% performers should be expected. These are (generally) high-prestige, high-pay, competitively-sought roles. This type of job at this type of company is not the 'no-cut' team, although in some very successful companies during a booming economic period, it can kind of become that way for a time. However, those heady times always end eventually. If you highly value long-term employment stability, it would be better to look for a role in a state, government, educational (or similar) organization. It won't be nearly as highly-paid, upwardly-mobile or prestigious but you'll generally have a better chance of staying employed even if you remain in the 'middle of the pack' performance-wise.

technion 4y ago
I'd probably be fine with knowing I had to excel if it was fully accepted they were genuinely the bottom ten percent of performers. Everything I read as an outsider from people working in such places seems to suggest otherwise though. People who work hard but have a PM cancel a project becoming low performers. Stories about people who ignore tech debt, ignore bugs, and launch a new chat app become top performers. I don't know if it's as prevalent as the comments often suggest.
- mrandish 4y ago
  > if it was fully accepted they were genuinely the bottom ten percent of performers. The problem is that your "If" rarely happens in the real-world. In situations of competitive evaluative performance, the person who loses out usually doesn't agree with the outcome of the process and the 'winners' rarely have reason to complain or post about it. Certainly there must have been situations where external variables (product cancellation or whatever) result in layoffs of non-bottom-10%-ers. But in high-growth tech companies, this instability is simply an ambient fact of life. My point was that highly-paid, high-skill tech roles in FAANG-type growth companies come with higher variability, some of which is going to be out of the employee's control. These jobs typically come with total comp packages which can be worth millions of dollars over time due to equity grants. That's there to compensate for the variability.
ryan_lane 4y ago
Stack ranking (especially rank and yank) has consistently been shown as a poor management practice. It leads to employees spending more time chasing good performance reviews than providing value to the company, and in many cases has been shown to cause employees to actively sabotage other people's work, and in other cases to not work with high performers. Amazon hires to fire due to it. Microsoft moved away from it, but had known issues with sabatogue across teams/projects.
- mrandish 4y ago
  I fully agree. I'm not defending stack ranking as good, just saying that these types of roles are usually very competitive. With options, there's millions of dollars at stake. There is going to generally be some sort of evaluative process to insure all that money is buying sufficient value. Not saying it's fair...

technion 4y ago

I'd probably be fine with knowing I had to excel if it was fully accepted they were genuinely the bottom ten percent of performers. Everything I read as an outsider from people working in such places seems to suggest otherwise though. People who work hard but have a PM cancel a project becoming low performers. Stories about people who ignore tech debt, ignore bugs, and launch a new chat app become top performers. I don't know if it's as prevalent as the comments often suggest.

mrandish 4y ago
> if it was fully accepted they were genuinely the bottom ten percent of performers. The problem is that your "If" rarely happens in the real-world. In situations of competitive evaluative performance, the person who loses out usually doesn't agree with the outcome of the process and the 'winners' rarely have reason to complain or post about it. Certainly there must have been situations where external variables (product cancellation or whatever) result in layoffs of non-bottom-10%-ers. But in high-growth tech companies, this instability is simply an ambient fact of life. My point was that highly-paid, high-skill tech roles in FAANG-type growth companies come with higher variability, some of which is going to be out of the employee's control. These jobs typically come with total comp packages which can be worth millions of dollars over time due to equity grants. That's there to compensate for the variability.

ryan_lane 4y ago

Stack ranking (especially rank and yank) has consistently been shown as a poor management practice. It leads to employees spending more time chasing good performance reviews than providing value to the company, and in many cases has been shown to cause employees to actively sabotage other people's work, and in other cases to not work with high performers. Amazon hires to fire due to it. Microsoft moved away from it, but had known issues with sabatogue across teams/projects.

mrandish 4y ago
I fully agree. I'm not defending stack ranking as good, just saying that these types of roles are usually very competitive. With options, there's millions of dollars at stake. There is going to generally be some sort of evaluative process to insure all that money is buying sufficient value. Not saying it's fair...