The thing isn't that you don't have a number of problematic employees, as you correctly pointed out you most likely have them in any sufficiently large organiza

The thing isn't that you don't have a number of problematic employees, as you correctly pointed out you most likely have them in any sufficiently large organization. The problem is that you can't find a static number for them. It's quite easy to see this, actually. If you let the bottom 5% go, stack ranking now dictates that you still have 5% problematic people. Repeat this cycle a few times and people previously considered perfectly average are now problematic. This obviously doesn't make any sense. In reality, some companies might be super lean and only have 1% bad performers (as in negative business value), while some companies might be 90% overhead. For some companies the bad employees might be spread over all teams, while in others some teams are incredibly efficient and others are completely worthless. Coming in with a 5% brute-force hammer just doesn't make much sense in general and comes with all the morale and infighting drawbacks mentioned sufficiently in this discussion.