Watched this come and go at a previous employer and the toxicity it generated was staggering. It’s especially awful when you work on a small team of bright, fun

Watched this come and go at a previous employer and the toxicity it generated was staggering. It’s especially awful when you work on a small team of bright, functional people who are all doing well: no matter what, management says someone has to get whacked. We used to joke about teams trading their bottom-5% employees every year to keep from having to hit someone useful, or deliberately hiring someone useless every year to make sure we had a bottom candidate in our back pocket. Looking back on it, all that joking was just a way of dealing with being afraid you’d be that guy next quarter…every quarter. Once that system died a well-deserved death, the amount of inter-team cooperation and general morale improved noticeably across the company.