9 ms·

One underlying problem with these PIP type programs at FAANG seems to be that they have very high barriers to entry in the interview process, and then act like

• philipwhiuk 3y ago
  > If you have a very competitive interview process and high compensation to attract the best talent It's a big assumption that the competitive interview process is sufficient to identify only the top talent. Every other week News@YC has posts complaining that every type of interview process doesn't identify talent well.
  • steveBK123 3y ago
    Sure, some people interview better than they work, and vice versa. But do a huge flood of bad employees really make it through these very difficult gates and merit 30% of employees being marked underperformers every year?
    • mrbgty 3y ago
      Yes. Difficult doesn't mean good.
    • astura 3y ago
      Sure, I've seen plenty of very capable people put very little to no effort into their work.
      • steveBK123 3y ago
        If Amazon's only management stick is to mark 30% underperforms & cull 6% every year, then they need to send their managers to manager school.
        • marcus0x62 3y ago
          Their stated goal is for each person they hire on a team to be better than 50% of their peers. For a company that professes to think a lot about the long term, I'd suggest they need to go to math school before they go to manager school.
          • geodel 3y ago
            Well you are right. But reality here is company is printing boat load of money with their cloud infra monopoly. So what to do? Blabber non sensical bullshit that no one will question because again everyone is making money and if they are so smart to challenge leadership dictates why wouldn't they just leave and apply their ideas some place else that needs them.
        • groby_b 3y ago
          This is not on the managers. This is HR gone wild. Most managers close to the frontline understand perfectly well what an incredibly stupid idea this is.
    • scarface_74 3y ago
      Do you realize how relatively easy it is for a CS grad with time and motivation to “grind leetCode” enough to pass an interview at Amazon? I didn’t go into AWS as a developer. I worked there in Professional Services. I shadowed a few coding interviews and conducted a few system design interviews of software devs while there.
• xkekjrktllss 3y ago
  >the old Wall St model of doing one cut in one afternoon, calling people into an office and giving a severance is far more humane. Since when did being "humane" contribute to profit? >Everyone understood it was about the numbers not about your performance The idea is literally to make the remaining employees think it's about performance. The company doesn't care what ex-employees think.
  • brianmcc 3y ago
    There's something to be said, after an initial "reduction in force" happens, for the remaining employees to look ahead and go: OK so I and my team may be at X% risk of layoffs, but with decent-to-good-to-sometimes-excellent severance pay and at least no prospect of dehumanizing PIPs/whatever, I am happy with those odds. Better than a pervasive dread amongst the whole workforce.
  • A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
    Even vampires knew that to feed another day, they need to let victim rest a little. Just sayin' <<The idea is literally to make the remaining employees think it's about performance. Lol. No. They make them think about whether they can jump ship. edit: Basically, only ones without any options stay.
• tcgv 3y ago
  Their interview process, while thorough, isn't failproof. Additionally, it primarily assesses candidates at entry, overlooking potential changes in performance that may emerge after a couple of years within the company.
  • steveBK123 3y ago
    It's not failproof, but is it so fail heavy that 30% of employees are underperformers with 6% meriting being fired at all times?
  • Kon-Peki 3y ago
    If 6-30% are failing year after year after year, you can't blame the interview process. You could blame the leadership failure that didn't fix the interview process, though.
    • steveBK123 3y ago
      Really it's indicative of Amazon treating their employees as disposable. They have enough employment market power still to attract enough great talent to burn through individuals in 2-3 years. Eventually they run out of meat or they soften the process. Of all the FAANG, I almost admire Amazon for chewing up & disposing of their white collar work force the same way they do their blue collar. The other guys are all pretty bad to work for at the bottom non-SWE tiers, but have cushy SWE adult daycare office environments. At least Amazon treats all their employees as disposable?
      • selectodude 3y ago
        Bezos cut his chops in finance at DE Shaw. That’s how every bank treats their employees.
      • twiddling 3y ago
        < SWE adult daycare office environments I love that description
• Taikonerd 3y ago
  > ... had explicitly described the compensation cliff and how a lot of people in the good years were proactively leaving, cooling off, and then coming back to reset the compensation instead of going over the cliff. Could you explain this a bit more? I thought that it was the opposite -- you have stock that's going to vest in X years, so you really want to stay.
  • steveBK123 3y ago
    There was something of a cliff at certain levels if you didn't get promoted around the third year. Something about the offer package would subsidize your base pay for a limited number of years until your stock started to vest, to smooth out your pay. However on the third year that subsidy would go away, and depending on the stock performance, your future stock grants could adjust down as well. In practice because the stock had been running up so much pre-2022, by the time the stock vested it was up a good amount. So if your stock grants & stock price performance after the third year weren't "just so" you could see your TC slip because the salary subsidy went away.
  • izacus 3y ago
    Yeah, but once X passes, your comp drops significantly - "down a cliff".
• giantg2 3y ago
  One thing about fat that I think is overlooked is how fat today might be muscle tomorrow, and how little companies try to convert it. Maybe a person is in a bad role, on a bad team, or simply doesn't have experience or skills fitting the specific requirements of that single point in time. I've been a high performer in the past. Now I'm a low performer (I'm slow) after the company has changed the way it treats teams/work and the technology shifted. My disability isn't suited to the new working style/process (or lack of). However, I do excellent work outside of my regular day to day responsibilities, like my secondary role as an ASC. My manager even said that I'd I could just speed up my regular work I would easily get the highest rating and a promotion. Hearing him say that really sucks because I unable to just speed up with my disability in the given work environment. The company/managers have made no effort in helping me find a role that works better with my skills or is impacted less by my disability. It seems there may not be any of the traditional roles/teams left. So now I fill midlevel roles and move team to team trying to find somewhere that I fit in. If I can find a place I fit in like before, then I would easily excel. Another example was a dev on another team that I worked with a few years ago was sloppy, slow, and just all around seemed like a poor performer - and even our tech lead and manager talked poorly about him. He was even considerably slower than me. About 3 years after that he's now the head of data and analytics for our international operations.
  • no_wizard 3y ago
    You should file for disability accommodations. That is completely legal to ask. Sometimes you need to back it up with documentation, but i suspect that won't be a problem. They can't discriminate against you for this.
    • giantg2 3y ago
      I have documentation. They don't care. HR said to just work with my manager on accommodations. My main problem is dealing with ambiguity and context switching. That's something they can't change given their chosen work model. The old model of working was that you supported 1 main app and maybe a smaller 1 or 2 that were related. These were usually in 1 stack and well documented. The new model is that teams are typical supporting 6-10 apps in multiple stacks. I'm slow when switching between apps and stacks, and without consistent exposure to a single app/stack, I won't get faster. It's funny though - they talk a big game and even hire in Auticon contractors, but then refuse to do anything for existing employees. I assume a least some of those contractors have similar difficulties as me.
• jfindley 3y ago
  High barriers to entry on the interview process don't mean as much as you may think. Even with the best interview process in the world, you're only going to have a small number of hours to try to evaluate a lot of complex factors about a human you know nothing about. You're going to hire people you shouldn't - and lots of them. You're also going to miss hiring people you should. It sucks, but that's life. With that in mind I do think your conclusion's a little suspect - there really will be a good amount of underperforming people you really do want to part ways with. Maybe not 6% - I don't work in HR, so I don't see those sorts of metrics - but I definitely have encountered lots of people who got through the interview process but nevertheless had no ability to do the job adequately. I'm sure a bunch of people will jump on this to then complain about the arduous interview process - but NO interview process is perfect. Having a tough process is a reasonable way to reduce the number of people you end up not keeping on, and expecting any process involving humans to be anything close to perfect is wildly unrealistic.
  • ghaff 3y ago
    And for roles at companies with very quantifiable outputs--like sales for example--the approach at a lot of companies is not to sweat the hiring process too much and just let go people who don't make their numbers (whether it's really their fault or not). Someone I knew's shorthand for this was that sales managers have no trouble firing people.
  • HDThoreaun 3y ago
    Right. FAANG interviews generally aren't even trying to figure out if someone will be good at their job. Leetcode tests for IQ and being willing to sink tons of hours into bs to get the job. FAANG companies have decided those are important qualities needed to succeed, but they clearly aren't the only ones.
• zhdc1 3y ago
  > There are industries & companies that have grown fat & lazy and could use a few annual 6% culls, but you eventually run out of fat. Agreed, but there's also an unaddressed issue of whether many (most?) positions at large tech companies provide an actual economic benefit to the company or whether they exist simply because of organizational inefficiencies (Parkinson's Law). To put it another way, a hire may have been the best candidate out a very selective interview process, but if his position exists simply because of internal silo building, forced ranking - as bad of a system as it is - may work. Is there any economically valid reason for Meta to have ~75K employees?
  • steveBK123 3y ago
    Forced ranking in your use case doesn't work because it's generally firm wide cascade. Is 6% of every team in every department in every org unnecessary? No, in fact.. there's teams that should be 2x as big and teams that should be completely let go. Management actually needs to do what they get the big bucks for and make strategic decisions about what business lines do/don't need to be staffed rather than culling arbitrary %s everywhere. Think - Google Bard vs Search vs Ads vs Youtube vs their 27 different chat/video apps vs .. etc.
    • mjr00 3y ago
      > Management actually needs to do what they get the big bucks for and make strategic decisions about what business lines do/don't need to be staffed rather than culling arbitrary %s everywhere. The performance management process and 4-6% "unregretted attrition" (to use the technical term) target at Amazon is totally independent from figuring out project resourcing and headcounts. An employee who is fired for performance reasons doesn't change the headcount on your team.
      • marcosdumay 3y ago
        Do hairless employees in a vacuum interfere with each commutativelly or anti-commutativelly?
      • steveBK123 3y ago
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• wickedwiesel 3y ago
  I know you are sharing some interesting observations, but can we all stop talking about employees as the "fat" of companies and firing of employees as "culls". > underperformers lying about to cull is not just bad wording. By definition, there will always be underperformers. A profitable company only has "too many" employees if you think it has to pay a larger dividend to its owners / shareholders or that future growth is mandatory. Why is it not fine when a company is more or less breaking even but paying good salaries to its employees?
  • pc86 3y ago
    > Why is it not fine when a company is more or less breaking even but paying good salaries to its employees? Because this ignores reality. Especially at FAANG companies, growth is expected and the majority of compensation is stock. If you stop growing, and stop having a profit, your stock tanks, and future compensation - as well as compensation from years prior that is still in the form of company stock - becomes worth much less. You can't hire people who are as good because you're "in decline." Your products falter because talent leaves and you can't find new talent. Even if all the above is imagined (it's not) you now have real impacts in terms of declining application quality and shrinking user bases.
    • wickedwiesel 3y ago
      I was trying to point out that not every company ownership model is a publicly traded stock company. Your point is totally valid in the context you give.
  • ThrowawayR2 3y ago
    > "Why is it not fine when a company is more or less breaking even but paying good salaries to its employees?" Do you have a retirement plan that contains stock or get any options/stock grants as part of your compensation? Those shares are your ownership stake in corporations and your retirement quite directly depends on those shares increasing in price faster than inflation.
    • 3y ago
• pyrale 3y ago
  You're mistaken in that you believe that the goal of culls is to cut underperformers. Stack ranking doesn't assess performance, it checks whether you're willing to do a little more to be ahead of your peers. The real goal of culls is to motivate people to work more, to be more accessible to their managers' requests, etc. so they make it "to the next round". It's a pressure tool, not a performance control tool.
  • JohnFen 3y ago
    This sort of thing is one of the big reasons why I would never work for a FAANG company. I prefer to work at a place that encourages good work rather than a weird cutthroat arena combat thing.
    • IKantRead 3y ago
      I feel the same way and would also never work at a FAANG. That said, I suspect this is would be viewed as a benefit of the process since I'm fairly confident Amazon and the like don't want people who feel this way working for them regardless of the talent of those individual people.
      • moate 3y ago
        Exactly this. “Are you willing to kill another human? No? Sorry, there’s no place for you in the infantry”
        • Terr_ 3y ago
          I feel a better analogy would involve (A) a demand that is outside the official job-description or duties and (B) isn't a fixed-bar but instead makes multiple employees fight each other in an indefinite race to the bottom. Ex: "Are you willing to spend your free time becoming the General's #1 personal servant? No? Sorry, there's no place for you in the infantry."
          • geodel 3y ago
• badpun 3y ago
  There’s plenty of people who lose motivation to work hard and want to just coast while taking very high salary. Happens in professional sports teams, happens in tech.
• commandlinefan 3y ago
  My ancestors were coal miners in Tennessee. They tried to reason with their employers for a long time to establish reasonable working conditions. When it became clear that their employers were not going to listen to reason, they found other ways to establish reasonable working conditions.
  • pierat 3y ago
    Well, yes. And lets expand that. The coal miners' solution was to get a bunch of guns and/or gasoline, and either pump bullets in the bosses' house, or to torch it with gasoline. Usually both. That was responded to by bringing in the Pinkertons (private military), along with the US military. These got horrifically bloody. And it got to a point, that by the 1920's, the USA had a strong representation of US Communist Party. 1927 really cemented that they were right in the long run. However, FDR sold the Communists out with "labor reforms" that paled in comparison to what the Communists wanted. Now, FDR's reforms lasted until the late 60's and 70's. Capital was able to get enough property and money, that they ended up *buying* the governmental reforms one politician at a time. Well, perhaps heads will have to roll again, to reset Capital. They're not going to willingly cede property/money/power. And this time, they bought government. And it's obvious that the NLRB and the DoL is going to do diddly. But whatever it is, I hope it's peaceful. But knowing labor history through the ages and US specifically, it will be anything but.
    • landemva 3y ago
      There was serious labor abuse in past years, and capital doesn't have as much power in the new info-WFH-open source economy. Mineral rights and office space and expensive yearly software support contracts are gone. Stop waiting on government regulators for action on white collar issues.
      • ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        > capital doesn't have as much power in the new info-WFH-open source economy Seriously? 30% of the population believes whateber chatgt-bot tells them is true on twitter > Stop waiting on government regulators for action I think the key is that there is likely to be violence. Look at how clinate protesters are treated.
• fatnoah 3y ago
  > One underlying problem with these PIP type programs at FAANG seems to be that they have very high barriers to entry in the interview process, and then act like 30% of the company is underperforming and subject to an annual 6% cull. FWIW, when I was a manager at a FAANG, the numbers were closer to: Underperforming: ~12% Meeting or Exceeding: ~80% Better than exceeding: ~8% As for my own anecdata, for the roughly 100 person cohort where I was part of performance management, there would be 1-3 people each cycle that were in the "cull" bracket. That said, people with a couple consecutive cycles of not meeting expectations were likely to be put on a PIP. I managed 4 people in that group, and all were able to successfully exit the PIP. All that said, every company and even org within a company have their own goals, targets, processes, and flows, and my experience was pre-COVID, so I'm also sure that any needle movement has been in the direction of harsher evaluations.
  • linster 3y ago
    As a Canadian, “better than Exceeding” sounds like an American construction. I’d imagine the scale to be: 1. Not Meeting Expectations 2. Meeting Expectations 3. Exceeding expectations
    • belval 3y ago
      It is probably a way to give workers fake kudos without actually giving them anything. A lot of north american modern management theory seems to think that praising your employees is the best way to get them to perform. By telling someone who's good but not great a "You got exceed expectations!!" they'll feel like they are valued.
      • resolutebat 3y ago
        Quite the opposite: getting into the top brackets is directly tied to large pay increases, larger bonuses and stock grants, and puts you in line for promotion.
      • fatnoah 3y ago
        > It is probably a way to give workers fake kudos without actually giving them anything. It's actually the opposite. The ratings themselves are associated with multipliers for your annual bonus and stock grants. IIRC, the full spectrum of ratings and multipliers was: Meets None (0.0) -> Meets Some (0.5) -> Meets Most (0.85) -> Meets (1.0) -> Exceeds (1.25) -> Greatly Exceeds (2.0) -> and Redefines (3.0) Ignoring the company multiplier, which was always a value slightly greater than 1.0 when I was there (that may not be true now), for a Senior Engineer (L5) with a $175k salary, 15% bonus target, and annual stock grant of $110k vesting over 4 years , the value of the rating to them at each exceeds level would be: Exceeds: ~$12k / year Greatly Exceeds: ~$53k / year Redefines: ~$107k / year The top 2 buckets only account for about 8% or so of employees, but the number for Exceeds was around 20% of employees during my time.
• awill 3y ago
  To play devil's advocate, the flaw in your logic is assuming that because someone passed the interview at a FAANG, they must be good. No interview process is perfect. Companies, no matter how 'high the entry barrier' make mistakes when hiring. This is how they've decided to correct it.
• JackFr 3y ago
  I have posted this before, an argument in defense of stack ranking I had heard from a friend's father who was a long-time manager for a large industrial conglomerate from the 60's through the 80's. Simply put it was that they were far more willing to hire non-standard candidates on gut and hunches, knowing that if it didn't work out, it didn't work out they would be gone in 1-1.5 years and it would not be a ding against the hiring manager. Further, at least in that day, it was an environment where everyone was going in with their eyes open -- people were not blindsided by it, they expected it. But as you point out, the FAANG's are doing the opposite of this. They've got extremely difficult hiring processes and are pretending that it's not stack ranking.
  • ep103 3y ago
    Stack Ranking was pioneered by Jack Welch who was operating in an environment where labor was the dominant party in the labor-capital relationship, and he was taking over companies that had had decades of labor growth and power while capital was stagflating nationwide. Introducing stack ranking was a way of trimming excess fat from decades of build up within companies, while reasserting capital in the relationship within the company. Long term, it has been a disaster in every company. Because eventually you run out of fat, and then what you describe as "far more willing to hire non-standard candidates on gut and hunches, knowing that if it didn't work out, it didn't work out they would be gone" becomes "I need to hire people I don't want to work with, so I have someone to fire in the next stack rank". And that's its own form of fat. In short, stack ranking makes some sense if you have a fat organization, not unlike restricting calories to lose fat when working out. But once you've lost fat, continuing to restrict your calories results in losing more muscle than fat.
    • psunavy03 3y ago
      > "I need to hire people I don't want to work with, so I have someone to fire in the next stack rank". And that's its own form of fat. There's a great long-form article on this called "Microsoft's Lost Decade."
      • 3y ago
• patorick002 3y ago
  Amazon eng manager here, at least for one more day. I think Amazon is easier to get into than the other FAANGs (I've worked at two of them and was very close to getting into another). This is partially because it's easy/required to manage people out, and partially because Amazon has a rotten reputation in the industry. It even feels like some teams hire low performers specifically to feed to the pip machine. Supposedly the idea of having a bar raiser in the interview dissuades that, but it certainly feels this way at times.
  • steveBK123 3y ago
    Datapoint - as a Wall St tech guy, AMZN & META are the only FAANGs who has reached out to me.. repeatedly. Same for my coworkers.
• golergka 3y ago
  > If you have a very competitive interview process and high compensation to attract the best talent, it is unlikely you have so many underperformers lying about to cull annually. Interview process doesn’t test for everyday laziness. A lot of very smart people who easily solve leetcode are just coasting at their jobs.
• goalonetwo 3y ago
  >> they have very high barriers to entry in the interview process You mean ... Leetcode? I would categorize it as an artificial high barrier to entry that is based on how much you study and a bit of luck. If anything, it is designed to make employees believe they are top-tier.
• chadash 3y ago
  I'm gonna play devil's advocate even though I agree with your point. Firing people sucks. As a manager, it's a terrible feeling to tell someone they are out of a job. Not only that, but often times my own pay might be tied to how many people I manage, so in some cases, it's better for me to have people around doing nothing than to let them go. By having a forced ranking/culling, you somewhat alleviate the tendency of people not wanting to fire non-performing staff. Companies should have a culture where this isn't the case. It should be encouraged to let people go with nice severance. You should be judged on your teams' output, not on how many people you manage. You should be rewarded for doing more with fewer staff. But enforcing this is very hard in a big company while enforcing a 6% cull is easy, so that's what happens.
• Aurornis 3y ago
  > here are industries & companies that have grown fat & lazy and could use a few annual 6% culls, but you eventually run out of fat. I've worked on many high-performing teams where you couldn't find 6%, or 1-in-18 of people who shouldn't be there. However, I've never worked for an entire fast growing company where I couldn't readily pick out 1-in-18 people who were clearly underperforming and everyone knew it. Hiring is far from perfect and these companies are growing quickly. Combined with turnover, you're bringing in a large number of new developers every year. Some people are really good at Leetcode and interviewing, but don't actually like to do work at jobs, for example. IMO, the problem comes when these arbitrary thresholds are applied at low levels like individual teams. If you take a group of 18 people and declare that 1 of them must be fired every year no matter what, it's terrible. On the other hand, if you were to look at a large department of 1000 people and went through everyone's performance closely, I don't think it would be hard to identify 60 people who weren't working out. The other problem is that some people have become really good at gaming this system. Every time I've worked at a company that does arbitrary culling of employees, there was always a contingent of old timers who had mastered the system years ago and never found themselves up for consideration to PIP. Either they were friends with management, had some arcane knowledge that they refused to let anyone else access, or they were really good at buttering up their manager come performance review time. I can think of one guy who was always fighting with everyone and refusing to do work, but would become the sweetest, most helpful hero a couple times a year when some high profile issue came up. He'd work 16 hour days for a couple weeks, emergent triumphantly with some solution, then disappear again for another 6 months. Untouchable, yet clearly the lowest net performer on the team.
  • steveBK123 3y ago
    The problem is I've been at both fast growing companies & big dumb banks, and the "1-in-18" are never evenly distributed. It is often clear that some teams are about 50% underperform while others are close to 0%.
  • tanjtanjtanj 3y ago
    If you work for a company that lays off 6% of the "fat" every year and then still continues to have 6+% of the company considered "fat" then the issue isn't the 6% of the people, it's the structure, culture, and practices of the company.
• throwrhpip 3y ago
  I was put on a PIP at Red Hat that was quite farcical and very much about personality disconnects between myself and my manager (and made much more annoying by the fact that he had told me before the PIP that multiple other managers had let him know that they would be interested in me being on their team if I was looking for something different - instead he went the PIP route). There was room for improvement (isn't there always), and on the face of it, to read the PIP "Objectives for success", they all seemed reasonable, and were very ... objective. Specifically to craft some extended documents around a potential product, to capture and present some of the research around that product to a group, etc. About five items. I completed them. All of them. My manager and I met for our regular 1:1s where he expressed that things were looking good (well, he no-showed for one, and my skip-level came for another). I show up to our end-of-PIP review and immediately know the outcome because HR is there with my manager. Part of me was pragmatic. However... What really ground my gears? "I have been reviewing the documents and material you created as part of your objectives for the PIP and I feel that they are not of the standard that we need." I expressed confusion. "When we discussed this in our meetings, you expressed no concern". "They're just not the standard of what we need." And then literally during the call, I pulled up the documents and discovered/remembered GDocs access list. I started screen sharing in front of him and HR. Document 1: Manager - Last Viewed: Never Document 2: Manager - Last Viewed: Never About this point he turned his camera off. Rinse and repeat. Of about 5 documents, presentations, spreadsheets, he'd only ever looked at one of them, at that was months before the PIP. He mentioned that he had given me feedback more in Google Chat than in our 1:1s. I pulled up our chat history, simple to review, since he'd actually 100% ghosted me for the duration of the PIP. Sitting there in front of HR, with me firing off about a dozen questions, updates, etc., and there's just no responses from manager. HR had at least the decency to look rather embarrassed about it all. My manager said nothing for the rest of the call. A few days later someone higher in HR acknowledged that they’d looked at the same things and confirmed my perspective and said that the managers handling of the PIP was not how it should have been but that their decision was final (which was fine, I never expected it to change anyone’s mind).
  • Terr_ 3y ago
    Oof. I wonder if the outcome could have been different if someone from legal had been on the line. Hostile work environment, constructive dismissal, etc.
• fatherzine 3y ago
  The point is to instill fear through humiliation. Bonus if you quit on your own, so they don't have to pay severance.
• yodsanklai 3y ago
  > they have very high barriers to entry in the interview process, and then act like 30% of the company is underperforming and subject to an annual 6% cull. There's no contradiction. No interview process can avoid low performers. There will always be unmotivated people, people who are difficult to work with and so on... But yes, this isn't cool, but at least, people working there have very high compensation and know it's a competitive environment.
• Ferret7446 3y ago
  Devil's advocate: no matter how "high barrier" your interview process is, you are 100% going to hire duds, and that's only going to be apparent after a couple months at least. "Ideally", the interview process would be those first couple months, but that is illegal and/or not socially accepted.
• RecycledEle 3y ago
  If I wanted to buy 50 of the best microwave ovens possible, and I could not buy 2 of the same model, I might do this: 1. Carefully review and test 500 models. 2. Buy what seems to be the best 55. 3. Rank what you have, and return the worst 10 out of 55. 4. Repeat careful reviewing of other possible models. 5. Buy another 10 microwave ovens. 6. GOTO step three. I thought that constantly hiring and firing was common practice. It also puts e.oyees under stress. Maybe it started at GE? I do not like it, but I can see the sociopathic boss' point of view.