> Standardizing roles, skills and training makes the individual laborer interchangeable. Every employee can be assessed uniformly against a cohort, where the re

> Standardizing roles, skills and training makes the individual laborer interchangeable. Every employee can be assessed uniformly against a cohort, where the retention calculus is relative performance versus salary. This takes all uncertainty out of future restructuring decisions When someone wonders why the company creates BS levels with arbitrary requirements that don't map to the way engineering works - it is because of this reason. They want an easy way to stack rank and restructure in perpetuity. As an example, even though a lot of engineering work is collaborative aka work together else it won't happen, corporate decision-makers detest thinking about employees like this. They want to think that EVERY individual can be stacked against others at a similar role - and they can just pull the bottom x% for their margins and FCF. And that this will have ZERO impact on the production. They sincerely believe this and consultants make out like bandits peddling this exact model. If this is still difficult to wrap your head around, imagine a basketball team where every player has a different role and they all work together to achieve the mission. Except the CEO has ordered the HR department to stack rank all the players based on points scored - which obviously is going to be different in different positions. It has also suddenly set up the team to not pass the ball even if passing the ball would yield a better outcome for the team.