5 ms·

Why? Why set an arbitrary number of people who need to be fired as opposed to grading people to a standard? Is your hiring process so flawed that you just acc

Why? Why set an arbitrary number of people who need to be fired as opposed to grading people to a standard? Is your hiring process so flawed that you just accept that you screwed up hiring 5 percent of your people? This smells like the Welchian nonsense that drove GE into the ground.

foobarian 2y ago
Honestly I would be ecstatic if it was possible for a hiring process to have a 95% success rate.
hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
> Is your hiring process so flawed that you just accept that you screwed up hiring 5 percent of your people? if you only messed up 5% of your hires you'd be a goddamn genius and every company in the world would want to put you in charge of their hiring process the "standard" is more like 20% of hires end up being bad hires
- tauwauwau 2y ago
  Other than agreeing with "spacemadness", I wanted to point out a small correction. Original argument was about 5% of total employees, not only new hires.
- spacemadness 2y ago
  Are these numbers coming out of thin air? Gut feel perhaps? So after you fire 10% and don’t hire, that holds until there is nobody left? Maybe we should stop with the gut feel managerial apologies and think about what we’re doing and how it affects company morale, no?
  - hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
    morale is also adversely affected by people having obvious underperformers on their team that they have to work around, so pick your poison
  - antisthenes 2y ago
    > Maybe we should stop with the gut feel managerial apologies and think about what we’re doing and how it affects company morale, no? Maybe you can devise a methodology that reduces bad hiring to below 5% across the entire S&P 500 and then share it with us?
  - lacker 2y ago
    The numbers are discussed by upper engineering management. They might change over time depending on the situation the company is in. Think of a hypothetical organization with 10,000 software engineers. You're the head of engineering. You have ten divisions, each with a VP managing 1000 engineers. Each VP has ten directors, each managing 100 engineers, and each line manager has 10 engineers on the team. The engineering team reviews the past year. You notice, overall we fired 500 people last year. Okay, so on average that was 5% of staff. Seems reasonable just as a sanity check. (You ask your buddies at other large tech companies, and the other heads of engineering are reporting similar numbers.) Now you look through the individual teams. A lot of 10-person teams don't fire anyone. That makes sense. But would you expect a director to fire nobody from their org? From 100 people... well, maybe. I'd be a little suspicious. I'd ask some other directors, does this person have a reputation of a very high quality team, or is it more likely that this director is lax, and their org doesn't manage out its underperformers? Now imagine a VP fired nobody. 1000 people and they all were high performers. Yeah, that doesn't seem right. That VP is probably letting their team get away with low standards. If you were the head of engineering meeting with your VPs, I think the group would be able to come to a consensus of, there's a problem here. It's based on the 5% target but it's not a hard and fast rule. In the long run, having a high-performing team is better for morale than firing nobody. It's the difference between working at Meta and working at the DMV.
    - voxl 2y ago
      So: You have no measure of performance and go off vibes. You have no scientific basis and go off vibes. You pretend this is all logical and common sense but it's really all just vibes. You could end up performing way better firing half of your teams. And what about your managers? How is an underperforming manager in the higher positions ever fired? I get that measuring performance is incredibly difficult, but dressing it up as if 5-10% of people are underperformers anyway is just so tantamount to how baseless and incompetent most businesses are run these days. Especially in software.
- dietr1ch 2y ago
  I understand that you made up your 20%, but at that point it feels like you are blaming bad team fit or environment as bad hires, and this fitting can change over time as bad politics or shifts to different goals happen.
  - hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
    bad hire doesn't necessarily mean bad/stupid/incompetent person, it just means bad hire. might not be a fit for the role, might not be a fit for the company. for example, i freely admit i was a bad hire at Google because i got demotivated by big corporate/political bullshit getting in my way, it just wasn't for me. then i went to a 20 startup and, in the words of the CEO, "saved the company" and scaled it to 200 people and no i didn't make up 20%, Gartner did a study on it. and most people with management/hiring experience report the same.
    - darth_avocado 2y ago
      But firing people for performance is framed as the person is bad/stupid/incompetent. The problem with the 5% quota is that it doesn’t necessarily mean you get rid of 5% bad fits. It often results in arbitrary top down push to fire x number of people in the org, which then translates to people with most political prowess keep their jobs and their headcounts while competent people get gaslighted, overworked and eventually fired because of moving goalposts. These people get put on PIP and eventually fired, often by telling them they are bad/incompetent and criticizing them excessively and pulling apart every single thing they do. Some people don’t care about this treatment, but others often face severe physical and mental health problems due to the excessive stress that is put on them.
      - colin_jack 2y ago
        Also since we are mentioning Google, they had some interesting to say in one of their books [0]: "Ratings, although an important way to measure performance during a specific period, are not predictive of future performance and should not be used to gauge readiness for a future role or qualify an internal candidate for a different team. (They can, however, be used to evaluate whether an employee is properly or improperly slotted on their current team; therefore, they can provide an opportunity to evaluate how to better support an internal candidate moving forward.)" [0] https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch04.html#challenge_established_processes https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch04.html#challeng...
- xracy 2y ago
  5% of your new hires, doesn't necessarily mean 5% of your company. https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-facebook-employees/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-faceboo... ^But let's say you messed up hiring 20% of your company, and then you corrected that (layoffs for the past 2 years). You haven't hired enough people to justify perma-cutting 5%. And the number of functioning employees who stop working in a role isn't going to be as high as 5%. The reality is that most hires are probably fine in the role they're in. And you don't actually need to be this aggressive in cost-cutting.
  - lacker 2y ago
    This specific target being discussed was 5% of all headcount, not just new hires. You shouldn't think of all firing as a "mistaken hire". Sometimes you hire someone, and they work effectively for years, and then they kind of "check out" and don't do much work any more. It can be a good decision to hire someone, and then later a good decision to fire them. It's also not a cost-cutting measure per se. Typically when you fire someone you get to replace the headcount with another hire or internal transfer. The point of firing people is to get rid of low performers and replace them with high performers.
    - xigency 2y ago
      This is somehow better than exploring ways to improve your existing employees' performance?
      - qwe----3 2y ago
        There are people ready to be hired that aren't checked out
        xigency 2y ago
        Sure. This is a great model to adopt if you believe corporations exist to destroy people. If a construction site was sending formerly qualified people away no longer able to work we would definitely investigate their practices. Tech deserves the same scrutiny.
bdcravens 2y ago
We've had many years in our industry where funded and public company were in a mad rush to put seats in chairs. It's like storming a field to pick fruit because you fear others will get it all first: you're incentivized to hoard, and not inspect.
ramesh31 2y ago
>Why? Why set an arbitrary number of people who need to be fired as opposed to grading people to a standard? A person, individually, indeed must always be judged by themselves objectively. But people, in aggregate, can generally be understood stochastically. And in any group of people there will always be the obvious slackers who everyone knows aren't pulling their weight. Good management clears these people out rather than allowing them to fester and lower morale. It doesn't matter if it's high paid SWEs or minimum wage workers, the dynamic is the same.
vanjajaja1 2y ago
it makes sense that if average tenure at a company is 3-5 years then some percentage yearly firing will cull people who have 'quiet quit' and havent fully quit yet
lbotos 2y ago
If you are in growth mode, say 20% growth or more -- and you are hiring quickly, your probably gonna have new dynamics form that change the shape of the team (Every hire changes the culture). Some folks may no longer be the right folks. (Could even be a new hire -- I had someone who I had high hopes for leave in 9 months because they weren't able to mesh.) Businesses are people but business is cogs. (In both senses of the word) To be a manager in a large org, you need to constantly be refocusing the team on the goal. Drift happens. When you have 100 brains, you get 100 ideas. This "rule of thumb" reason is to make sure leaders are not languishing. It's very easy to see the people, and lose sight of the business goal. Are all 100 people aligned and driving towards the goal? (If so, amazing and you should fight to keep all of them.)
yodsanklai 2y ago
Statistically speaking there will be a few percent of bad hires and people whose skills don't match the requirements. Arguably, they could detect that during probation period, possibly extending probation period needed. That's how it's done in more progressist european countries. It gets harder to fire people after that. Note that they also routinely fire perfectly capable people, who exceeded expectations for many years in a row and just had one bad year (sometimes after a team change or a promotion).
jaredklewis 2y ago
I think grading people to a standard is very difficult. At the last place I worked I was managing people and we were given a set of "standards" to rate employees on, used to determine raises, promotions, and so on. I tried my best fairly evaluate my reports, but obviously the standards are inherently imprecise and so the evaluations are mostly qualitative. I found that other managers, wanting to do well by their reports, more leniently interpreted the standards and their reports were promoted more and treated better than my own. So, wanting to do well by my reports, I re-calibrated my own evaluations to be more lenient. The other managers responded in kind. This arms race continued until upper management found it to have essentially broken the whole system. So then we were asked to rank the performance of reports on our team. I liked everyone on my team and wanted the best for all of them, but also had no difficulty putting them in order from most productive to least productive, with maybe the occasional tie here or there. Anyway, the whole experience kind of highlighted to me some of the issues with "objective" standards and some of the benefits of relative standards.
- psunavy03 2y ago
  Promotions are always going to be subjective because they're a judgement call about how well the person will perform in a more senior role. Firing someone is different; the bar for that is that they are squarely underperforming relative to what is reasonably expectable. The idea that some fixed percentage of people always underperform is possibly Jack Welch's most toxic contribution to management, and with all the BS he spewed over the years, that's saying something. It makes people compete against each other Hunger Games-style as opposed to working as a team.
  - jaredklewis 2y ago
    Well I guess I don't see how a manager can determine if someone is "underperforming relative to what is reasonably expectable" without the issues I mentioned in my first post, namely that there is no objective way to make that determination. Managers will mostly be incentivized to determine that no one is ever underperforming relative to a firing standard. And maybe it wasn’t clear, but at my previous company, those evaluations were not just used for promotions, but also who to PIP. There is also the more philosophical question of where that standard would come from in the first place. And what if the business finds that the average applicant meets a much higher standard than the current firing standard of the company? It would seem to then make sense to raise the company's own firing standard.
theptip 2y ago
The arbitrariness is a risk. But the general idea is that there is a strong inertial bias against firing “enough”, and this grows exponentially with company size. Doing a PIP is extremely annoying when you are already sure you want to fire someone. So it’s not uncommon for underperformers to get moved around. Essentially the individual incentives for managers are naturally to avoid making the tough decision, the idea is to put some more pressure to make the right call. Your value of X% will vary but you hope it’s tuned by some research within the org.

foobarian 2y ago

Honestly I would be ecstatic if it was possible for a hiring process to have a 95% success rate.

hnthrowaway6543 2y ago

> Is your hiring process so flawed that you just accept that you screwed up hiring 5 percent of your people? if you only messed up 5% of your hires you'd be a goddamn genius and every company in the world would want to put you in charge of their hiring process the "standard" is more like 20% of hires end up being bad hires

tauwauwau 2y ago
Other than agreeing with "spacemadness", I wanted to point out a small correction. Original argument was about 5% of total employees, not only new hires.
spacemadness 2y ago
Are these numbers coming out of thin air? Gut feel perhaps? So after you fire 10% and don’t hire, that holds until there is nobody left? Maybe we should stop with the gut feel managerial apologies and think about what we’re doing and how it affects company morale, no?
- hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
  morale is also adversely affected by people having obvious underperformers on their team that they have to work around, so pick your poison
- antisthenes 2y ago
  > Maybe we should stop with the gut feel managerial apologies and think about what we’re doing and how it affects company morale, no? Maybe you can devise a methodology that reduces bad hiring to below 5% across the entire S&P 500 and then share it with us?
- lacker 2y ago
  The numbers are discussed by upper engineering management. They might change over time depending on the situation the company is in. Think of a hypothetical organization with 10,000 software engineers. You're the head of engineering. You have ten divisions, each with a VP managing 1000 engineers. Each VP has ten directors, each managing 100 engineers, and each line manager has 10 engineers on the team. The engineering team reviews the past year. You notice, overall we fired 500 people last year. Okay, so on average that was 5% of staff. Seems reasonable just as a sanity check. (You ask your buddies at other large tech companies, and the other heads of engineering are reporting similar numbers.) Now you look through the individual teams. A lot of 10-person teams don't fire anyone. That makes sense. But would you expect a director to fire nobody from their org? From 100 people... well, maybe. I'd be a little suspicious. I'd ask some other directors, does this person have a reputation of a very high quality team, or is it more likely that this director is lax, and their org doesn't manage out its underperformers? Now imagine a VP fired nobody. 1000 people and they all were high performers. Yeah, that doesn't seem right. That VP is probably letting their team get away with low standards. If you were the head of engineering meeting with your VPs, I think the group would be able to come to a consensus of, there's a problem here. It's based on the 5% target but it's not a hard and fast rule. In the long run, having a high-performing team is better for morale than firing nobody. It's the difference between working at Meta and working at the DMV.
  - voxl 2y ago
    So: You have no measure of performance and go off vibes. You have no scientific basis and go off vibes. You pretend this is all logical and common sense but it's really all just vibes. You could end up performing way better firing half of your teams. And what about your managers? How is an underperforming manager in the higher positions ever fired? I get that measuring performance is incredibly difficult, but dressing it up as if 5-10% of people are underperformers anyway is just so tantamount to how baseless and incompetent most businesses are run these days. Especially in software.
dietr1ch 2y ago
I understand that you made up your 20%, but at that point it feels like you are blaming bad team fit or environment as bad hires, and this fitting can change over time as bad politics or shifts to different goals happen.
- hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
  bad hire doesn't necessarily mean bad/stupid/incompetent person, it just means bad hire. might not be a fit for the role, might not be a fit for the company. for example, i freely admit i was a bad hire at Google because i got demotivated by big corporate/political bullshit getting in my way, it just wasn't for me. then i went to a 20 startup and, in the words of the CEO, "saved the company" and scaled it to 200 people and no i didn't make up 20%, Gartner did a study on it. and most people with management/hiring experience report the same.
  - darth_avocado 2y ago
    But firing people for performance is framed as the person is bad/stupid/incompetent. The problem with the 5% quota is that it doesn’t necessarily mean you get rid of 5% bad fits. It often results in arbitrary top down push to fire x number of people in the org, which then translates to people with most political prowess keep their jobs and their headcounts while competent people get gaslighted, overworked and eventually fired because of moving goalposts. These people get put on PIP and eventually fired, often by telling them they are bad/incompetent and criticizing them excessively and pulling apart every single thing they do. Some people don’t care about this treatment, but others often face severe physical and mental health problems due to the excessive stress that is put on them.
    - colin_jack 2y ago
      Also since we are mentioning Google, they had some interesting to say in one of their books [0]: "Ratings, although an important way to measure performance during a specific period, are not predictive of future performance and should not be used to gauge readiness for a future role or qualify an internal candidate for a different team. (They can, however, be used to evaluate whether an employee is properly or improperly slotted on their current team; therefore, they can provide an opportunity to evaluate how to better support an internal candidate moving forward.)" [0] https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch04.html#challenge_established_processes https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch04.html#challeng...
xracy 2y ago
5% of your new hires, doesn't necessarily mean 5% of your company. https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-facebook-employees/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-faceboo... ^But let's say you messed up hiring 20% of your company, and then you corrected that (layoffs for the past 2 years). You haven't hired enough people to justify perma-cutting 5%. And the number of functioning employees who stop working in a role isn't going to be as high as 5%. The reality is that most hires are probably fine in the role they're in. And you don't actually need to be this aggressive in cost-cutting.
- lacker 2y ago
  This specific target being discussed was 5% of all headcount, not just new hires. You shouldn't think of all firing as a "mistaken hire". Sometimes you hire someone, and they work effectively for years, and then they kind of "check out" and don't do much work any more. It can be a good decision to hire someone, and then later a good decision to fire them. It's also not a cost-cutting measure per se. Typically when you fire someone you get to replace the headcount with another hire or internal transfer. The point of firing people is to get rid of low performers and replace them with high performers.
  - xigency 2y ago
    This is somehow better than exploring ways to improve your existing employees' performance?
    - qwe----3 2y ago
      There are people ready to be hired that aren't checked out
      - xigency 2y ago
        Sure. This is a great model to adopt if you believe corporations exist to destroy people. If a construction site was sending formerly qualified people away no longer able to work we would definitely investigate their practices. Tech deserves the same scrutiny.

bdcravens 2y ago

We've had many years in our industry where funded and public company were in a mad rush to put seats in chairs. It's like storming a field to pick fruit because you fear others will get it all first: you're incentivized to hoard, and not inspect.

ramesh31 2y ago

>Why? Why set an arbitrary number of people who need to be fired as opposed to grading people to a standard? A person, individually, indeed must always be judged by themselves objectively. But people, in aggregate, can generally be understood stochastically. And in any group of people there will always be the obvious slackers who everyone knows aren't pulling their weight. Good management clears these people out rather than allowing them to fester and lower morale. It doesn't matter if it's high paid SWEs or minimum wage workers, the dynamic is the same.

vanjajaja1 2y ago

it makes sense that if average tenure at a company is 3-5 years then some percentage yearly firing will cull people who have 'quiet quit' and havent fully quit yet

lbotos 2y ago

If you are in growth mode, say 20% growth or more -- and you are hiring quickly, your probably gonna have new dynamics form that change the shape of the team (Every hire changes the culture). Some folks may no longer be the right folks. (Could even be a new hire -- I had someone who I had high hopes for leave in 9 months because they weren't able to mesh.) Businesses are people but business is cogs. (In both senses of the word) To be a manager in a large org, you need to constantly be refocusing the team on the goal. Drift happens. When you have 100 brains, you get 100 ideas. This "rule of thumb" reason is to make sure leaders are not languishing. It's very easy to see the people, and lose sight of the business goal. Are all 100 people aligned and driving towards the goal? (If so, amazing and you should fight to keep all of them.)

yodsanklai 2y ago

Statistically speaking there will be a few percent of bad hires and people whose skills don't match the requirements. Arguably, they could detect that during probation period, possibly extending probation period needed. That's how it's done in more progressist european countries. It gets harder to fire people after that. Note that they also routinely fire perfectly capable people, who exceeded expectations for many years in a row and just had one bad year (sometimes after a team change or a promotion).

jaredklewis 2y ago

I think grading people to a standard is very difficult. At the last place I worked I was managing people and we were given a set of "standards" to rate employees on, used to determine raises, promotions, and so on. I tried my best fairly evaluate my reports, but obviously the standards are inherently imprecise and so the evaluations are mostly qualitative. I found that other managers, wanting to do well by their reports, more leniently interpreted the standards and their reports were promoted more and treated better than my own. So, wanting to do well by my reports, I re-calibrated my own evaluations to be more lenient. The other managers responded in kind. This arms race continued until upper management found it to have essentially broken the whole system. So then we were asked to rank the performance of reports on our team. I liked everyone on my team and wanted the best for all of them, but also had no difficulty putting them in order from most productive to least productive, with maybe the occasional tie here or there. Anyway, the whole experience kind of highlighted to me some of the issues with "objective" standards and some of the benefits of relative standards.

psunavy03 2y ago
Promotions are always going to be subjective because they're a judgement call about how well the person will perform in a more senior role. Firing someone is different; the bar for that is that they are squarely underperforming relative to what is reasonably expectable. The idea that some fixed percentage of people always underperform is possibly Jack Welch's most toxic contribution to management, and with all the BS he spewed over the years, that's saying something. It makes people compete against each other Hunger Games-style as opposed to working as a team.
- jaredklewis 2y ago
  Well I guess I don't see how a manager can determine if someone is "underperforming relative to what is reasonably expectable" without the issues I mentioned in my first post, namely that there is no objective way to make that determination. Managers will mostly be incentivized to determine that no one is ever underperforming relative to a firing standard. And maybe it wasn’t clear, but at my previous company, those evaluations were not just used for promotions, but also who to PIP. There is also the more philosophical question of where that standard would come from in the first place. And what if the business finds that the average applicant meets a much higher standard than the current firing standard of the company? It would seem to then make sense to raise the company's own firing standard.

theptip 2y ago

The arbitrariness is a risk. But the general idea is that there is a strong inertial bias against firing “enough”, and this grows exponentially with company size. Doing a PIP is extremely annoying when you are already sure you want to fire someone. So it’s not uncommon for underperformers to get moved around. Essentially the individual incentives for managers are naturally to avoid making the tough decision, the idea is to put some more pressure to make the right call. Your value of X% will vary but you hope it’s tuned by some research within the org.