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> Dimon then complained of employees wasting time during Zoom meetings, and how headcount for JPMorgan Chase had ballooned by 50,000 in the last four to five ye

• matwood 2y ago
  > why don't they just get rid of the people that aren't performing? The other secret is that outside of really bad performers, no one really knows how well people are performing in a large company. And even if those people are performing well, are they doing a necessary job? This is why so many promotions come down to if your boss likes you, aka ‘team fit’.
  • echelon 2y ago
    > no one really knows how well people are performing in a large company. And even if those people are performing well, are they doing a necessary job? Attempts to measure and quantify this have been unsuccessful thus far.
  • aianus 2y ago
    Elon and his team seem to have succeeded at figuring this out at Twitter. Or do you think Twitter was a unique case?
    • bonzini 2y ago
      Elon didn't remove bad performers, he pivoted from social network to political platform. They removed moderators not because they were unnecessary or performed badly, but rather because they were actively harmful to the new mission.
      • curtisblaine 2y ago
        He removed a large swath of tech people too, so many that several posts here on HN doubted that the platform would stay up in the long run. In reality the platform did pretty well, even during "intense" events like the US election.
        • lovich 2y ago
          It crashed multiple times after his cuts and that was while dealing with a largely reduced flow of traffic. Twitter has survived death, but it’s only a fraction of what it used to be in terms of traffic, revenue, and profit compared to before Musk
          • starspangled 2y ago
            > It crashed multiple times after his cuts and that was while dealing with a largely reduced flow of traffic. It crashed multiple times before he bought it too though. > Twitter has survived death, but it’s only a fraction of what it used to be in terms of traffic, revenue, and profit compared to before Musk That fraction of traffic being somewhere around 3/4 to 4/5 the hits, according to a quick search, does that sound about right? That the dire predictions on HN, reddit, etc., about twitter's destruction after those aggressive layoffs turned out to be wrong. We were assured that it would imminently implode and/or explode. Not that revenue or traffic would be reduced due to content/policy/marketing/etc, but specifically that the site would essentially cease to operate due to lack of technical expertise. I think it's fair to say those predictions were wrong, and not wrong because traffic was so significantly reduced that the problem went from imminent implosion to more-or-less operating as usual, but because they were really just baseless speculation driven by wishful thinking.
            • curtisblaine 2y ago
              Layoffs were around 80% of the total workforce. It's impressive that they managed to stay up & running with 4/5 of the hits. The real Pareto law: you can run at 80% capacity by cutting your developers to 20%. All jokes aside, either Musk's people were incredibly good at reducing waste or the majority of developers and PMs at Twitter were doing nothing useful. I can't see any other explanation.
    • NitpickLawyer 2y ago
      AMZ is also known for periodically culling 10% of the worst performers. Out of all my contacts at faang type orgs, I get the feeling that AMZ is pretty tough to "game" by underperforming / "silent quitting" people (exceptions and all, ofc)
    • SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
      Twitter, like many tech companies, was composed of a small core worth a small fraction of its valuation plus a large number of speculative bets. It's easy for an owner who doesn't care about the valuation to simply stop doing the speculative bets; it doesn't require any kind of clever employee performance analysis.
      • fmajid 2y ago
        It’s not that simple, even in a company that was as notoriously mismanaged as Twitter. When he came in with his trusted lieutenants from SpaceX and Tesla, they had some sort of game plan to data mine HR databases, corporate email and so on. If I were to guess, Palantir must be involved somehow. Probably the same playbook they are applying at DOGE right now. In comparison, the “RTO to make people quit so we don’t have to pay severance” model of JPM, Amazon and others is a blunt instrument that is as likely to cause top performers to flee.
  • Gibbon1 2y ago
    I remember an interview with is it Wozniak where he said he took classes in business under an assumed name. And the professors lesions were often wrong or hopelessly outdated. Outdated like thinking business is like a 1940's toaster manufacturing plant. Unfortunately Eddy is only managing to stamp 260 units an hour and his defect rate is too high at 2.2%. The average is 350 stampings and a defect rate under 1%. We need to get rid of Eddy. Compare with a software guy that spent a month on a feature most of which was fighting broken tools, back and forth with the customer because marketing completely failed to understand what the customer needed. All the while getting pulled off to fight fires. It's amazing Eddy got it done at all. Then Eddy's bosses boss notices that Eddy only manages to close 1-3 issues a month vs the usual 6 to 10. Tells Eddy's boss that Eddy has to go and Eddy's boss freaks out because Eddy is his fixer.
• lotsofpulp 2y ago
  > We don’t need all those people. We were putting people in jobs because people weren’t doing the jobs they were hired to do in [the] first place,” Sounds like Dimon admitting that he failed at being a good leader, but for some reason, the solution isn’t to get rid of himself.
• sour-taste 2y ago
  You made the decision to hire those people! Why are you punishing them for doing jobs you hired them to do??? I think this is executives mad at empire building middle managers who request bloated headcount to increase their scope