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What difference does it make? If your committed to reducing an organisation by X%, then a certain number of people are going to be fired. And it makes sense the

by smegel 13y ago

What difference does it make? If your committed to reducing an organisation by X%, then a certain number of people are going to be fired. And it makes sense they are the lowest performing percentile. So maybe some people were rated as "misses" when they weren't, but they were still the lowest ranked employee in their unit. Would this argument be mute if they were ranked "least effective" instead?

ye 13y ago
I also thing firing the bottom X% is absolutely normal for a business. It's a free market. If you're ranking in the bottom X%, then it's likely your own fault.
- Iftheshoefits 13y ago
  Those are some...interesting...views. 1) There is no "absolutely normal" anything about firing or laying off employees. Some of layoffs/firings will be to get rid of bottom X%-ers, but some will be good or even very well qualified and capable employees (e.g. for salary or budgetary reasons). 2) There is no such thing as a "free market." Or, put another way, "it's a free market" in the same way that China is a pure communist state. 3) You're assuming the person granting the grade--the manager--is being objective and assigning grades fairly. If you think managers do that, you're either a manager, inexperienced, or woefully oblivious (or possibly all three). There are many, many reasons a person could be placed in the bottom X% that have literally nothing to do with his performance or abilities.
- mhurron 13y ago
  Except as others have pointed out, you're not ranked according to the company, but your group. And in companies that like to keep groups small, that means even in groups where everyone is performing well, someone has to be called the bottom. Your manager was forced to blame someone for something so you get fired for being part of a project that had better staffing so it would be less impacted by loss. This setup requires someone to be called deadweight whether that group actually has any or not. Firing a static percentage of the company every year is horrible for morale. Managers who are doing their jobs and managing their people should find out when they need to work with them or let them go. People who should be let go shouldn't be held on to until the next review cycle.
JoshTriplett 13y ago
Firing the bottom 10% of performers at a company with the size and problems of Yahoo makes perfect sense. However, organizing such a company into teams, and then firing the bottom 10% of every team, is a terrible idea, and it will not produce even remotely the same results. That's doubly true if not everyone is even subject to the policy (e.g. first-line or second-line managers). Think of it this way: if you selected the bottom 10% of a company, would the results always have exactly 10% of each team? Of course not. Stack ranking at a whole-company level, or to a rough approximation at a divisional level, can work just fine. Stack ranking within teams or even within small groups of teams is a terrible idea.
- smegel 13y ago
  Nice in theory, just doesn't work in practice. There are two main problems with company or even divisional stacking: One, inter-team comparative rankings are essentially meaningless. Imagine you have two teams of roughly equal competence. When asked to rank employees one manager is a bit of a soft touch and gives all his team members good-high rankings. The other is a bit honest and ranks most in the middle, with some low and some high. Some managers might be weak, others lazy, or may simply have a difference understanding of the rankings to other managers. The result is that the group people who get let go are arbitrarily determined by incomparable manager rankings - when you look at it this way, forcing every manager to fire their least effective employee is a blunt, but fairer approach. Of course if you have some magic formula to truly discover the bottom 10% of an entire company...maybe in a call center where everyone can be measured by calls/day...but in a software company what would you do? Measure people by KLOCs? That craziness ended in the 80s (except maybe in IBM). At the end of the day manager rankings (and perhaps peer rankings like MS) are all you have - and as they are essentially incomparable, what else can you do? If you have a better way, you should start a management consulting firm. Two, when a company is engaging on a total staff reduction, it needs to spread the cuts otherwise it might see entire crucial areas and teams disappear. I think we can all agree here that sales/corporate/IT are generally far less effective employees than engineers, but a company can't just fire its entire sales division. That fact alone, by definition, implies that some more-competent staff will need to be fired while less-competent ones are kept, simply to maintain a necessary skill balance. Firing by team is an effective, if crude way to reach that goal. I think this is one of those areas where you have to accept there are no easy answers, and the "least worst" solution is the best one.
e12e 13y ago
> If your committed to reducing an organisation by X%, then a certain number of people are going to be fired. And it makes sense they are the lowest performing percentile. It may make sense to reduce the number of employees. If you chose to do so, it'd be great if you could keep your (relatively) "best" and fire your "worst". The problem is that it's really, really hard to measure how good your employees are. It's even hard to define what a "good" employee is. Especially, perhaps, in a large company. Take YUI, for instance. How much does someone working in localization of YUI contribute to quarterly revenue? Is he or she more valuable than the person responsible for selling ads? How about the community manager for the Traffic Webserver? How much revenue does he or she contribute? Are the these roles even comparable? I wonder how things would look if they went by seniority, and simply fired the last 10% to join (maybe with the exception of certain "specialists", like the CEO... ).
- smegel 13y ago
  > The problem is that it's really, really hard to measure how good your employees are. It's even hard to define what a "good" employee is. Especially, perhaps, in a large company. At a company level that is absolutely correct. I think it supports the notion of firing by team - if anyone can measure the worth of an employee, it is their direct line manager, who is responsible for giving them work and judging the timeliness and quality of the outcome. However, as this "measure" is essentially incomparable between teams, it can't be effectively extrapolated to form a company wide view of the "bottom 10%". Asking each manager to get rid of their least effective employee both spreads the cuts evenly across skill sets, while ensuring that the measure of employee worth is being made by the most qualified person to do so. > I wonder how things would look if they went by seniority, and simply fired the last 10% to join Well, like firing by team, it is just another arbitrary measure. But I think I would rather an arbitrary measure that at least tries to take into account employee worth rather than when they joined.
  - allochthon 13y ago
    while ensuring that the measure of employee worth is being made by the most qualified person to do so. This implicitly assumes that the line manager is competent and not spread too thin.

by smegel 13y ago

ye 13y ago

I also thing firing the bottom X% is absolutely normal for a business. It's a free market. If you're ranking in the bottom X%, then it's likely your own fault.

Iftheshoefits 13y ago
Those are some...interesting...views. 1) There is no "absolutely normal" anything about firing or laying off employees. Some of layoffs/firings will be to get rid of bottom X%-ers, but some will be good or even very well qualified and capable employees (e.g. for salary or budgetary reasons). 2) There is no such thing as a "free market." Or, put another way, "it's a free market" in the same way that China is a pure communist state. 3) You're assuming the person granting the grade--the manager--is being objective and assigning grades fairly. If you think managers do that, you're either a manager, inexperienced, or woefully oblivious (or possibly all three). There are many, many reasons a person could be placed in the bottom X% that have literally nothing to do with his performance or abilities.
mhurron 13y ago
Except as others have pointed out, you're not ranked according to the company, but your group. And in companies that like to keep groups small, that means even in groups where everyone is performing well, someone has to be called the bottom. Your manager was forced to blame someone for something so you get fired for being part of a project that had better staffing so it would be less impacted by loss. This setup requires someone to be called deadweight whether that group actually has any or not. Firing a static percentage of the company every year is horrible for morale. Managers who are doing their jobs and managing their people should find out when they need to work with them or let them go. People who should be let go shouldn't be held on to until the next review cycle.

JoshTriplett 13y ago

Firing the bottom 10% of performers at a company with the size and problems of Yahoo makes perfect sense. However, organizing such a company into teams, and then firing the bottom 10% of every team, is a terrible idea, and it will not produce even remotely the same results. That's doubly true if not everyone is even subject to the policy (e.g. first-line or second-line managers). Think of it this way: if you selected the bottom 10% of a company, would the results always have exactly 10% of each team? Of course not. Stack ranking at a whole-company level, or to a rough approximation at a divisional level, can work just fine. Stack ranking within teams or even within small groups of teams is a terrible idea.

smegel 13y ago
Nice in theory, just doesn't work in practice. There are two main problems with company or even divisional stacking: One, inter-team comparative rankings are essentially meaningless. Imagine you have two teams of roughly equal competence. When asked to rank employees one manager is a bit of a soft touch and gives all his team members good-high rankings. The other is a bit honest and ranks most in the middle, with some low and some high. Some managers might be weak, others lazy, or may simply have a difference understanding of the rankings to other managers. The result is that the group people who get let go are arbitrarily determined by incomparable manager rankings - when you look at it this way, forcing every manager to fire their least effective employee is a blunt, but fairer approach. Of course if you have some magic formula to truly discover the bottom 10% of an entire company...maybe in a call center where everyone can be measured by calls/day...but in a software company what would you do? Measure people by KLOCs? That craziness ended in the 80s (except maybe in IBM). At the end of the day manager rankings (and perhaps peer rankings like MS) are all you have - and as they are essentially incomparable, what else can you do? If you have a better way, you should start a management consulting firm. Two, when a company is engaging on a total staff reduction, it needs to spread the cuts otherwise it might see entire crucial areas and teams disappear. I think we can all agree here that sales/corporate/IT are generally far less effective employees than engineers, but a company can't just fire its entire sales division. That fact alone, by definition, implies that some more-competent staff will need to be fired while less-competent ones are kept, simply to maintain a necessary skill balance. Firing by team is an effective, if crude way to reach that goal. I think this is one of those areas where you have to accept there are no easy answers, and the "least worst" solution is the best one.

e12e 13y ago

> If your committed to reducing an organisation by X%, then a certain number of people are going to be fired. And it makes sense they are the lowest performing percentile. It may make sense to reduce the number of employees. If you chose to do so, it'd be great if you could keep your (relatively) "best" and fire your "worst". The problem is that it's really, really hard to measure how good your employees are. It's even hard to define what a "good" employee is. Especially, perhaps, in a large company. Take YUI, for instance. How much does someone working in localization of YUI contribute to quarterly revenue? Is he or she more valuable than the person responsible for selling ads? How about the community manager for the Traffic Webserver? How much revenue does he or she contribute? Are the these roles even comparable? I wonder how things would look if they went by seniority, and simply fired the last 10% to join (maybe with the exception of certain "specialists", like the CEO... ).

smegel 13y ago
> The problem is that it's really, really hard to measure how good your employees are. It's even hard to define what a "good" employee is. Especially, perhaps, in a large company. At a company level that is absolutely correct. I think it supports the notion of firing by team - if anyone can measure the worth of an employee, it is their direct line manager, who is responsible for giving them work and judging the timeliness and quality of the outcome. However, as this "measure" is essentially incomparable between teams, it can't be effectively extrapolated to form a company wide view of the "bottom 10%". Asking each manager to get rid of their least effective employee both spreads the cuts evenly across skill sets, while ensuring that the measure of employee worth is being made by the most qualified person to do so. > I wonder how things would look if they went by seniority, and simply fired the last 10% to join Well, like firing by team, it is just another arbitrary measure. But I think I would rather an arbitrary measure that at least tries to take into account employee worth rather than when they joined.
- allochthon 13y ago
  while ensuring that the measure of employee worth is being made by the most qualified person to do so. This implicitly assumes that the line manager is competent and not spread too thin.