> 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,

> 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.