3 ms·

Manage around it - hire a team of your four favourite engineers, plus one sacrificial goat. Every year the goat gets it and you hire a new one :P

• paulojreis 11y ago
  I don't know how jocose you wanted to make it, but it's really not that far-fetched from reality in companies where performance review results are stacked or quota-based. I saw it happening first-hand and it is indeed revolting. Humans shouldn't be handled like ordinary resources. And the worst thing is that these strategies aren't any better in managing subjectivity and prejudice. For all its quantitativeness and statistically-oriented methods (e.g. fitting the performances to a normal distribution), these systems are subject to biases just like others. More often than it should, your placement in the stack or distribution reflects more your influence and relationship with evaluators than your actual performance.
• skrebbel 11y ago
  And this, people, is how psychopaths get to be managers.
• melted 11y ago
  That's exactly how Microsoft managers used to do it. They would hire (and keep) deadwood on the teams specifically for this purpose. Honestly, that's the trick any reasonably bright manager learns after having to let go of someone who's really good. Another trick they would do is tweak rewards so that some people get more cash raise than normal and less stock, and some would get more stock than normal and less cash. Then they'd make up all these lies about "potential" etc, instead of just telling you "dude, I had a finite budget, and this is how the dice fell this time around".
• walshemj 11y ago
  I have seen it in a uk company one of my mates said well our team had 2 people with terminal conditions so they where selected for the chop. Not totally as brutal as it sounds as they would have got medical retirement.