_Why haven't you already done that?_

Nobody likes low-performers, even when you're flush with cash. Fixing their mistakes is demoralizing for your high-performers. The word gets around that you have low standards, and it's hard to recruit.

The only way to get your money's worth from them is to put them in death marches and grind them down until they burn out and quit.

I am always extremely suspicious of claims that a company is going to lay off its poor performers and magically be better. If they're telling the truth, they are actually saying that their existing managers are incompetent.

There's a reason that all tech companies try to brag that they only hire the top performers.

There's a reason that all tech companies try to brag that they only hire the top performers.

Performance of an engineer is relative to his environment. I was a top performer on some teams/projects and a low performer on others.

Even if they ace your hiring process, you still can't know how they'll fit with the team long term.

Another way to think about it is that everyone has some productivity, some contribution to the company’s net progress. If someone’s contribution is negative, they should already have been let go.

If their contribution is less than others, maybe “bottom 10%,” but it is still positive, you may be letting go a relatively poor performer in a round of layoffs, but you’re still shedding a person with a positive contribution.

You are going to be worse off, no matter how you sugar-coat it.

If you define performance as change over time then this would seem to have nothing to do with mistakes. From what I've read about the space shuttle programmers, they would have been classified as low performance (low change over time) but who also made with very few mistakes (as I understand their process). At the other end you could have high performing programmers (lots of change) with high defects that they're always fixing (which could in turn qualify as still more change).

With layoffs you want to apply “cut once” approach or at least as rarely as possible, in batches.

Constant trickle of layoffs is very bad for morale, no matter who is laid off. It is also bad for an external image of management.

For example, closing a plant, or getting out of a line of business. If Uber decides not to have anything more to do with self-driving vehicles, they might lay off everyone in its division.

That would have nothing to do with poor performance on the part of individuals.

On the other hand, there is “These people are underperformers,” which is part of Uber’s allegation as they throw their former employees under the bus rather than take responsibility for their management choices.

I contend that if people are underperformers, a constant trickle of letting such people go is not bad for morale. It’s perfectly normal.

“Did you hear they let Dave go?” “Yeah. What took them so long?” That’s the usual talk.

Whereas, “Did you hear that they shut down ML?” “Yeah, and it was half the database tuning group last month, who’ll be next?” “I dunno, but I’m not hanging around to find out...” is the thing you are describing.

Long story short, I agree that a trickle of layoffs is not good, but I suggest that this is true when the people being let go are not thought of as holding the company back.

I disagree that it doesn’t matter who it is. If they are underperforming in the sense of being bottom 10% but still carrying their costs, I agree with you about trickle, but then we can’t claim that letting them go makes the company stronger.

But if they are underperforming to the extent that letting them go makes the engineering group more effective, then management should have identified them earlier, done everything in its power to make them perform, and let them go if they didn’t improve.

Ignoring net negative employees, or being blind to whether they are net negative, or keeping them around even though they are known to be net negative is bad for the company’s bottom line and bad for its morale.

I agree with your points, but optics might depend on a company. In a startup or smaller company being aware that underperforming employees are let go might actually improve morale. For bigger companies it is a typical situation that you notice or get to know that people from other teams are gone, but you may not be aware of their performance.

> Nobody likes low-performers, even when you're flush with cash. Fixing their mistakes is demoralizing for your high-performers. The word gets around that you have low standards, and it's hard to recruit.

Fixing mistakes is part of development. I am yet to be part of a team that never made a mistake. Mistakes are how we learn and get better.

If the same mistakes repeat, THEN you have a problem but if a single individual is to blame everytime, then it's not the individual's problem - you have a bad team. Your team has failed at teamwork - the primary focus of any team.

If you have a team of dozen engineers making a car, the car does not drive until all the parts are not only in place but they all work well together.

The way to make all parts work well together is to have the designers of the parts communicate and work together, well.

If the engine guy is not talking to the intake and exhaust guys, don't be surprised if there are leaks at best or the engine blows up at worst.

I AM assuming each team member went through an interview process. If the going was tough where you could not interview and had to let just any person in, hopefully this person helped you through the tough times.

What value does the interview process provide if you can't figure out if your candidate is a high-performer or not?

Why did your interview process select a low-performer?

Also, performance is the output of a team - a single person should not be expected to provide high-performance day in and day out.

That's impractical to expect out of a human being. A machine and a person have vastly different characteristics.

If my team is working well, we will have a high performance team. There is no other way to have high performance sustained over a long term.

Each team member needs to actually looking forward to working with each other.

The other extreme is programmers work in these silos and come up with solutions that barely work well with each other and then there's blame game being played.

Why do that nonsense? Save money? No - of course not!

Just work as a team!

> The only way to get your money's worth from them is to put them in death marches and grind them down until they burn out and quit.

I don't follow.

Death marches?

First of all WHY do this at all?

What's wrong with the alternative "Hey, it looks like it's not working out. We will be letting you go and support you in looking for a job elsewhere over the next X days"

At one point in time in the past, you and your team interviewed this person and found them useful - what changed that they are no longer useful?

Was an error in hiring made?

Own up, take responsibility and move on. Make the interview process better.

Did the person expect to get a larger bump come bonus/review time that did not happen and now they are demoralized and upset?

Own up, take responsibility and move on. Clarify better what bumps and bonus would be like and how much effort that would entail next time.

> I am always extremely suspicious of claims that a company is going to lay off its poor performers and magically be better. If they're telling the truth, they are actually saying that their existing managers are incompetent.

I also don't follow this and want to hear more about this perspective.

What happens to the people working in mining, transporting and delivering ice from Iceland to California when refrigerators get invented?

Are those people inherently low performers or has the industry they work for shifted beneath them?

We (developers) work in an area of high specialization and the market values us for it (to the tune of six figures).

I have worked at both product and service companies before where entire departments were laid off because a contract did not get renewed or the market changed.

Most employees AND manager involved there were and continue to be competent. We even hire and refer each other wherever we might happen to be to this date even though we met decades ago.

Why would you do that vs moving the high performers to the business critical projects?

I'm implying that rather than laying off top performers you find them a different role in your organization.

Granted if the skill set is incredibly niche--such as hand optimizing HC12 assembly and you've moved to ARM then perhaps not.

It's hard to imagine a scenario where an entire project teams skillset is so niche that they couldn't find a home for top developers in other parts of the org.

In the first case, you're losing team members with tribal knowledge of the system and its requirements. In the second case, you're exponentially increasing the pathways of communication. In either case, you still have the ramp-up time for new team members.

I completely disagree. Which would you rather have:

(a) Business is booming, but leadership holds off on hiring because they believe the boom won't last forever.

(b) Business is booming, so leadership hires to support the boom. The boom eventually subsides, so leadership decides to lay off as the business is no longer there.

Fortunately, even as an employee, I'd much rather have (b) (assuming the timeframe was relatively decent, i.e. I didn't get hired and laid off in 3 months).

I've said this before, but in growing industries, I do not believe lay offs are something to fear. I mean, given the desire for experienced engineers and product people, I have no doubt these Uber folks will get snatched up extremely quickly. (and to emphasize, I certainly do NOT believe this is the case with shrinking industries)

This is a story for retail that will be buying stock. "We cannot afford X" can be an stock buster.

A job candidate with solid skills will be able to show their value to employers, and if an employer puts more weight on this quote over a candidate's qualifications then it was a bullet dodged.

I generally agree with this, except when the candidate in question needs the money paid from a job more than they need a good job.

In any case, yeah, in that respect it is a massively shitty and unnecessary thing to do to employees. They could have easily left it as "re-structuring" without a risk of tainting the reputation of former employees.