Even if you can do this accurately the second order effects in terms of stress on the team, friends and colleagues getting kicked out and self doubt do make the job more miserable. The people that are nominally “safe” aren’t some island of calm unaffected by their coworkers and culture shift that isn’t. And I’d expect that the actual approach will end up being a far blunter instrument and make the situation adversarial.

That’s true, but at a company that size when the order comes all the way from the top to “turn up the heat?” Sounds like a recipe for misery generation.

Where should the order come from?

I'm agnostic about whether or not Facebook will implement this well. Certainly it's possible to implement these kinds of initiatives badly. But the whole HN attitude of "how dare you?!?" doesn't strike me as people who are taking an appropriately realistic view of the real problems in trying to make a large organization be high performing, it strikes me as entitlement.

I also feel like Zuckerberg has had a fairly large amount of success building a highly performant organization in the past, and while that doesn't mean he hasn't lost touch or that FB hasn't gotten too big to do the same things with or whatever, this certainty that you see in these comment threads that he's just like tripping on his shoelaces and doing self-evidently idiotic things seems extremely overconfident.

I think that building a high performance organisation starts way before you get to the point where you need an emergency leadership directive at the beginning of a downturn that from now on you’re going to turn up the heat and hold people accountable for performance. If you are pulling that lever to some extent I think you have to admit you took a wrong turn somewhere.

I dunno, maybe there was a wrong turn -- or maybe just you're responding to rapidly changing conditions.

But if there was a wrong turn, and now you're error correcting, that still seems quite a bit different from, "Lol what does this doofus know, he's just an idiot."

I don’t recall having said anything like that.

I recall you saying that Zuckerberg's plan was to "make everyone miserable," and that the result of that would be that the highest performers would quit.

I think paraphrasing that as "Zuckerberg's an idiot" is, if anything, charitable.