Re:Meta and Google are cutting staff
by jiggawatts on Thursday September 22, 2022 @08:07AM
(#32937713)
Stack ranking kinda-sorta makes sense in a sales team, because fundamentally it isn't a team at all. Sales tends to be made up of a bunch of individuals chasing a finite set of opportunities. Firing low-performing sales people won't remove some essential technical knowledge, and won't affect other sales. In fact, poor performing sales people may "fumble" lucrative opportunities that would have been landed if they had been fired and replaced by someone better. Replacing sales staff is also not a big problem. In fact, some new hires will bring customers with them.
None of this is true for creative workers in actual teams with deep technical or site knowledge. Someone with a decade of experience that is a bit burnt out and underperforming may still have amazing contributions albeit less frequently or predictably. Someone that doesn't commit code often but "holds the team together" by lending a helping hand and giving sage advice to juniors can be invaluable. Fire them and the juniors will flounder. New developers not only don't bring customers with them, but likely won't be productive for months. And so on, and so forth.
Stack ranking originates in organisations where sales are in charge at the upper levels. They think that what applies to them applies to everybody else at the organisation.
This is a mistake, of course, but it's fantastically difficult to overcome "cultural" biases like this. Even otherwise very smart people have a blind spot to this kind of thing. After all, the fish is the last to know it swims in water.
None of this is true for creative workers in actual teams with deep technical or site knowledge. Someone with a decade of experience that is a bit burnt out and underperforming may still have amazing contributions albeit less frequently or predictably. Someone that doesn't commit code often but "holds the team together" by lending a helping hand and giving sage advice to juniors can be invaluable. Fire them and the juniors will flounder. New developers not only don't bring customers with them, but likely won't be productive for months. And so on, and so forth.
Stack ranking originates in organisations where sales are in charge at the upper levels. They think that what applies to them applies to everybody else at the organisation.
This is a mistake, of course, but it's fantastically difficult to overcome "cultural" biases like this. Even otherwise very smart people have a blind spot to this kind of thing. After all, the fish is the last to know it swims in water.