I think the value of low performers becomes much more obvious when you separate out the concept of a toxic employee. Toxic employees hurt the team or organization whether low performing or high performing, and with rare exceptions it’s almost always worth getting rid of them. Toxic employees are the people getting into arguments and conflicts all the time, dragging others down constantly. Or they’re the managers who cause attrition or can’t retain their team or lie to their peers and own leadership until it catches up to them, often dramatically.

However, low performers are not always toxic. Often, low performers are just kind of lazy, or they take longer than they should to finish their work, or they take too long to reply to emails or messages, or their work needs extra review and checks and balances, or they are only capable of delivering on a relatively small set of fairly simple tasks, or they just want to work on the same part of the same product forever and can’t emotionally handle change, or …

Non-toxic low performers can be great because they’ll often do the unglamorous work for you for relatively low pay, and all you have to do is not bother them too much. The worst thing you can do with non-toxic low performers is try to force them into high performers. It won’t work, because they’re either not capable or they just don’t care. For some people, their work just isn’t that important to them, and there’s nothing you can do to change their perception of the relative importance of their job to the other aspects of their life. What might look like low performance in a corporate environment can just be someone setting boundaries and refusing to let work infringe too much on their personal life.

This is a great point. Toxicity is entirely orthogonal to performance. And you rarely have to worry about toxic low performers: if you're unlucky enough to hire them, they don't stay around for long.

But toxic top performers are IME one of the biggest challenges a manager will have to deal with. You have to root them out the moment they land in an organization because given enough they'll push out the non-toxic top performers, leaving you with a toxic asshole and a bunch of flunkies. And you have to convince everyone outside the team that yes, they get things done, but they're enough of an asshole that you'd rather risk hiring someone to deliver less but also destroy less.

All this reminds me of the quote attributed to everyone under the sun (Clausewitz, various US civil war generals, Omar Bradley, you name 'em) but apparently was said by Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord[0]

> There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.

Turns out this problem is quite old, indeed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord#Cl...

For leaders, Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord‘s advice reigns supreme. The diligent idiot is always the biggest threat, and the stupid and lazy are awesome as long as they stay in their lane.

> What might look like low performance in a corporate environment can just be someone setting boundaries and refusing to let work infringe too much on their personal life.

Another is poor fit between the employee and the job. One the lowest performers in a role can sometime be a great in another because they do/don’t care about clean code, long hours, spelling / grammar issues, minor aesthetic issues, minor bugs, speed, etc etc.

The universally perfect employee basically doesn’t exist as much as organizations want everybody to be interchangeable cogs.

Or the fit between employee and manager. I've come into many teams where the employee on a PIP went to being one of my best performers while those I was given the ravest reviews for were just mediocre under me. Or even just cultural. I had to change how I managed/my expectations as I moved positions around the country or when offshore teams were brought on.

I agree with your shocking premise that people are not machines and expand it to include that they are also not numbers in a spreadsheet or HR system.

    > I had to change how I managed/my expectations ... when offshore teams were brought on.

Did you mean to say "lowered my expectations"?

I don’t think it’s helpful to use inflammatory labels like “toxic”. There’s no such thing. It’s an unfalsifiable claim.

> There’s no such thing

This is your opinion. I have worked with and managed 'toxic' employees. They are very much a thing.

There very much is such a thing, and they provide an accurate definition of it in their comment.

...what? It's not a claim to be falsified, it's a hyperbolic metaphor. I don't particularly like it either as it's been thrown around so much as to have lost much of its meaning (like "gaslighting", "gatekeeping", "narcissistic", etc.) but it's absolutely a thing. If you call a coworker who doesn't perform while falsely accusing you of incompetence in public Slack channels "toxic" then everybody knows exactly what you mean.

> It’s an unfalsifiable claim.

It is very falsifiable. Take that employee out of the team and look at the outcome.

You’re naive. God bless you for not encountering one of these people.

People like this are masters at working the system and will make everyone around them miserable. They crave attention and love to wield power.

The most toxic person I can think of spent most of his career broadly filing complaints for various forms of discrimination, which insulated him from accountability because any attempt to fire him would be seen as retaliation. His parting shot was to call the FBI and accuse a coworker of trading illicit porn on his work computer.

Nasty, evil people exist.

> What might look like low performance in a corporate environment can just be someone setting boundaries and refusing to let work infringe too much on their personal life.

After killing myself at a FAANG because it was what was expected (to my mental health detriment), I have exactly this attitude since. At the end of the day, I'm done. I'm gone. I don't care. Even while I'm there, I'm only doing the amount outlined in the job and nothing extra. When I have a task to complete, I do my best to do it well. But I also don't care and don't sweat making sure it's perfect.

This has worked out great. I think I do a good enough job to be viewed as pretty good at what I do. That's good enough for me. I don't want advancement. I don't want more responsibility. Just give me a cost-of-living bump every year and we're good.

this exactly! everyone should find the bare minimum which does not get you fired and just do that - nothing more. salaried employees just don’t grasp the simple truth that putting in more than bare-minimum-required-to-keep-the-job is absolute waste which only benefits the employer. if I have no equity or vested interest in company’s success - this is the way!

> they take too long to reply to emails or messages, or their work needs extra review and checks and balances, or they are only capable of delivering on a relatively small set of fairly simple tasks, or they just want to work on the same part of the same product forever and can’t emotionally handle change

As someone on the ASD spectrum, who has struggled in the workplace, I resemble that remark! I found my coding job to be ok before the app was converted to be web-based, then found it to be death by a 1000 distractions as I became more senior and found the web project to be too messy, too many checkins of bad code by the overseas team, team too big, etc. Anyone have tips to help someone like me?

I think one should be careful with the word toxic. I’ve seen every manner of dishonesty and unscrupulousness and in some cases outright sociopathy and I’ve seen all these things done with an eye to optics: the right language, the right audience, the right timing to present stuff somewhere between “unsavory” and “fraud” in a fashionable light. This is locally non-toxic in the sense that it is unlikely to ruin the financials next quarter. It’s globally toxic in the sense that it’ll just kill your company over years or sometimes decades.

I’ve seen aspy nerds be the squeaky wheel (and very often be correct) in the long tradition of neuroatypical people who care more about an ideal than about fashionable niceties that fluctuate like hemlines called toxic way more often over the last few years. This is locally toxic in the sense that it can be temporarily disruptive until either the problem gets fixed or the aspy nerd gets fixed. But it’s in no way globally toxic: it never kills your business unless it’s one of two founders, and often saves your business from getting hit by an asteroid when the subject matter changes abruptly. Back when there was real competition at the apex of the software business you were cooked without those people around.

5-10 years ago Elon Musk was so popular in SV that people were buying up Teslas and posting every SpaceX launch and all but naming their kids after him. Today he’s anathema in huge parts of the Valley culture. Same guy, same behavior really. Good or bad? Eh, I don’t know, seems complicated.

Palmer Luckey was forced out of Meta for giving like eight grand to a conservative PAC, today he’s the darling of everyone with a family office.

Linux was built by a Linus that would call people “fucking brain damaged” on LKML, he’s mellowed but he built one of the longest-running and most successful engineering artifacts in all of human affairs acting in the “locally toxic, globally enlightened” mode.

The thing is that bad behavior at scale, bad behavior with real, lasting, irreversible consequences is almost never called toxic. This is the globally toxic behavior of those with power.

Transient words are routinely called toxic. This is the locally toxic, globally enlightened behavior of those with little.

This doesn’t seem like a word we use in a way that is either practically useful or morally sound.

Lazy employees are most times unmotivated for what ever reasons. Either it’s the work they do to just very hard to motivate such people. Slow employees maybe too risk adverse so they go slowly, or they don’t know to seek out better ways to do things.

Talking about a "toxic person" is starting on an ontological track that is deprived of any possible way to make everyone satisfied. Instead it’s possible to think about toxic behavior. Now, maybe a behavior is so deeply enshrined in a person that abrogating it is out of reach for the social organization that is considering this person behavior as a source of nuisance. But this is not necessarily the case and maybe there are option to help the person change and become part of a more harmonious social structure.

Using a "isolate poor performers" and "excellent beings" has well known backfire consequences that history largely document.

> Toxic employees hurt the team or organization whether low performing or high performing, and with rare exceptions it’s almost always worth getting rid of them. Toxic employees are the people getting into arguments and conflicts all the time, dragging others down constantly.

Often such people have good arguments, they are just vocal about them and not the "docile" kind of people. For example the great engineer who is willing to fight to keep the code well-architected and clean.

Of course managers hate this kind of "non-docile" employee, and thus invent terms like "toxic" to be capable of bullying (and perhaps having a "socially accepted" reason for firing) them.

> I'll add a perverse incentive too that I've talked about elsewhere – hiring is a goddamn mess right now.

Not to take away from any of your points...

But this statement has been made every year for as long as I've been in the industry (about twenty years). I suspect it's been made much before that too.

I guess it's messy but it's not worth the cost to fix, in that case.

There isn’t a way to fix it, a new hire is always an unknown factor by definition. And if you aren’t FAANG, people usually aren’t lining up at your door to work for you, so you have to make do with what you get.

Pair that with the fact that the new hire won’t reach full productivity until at least 6 months in, it’s always going to be messy.

>a new hire is always an unknown factor by definition.

sure, that's why the entire hiring factor is an industry comprised of HR, recruiters, and hiring managers. you're supposed to minimize the odds of a bad hire. Similar to any other business that is an unknown factor until you do research.

Life's all about dealing with known and unknown unknowns.

>And if you aren’t FAANG, people usually aren’t lining up at your door to work for you, so you have to make do with what you get.

Not in this current economy. That's part of the frustration with the current market. Everyone is lining up, few are getting hired, but hey it's okay unemployment is low and the economy is great!

>Pair that with the fact that the new hire won’t reach full productivity until at least 6 months in

well that's also mitigatable. Make your process public and let candidates study to your tools and process. But that will never happen because it's more important to hide your process from competitors than get qualified candidates to ramp up quicker.

> But for now, I definitely need my low performers.

Firing people if you can't get backfill is illogical, obviously. Once a company institutes a hiring freeze, low performers get locked in until forced layoffs. You'll see some people stop working and start job searching because they know that any contribution they make at all is better for their manager than having them fired.

However, deliberately keeping low performers around as a buffer becomes a self-own on a longer time horizon. Smart managers will negotiate hiring exceptions to replace a low performer now rather than keep that headcount occupied for safety. Yes, it's frustrating to have to lay off a good performer, but it's more frustrating for everyone to have a poor performer dragging the team down for some invisible game of chess that goes on for potentially years without resolution.

> However, deliberately keeping low performers around as a buffer becomes a self-own on a longer time horizon. Smart managers will negotiate hiring exceptions to replace a low performer now rather than keep that headcount occupied for safety.

This is a "the times are good" play, and it can absolutely work. But the real trick is understanding

> Once a company institutes a hiring freeze

that if you as a manager are reacting here, the die is already cast. There are plenty of unofficial "we're frozen but aren't saying it out loud" moves I & peers in other companies are seeing right now: downleveling, additional approval gates added to slow things down to a more favorable time, you name it.

Yes, over a long enough time horizon ballast will weigh down the boat, but theta is on my side right now.

The evil path for a director is to acquire a nonessential group and make it the land of misfit toys.

Bank them away from everyone else, and nuke them from orbit when necessary.

Just as a curiosity, are those 2-3 people "underperformers" or simply "Not as high performers"? In an org that size I can imagine everyone pulls their weight, but there will simply be others who are inevitably more productive for a variety of reasons.

>hiring is a goddamn mess right now.

Any insight you can give on why? I know enough from the hirees end, but how's it on the other side?

The vast majority of underperformers I've managed are people who are less motivated to perform, less technically skilled, not aligned to the team, have different values, etc. Almost always the answer is to keep them around and try to squeeze what value you can get. One engineer I have really values on-call firefighting which is great, except my entire org is aligned around avoiding that. I'm getting value out of him by letting him do the firefighting he likes, but ensuring he drives the postmortem process so we can avoid fires in the future.

At the end of the day, all I care about is getting an acceptable level of output compared to pay from an employee who knows the business and isn't particularly fussy. So I'll try to find the path to get low performers upskilled, find what interests them, or find another role in the company that fits & do some horse trading. Or I'll let them coast and replace them when it's easier for me to hire.

>> hiring is a goddamn mess right now.

> Any insight you can give on why? I know enough from the hirees end, but how's it on the other side?

Someone smarter than me might know the true answer. I've heard three compelling arguments:

* tons of companies were irrationally exuberant and overhired, cut roles, and now we're seeing the impact of those workers looking for new work

* increasing shareholder greed means running a threadbare team and driving the company into the ground is better than staffing appropriately if it means next quarter looks good

* most companies are big dumb herd animals and hey, if the big guys are downsizing, so should we

But even though the market is saturated, profitability is now king, so if I'm going to hire someone I need to have a compelling answer to finance saying "how does this new role guarantee us ROI?"

All I really know and can see is the knock-on effect: I posted the same role in 2022 and last month. In 2022, I had to recruit like crazy, to the point that I had external vendors placing below-average employees at above-average salaries. Last month I had the pleasure of sifting through 700 applications, and plenty were "pass: overqualified, won't stick around".

So it seems there are tons of people out there competing for fewer roles.

FYI: I assume RIF means "reduction in force" (involuntary layoffs).

From the view of senior management (and yours), would these layoffs adversely harm your business model or profitability? If the answer is no, then layoffs are probably the economically correct decision. (Of course, there are many other factors to consider.)