What I have seen in the past was engineers that were performing completely fine being put on PIP-equivalents because there must be a few being PIPped on every department, based off on some bullshit percentage.
In reality, low perforers should be culled, no need to enforce percentages department-wide. That would require managers doing their job properly of course.
This smells like the Welchian nonsense that drove GE into the ground.
if you only messed up 5% of your hires you'd be a goddamn genius and every company in the world would want to put you in charge of their hiring process
the "standard" is more like 20% of hires end up being bad hires
Maybe we should stop with the gut feel managerial apologies and think about what we’re doing and how it affects company morale, no?
Maybe you can devise a methodology that reduces bad hiring to below 5% across the entire S&P 500 and then share it with us?
Think of a hypothetical organization with 10,000 software engineers. You're the head of engineering. You have ten divisions, each with a VP managing 1000 engineers. Each VP has ten directors, each managing 100 engineers, and each line manager has 10 engineers on the team.
The engineering team reviews the past year. You notice, overall we fired 500 people last year. Okay, so on average that was 5% of staff. Seems reasonable just as a sanity check. (You ask your buddies at other large tech companies, and the other heads of engineering are reporting similar numbers.)
Now you look through the individual teams. A lot of 10-person teams don't fire anyone. That makes sense. But would you expect a director to fire nobody from their org? From 100 people... well, maybe. I'd be a little suspicious. I'd ask some other directors, does this person have a reputation of a very high quality team, or is it more likely that this director is lax, and their org doesn't manage out its underperformers?
Now imagine a VP fired nobody. 1000 people and they all were high performers. Yeah, that doesn't seem right. That VP is probably letting their team get away with low standards. If you were the head of engineering meeting with your VPs, I think the group would be able to come to a consensus of, there's a problem here. It's based on the 5% target but it's not a hard and fast rule.
In the long run, having a high-performing team is better for morale than firing nobody. It's the difference between working at Meta and working at the DMV.
You could end up performing way better firing half of your teams. And what about your managers? How is an underperforming manager in the higher positions ever fired?
I get that measuring performance is incredibly difficult, but dressing it up as if 5-10% of people are underperformers anyway is just so tantamount to how baseless and incompetent most businesses are run these days. Especially in software.
and no i didn't make up 20%, Gartner did a study on it. and most people with management/hiring experience report the same.
"Ratings, although an important way to measure performance during a specific period, are not predictive of future performance and should not be used to gauge readiness for a future role or qualify an internal candidate for a different team. (They can, however, be used to evaluate whether an employee is properly or improperly slotted on their current team; therefore, they can provide an opportunity to evaluate how to better support an internal candidate moving forward.)"
[0] https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch04.html#challeng...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-faceboo...
^But let's say you messed up hiring 20% of your company, and then you corrected that (layoffs for the past 2 years). You haven't hired enough people to justify perma-cutting 5%. And the number of functioning employees who stop working in a role isn't going to be as high as 5%.
The reality is that most hires are probably fine in the role they're in. And you don't actually need to be this aggressive in cost-cutting.
You shouldn't think of all firing as a "mistaken hire". Sometimes you hire someone, and they work effectively for years, and then they kind of "check out" and don't do much work any more. It can be a good decision to hire someone, and then later a good decision to fire them.
It's also not a cost-cutting measure per se. Typically when you fire someone you get to replace the headcount with another hire or internal transfer. The point of firing people is to get rid of low performers and replace them with high performers.
If a construction site was sending formerly qualified people away no longer able to work we would definitely investigate their practices. Tech deserves the same scrutiny.
corporations exist to make money, or maximize shareholder returns, depending on how you look at it. corporations don't exist to make people happy or solve the fundamental societal issues with capitalism. there's merit to discussing that as a separate topic, but in the context of "capitalism exists and you are operating a business within it", you want to fire low performers and replace them with high performers
A band of criminals has no protection over their enterprise. They all go to jail.
And why we have these conversations: to build consensus over these rules.
But it feels like your take is: "Guess all there is to do is just sit and feel righteous indignation while companies have their way with us, and the world crumbles around us."
Businesses are people but business is cogs. (In both senses of the word)
To be a manager in a large org, you need to constantly be refocusing the team on the goal. Drift happens. When you have 100 brains, you get 100 ideas.
This "rule of thumb" reason is to make sure leaders are not languishing. It's very easy to see the people, and lose sight of the business goal.
Are all 100 people aligned and driving towards the goal? (If so, amazing and you should fight to keep all of them.)
Note that they also routinely fire perfectly capable people, who exceeded expectations for many years in a row and just had one bad year (sometimes after a team change or a promotion).
A person, individually, indeed must always be judged by themselves objectively. But people, in aggregate, can generally be understood stochastically. And in any group of people there will always be the obvious slackers who everyone knows aren't pulling their weight. Good management clears these people out rather than allowing them to fester and lower morale. It doesn't matter if it's high paid SWEs or minimum wage workers, the dynamic is the same.
At the last place I worked I was managing people and we were given a set of "standards" to rate employees on, used to determine raises, promotions, and so on. I tried my best fairly evaluate my reports, but obviously the standards are inherently imprecise and so the evaluations are mostly qualitative. I found that other managers, wanting to do well by their reports, more leniently interpreted the standards and their reports were promoted more and treated better than my own.
So, wanting to do well by my reports, I re-calibrated my own evaluations to be more lenient. The other managers responded in kind. This arms race continued until upper management found it to have essentially broken the whole system. So then we were asked to rank the performance of reports on our team. I liked everyone on my team and wanted the best for all of them, but also had no difficulty putting them in order from most productive to least productive, with maybe the occasional tie here or there.
Anyway, the whole experience kind of highlighted to me some of the issues with "objective" standards and some of the benefits of relative standards.
The idea that some fixed percentage of people always underperform is possibly Jack Welch's most toxic contribution to management, and with all the BS he spewed over the years, that's saying something. It makes people compete against each other Hunger Games-style as opposed to working as a team.
There is also the more philosophical question of where that standard would come from in the first place. And what if the business finds that the average applicant meets a much higher standard than the current firing standard of the company? It would seem to then make sense to raise the company's own firing standard.
Essentially the individual incentives for managers are naturally to avoid making the tough decision, the idea is to put some more pressure to make the right call.
Your value of X% will vary but you hope it’s tuned by some research within the org.
Could this lead to a manager that tries to have the best team for himself will always include average employees that they can easily fire?
Interview process at Meta isn't that hard. Mostly medium leetcode questions (in front of single interviewer), not particularly tricky. With enough preparation, it's doable by any reasonably good undergrad. Google was slightly harder though. Similarly, system design can be prepared.
The hardest part is to get the interview in the first place. But if you do, it's just a matter of preparation. You want to be able to nail these questions.
Also, the follow ups are designed to eventually lock the candidate, since is not enough to pass the low bar, they want to know what your high bar is too.
That's quite the qualifier. I could not regularly pass these interviews when I had done 200+ LC problems. It's only when I got to 1000+ LC problems and had done hundreds of technical interviews that I was able to regularly pass a lot of these interviews. Even now, it still requires me to prepare a lot because how often am I really thinking about suffix tries? It's an arms race. It has happened in universities as well. An arms race between the professors trying to make sure a lot of students still fail their classes while every student needs a 4.0 to get an internship/job now.
It will get higher and higher as time goes on because we're mostly focused on H1B candidates who come from a similarly culture of grinding for exams. You can see this lifestyle is very normalized on the LC, 1point3acres, etc. Cheating is also seen as completely fine too. At this point, I feel like it's almost unfair to not be cheating due to how many people are. Your competition doesn't care about some sense of ethics (nor does the hiring manager - they cheated to get in too!).
I've met with multiple folks at FAANG and such where these practices of grinding + a little "magic" get you in. You talk to someone and they'll say, "oh yeah, I have like three guys I went to high school with in [country] in my house. Once one of us got accepted, it was easy for the rest of us."
It's setting a bar that when evaluated on a curve a certain percentage of your employees wind up being below that bar. You derive the ratio from how aggressive you expect your bar to be.
But no one is saying you need to fire people. They're saying they expect a certain amount of lower performers and if they don't see it, they want to know reason. But it also only manifests at much higher populations than an individual team. Totally possible a small enough team has everyone >= meeting expectations.
My assumption based on some interview experience articles[1][2] is that there's an internal arms race between the recruiting and engineering at Meta where candidates are not forwarded for the interview process until they feel sufficiently prepared, often giving them months (in any other company, I feel this would be a big red flag), and interviewers expecting the equivalent of Djikstra or Knuth to join their team, regardless of what the team actually does. (I assume not everyone writes distributed system or database implementations from scratch at Meta.)
[1] https://medium.com/@rohitverma_87831/my-interview-experience...
[2] https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/5132569/Me...
If the company is growing 10% a year and firing 5% a year you're still growing significantly.
So I think it's pretty important to look at the rate of hiring, not just the rate of firing.
Wouldn’t be every coworker a competitor? How do you plan your life or start a family if you are every year 10% likely of being fired or backstabbed?
On the other hand, do you really want to be stuck working with someone who's not very competent? I think we've all had that experience and it's miserable.
We assume there would probably be PIP for those individuals in this hypothetical scenario. However even then, saying "10 percent of our workforce will guaranteed be subject to PIP and or firing as a matter of our staffing methodology" instantly turns much of your working time into fluffing your work and backstabbing colleagues.
OR running away at great speed.
OR telling investorts "We do not grow, we abritrarilly trim regardless of market forces."
AKA, GE.
I’ve rarely seen anyone let go and thought the person was a low performer. Most of the time the person was fired because they questioned authority.
oh you sweet summer child. No, in many cases they absolutely do not.
Sounds like a good way to turn a functioning team into Survivor Island.
Speaking as someone who works at Meta, I certainly don't plan my life as if I'll always be employed by Meta, always earning this high of a wage. The ride could end at any minute, and I plan accordingly.
10% is an overestimate, of being fired or backstabbed in any given year, fwiw. The people getting laid off in any given cycle tend to be heavily skewed towards newcomers in my experience.
If 5% is every coworker is a competitor, unions are your coworker doesn't even have to deliver any value at all yet is treated the same as you.
Before, Zuckerberg rhetorically accepted responsibility for lay-offs, but now he's making clear that the people he's firing are entirely to blame. He's deliberately talking up the firings, bringing them closer, making them feel more personal and making it a bit harder for the people fired to get replacement jobs, all for the purpose of cratering his own employees' morale.
He's making Facebook a pro-MAGA company and has decided that the way to make the workers get with the program is to intimidate them.
I think the difference is that they'll get rid of the PIP and fire people straight away.
So if you aren’t getting a promotion, you are eventually getting fired. This meat grinder probably has some perverse incentives for employees and makes sure you are always churning through folk who you don’t need to pay QoL raises to
https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/mark-zuckerberg-layoff-mes...
And if that wasn't enough: https://www.itpro.com/business/business-strategy/mark-zucker...
Besides, all those Associate Directors of Nonengineering Engineers of Developer Conference Swag Acquisition need to eat too.
Lower than 5% at scale would be a red flag, not necessarily wrong, you don't want to "stack rank" with a quota and force managers to fire people who shouldn't want to be fired, but if you have 100 engineers in a department and only one of them gets fired in a year, probably the director is making a mistake.
So, I'm sure this won't be the only firing for the year at Meta. But this doesn't really seem like it's very far away from normal practices.