It's not like the firing is random. "Low performers" get a lot of warnings throughout the year. Most people are average or above so they will be completely unaffected, it's not likely you would drop from 50th percentile to 5th.

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.

I love how so many on HN have embraced “low performers” as an unbending metric that isn’t gamed by management to fire people without paying severance. I’ve seen this happen.

It's not the perception of "randomness" that is a problem, it's the arbitrary figure attributed to getting fired with no comment on methodology or the attributes that will get you fired.

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.

This is quite disingenuous. “Low performers” in many of these companies aren’t low performers. It’s often whoever the boss likes the least due to whatever reason.

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.

I haven't worked in FAANG, but have seen and personally fired people before. All were justified, and in times where I had to do the firing I was always late. And I knew I was late because the team would say, 'about time'.

""Low performers" get a lot of warnings throughout the year. "

oh you sweet summer child. No, in many cases they absolutely do not.

Indeed. If you're on a team where the bottom 5% are always getting culled, eventually you're going to find yourself in the bottom 5%. That's just math.

Sounds like a good way to turn a functioning team into Survivor Island.

I am very much opposed to unions,I think in general , with time unions workers are just trading one oppressing power structure where they have not much control for another. However, i think with the way things go, it's inevitable that IT/Knowledge worker with start unionizing. The same things happens for starbucks the coffee : As the company grew, the margin improvement came at the expense of the employee working conditions until unions start forming

Every coworker (and each person outside your company with similar skills) is a competitor in a global marketplace for various skills. It's just not very useful or helpful to think about it only in that way. Day to day it's much more helpful to think of my coworkers as fellow travelers, wrenching on the same big distributed machine in the cloud, generally just trying to get shit done and be useful.

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.

Not that I think firing 5% makes any sense but unions are a far worse evil, had to walk past almost 20 people in a tiny train station pretending to be ticket inspectors when the gate for ticket checks is automated and within view of them all so it's a completely fake job but they can't fire them so they have them do this "job" till they retire on a excellent pension which to make matters worse along with their salary are negotiated via the threat of striking crippling the capitals transport network.

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.