4. Keep it secret or the workforce will adapt by hiring bad people and sabotaging good people
Used at most companies with performance evaluations. Taught at MBA schools.
Trivia: MBAs have accomplished nothing throughout human history. Only creating overpaid executives that avoid taxes, corrupt the government, ruin the environment, make people poor, sick and make other countries richer. If all MBAs retired tomorrow 90% of obesity, pollution and corruption would stop.
The company that first applied that strategy, GE, ran themselves into all sorts of problems with that approach. Microsoft’s era of doing fairly poorly was also at a timeframe when they were doing rank and cut strongly.
Yep, and these rankings are less about performance and more about politics. You actually have a very high chance of getting an organization made out of talkers and not-doers.
That's putting it mildly, re GE. When both Fortune and WSJ ("hardly bastions of anti-corporate sentiment", with apologies to _The Insider_) are criticizing your approach and leadership style, then you have an issue.
Not to mention Jack Welch's very "Let Them Eat Cake" attitude to the middle and working classes and executive compensation.
[at a FAANG] Just the other day my director chastised his directs for "letting low performers leave without getting fired," which is something I had yet to hear get broadcasted to a full room of people. The company's leaders would rather get credit for a URA target than do what's best for the company (in this case, not paying out severance). Tech is so polluted with this kind of thinking that I really can't wait to leave it.
After surviving what feels like a dozen rounds of layoffs over the past year, morale is already non-existent. You can go weeks and sometimes months without even hearing a peep from the people you once thought were the brightest and hardest working. The whole thing just feels in need of a reboot. Is this consistent across all companies at the moment or is it just time for me to leave?
This isn't an eval. It's typically "you need X poor performers, Y average performers, and Z top performers. Can't fit your folks into these buckets? Too bad!"
Performance evaluations are not evaluating your performance, the evaluations are the performance. “Performance” evaluations. They’re intended to be a method to easily fire people in a litigious world.
You are talking about stack ranking. While yes, it does happen, the outcome of it isn't dictated in a single "x% people are now fired" event. There are multiple rounds of performance reviews, employees at the bottom are identified, they go through PIPs or some other similar process, and it may eventually lead to their firing or resignation. What we are seeing right now isn't that.
> There are multiple rounds of performance reviews, employees at the bottom are identified, they go through PIPs
I think this is a little hand-wavy. I bet the number of people identified for PIPs by stack ranking who survive the process is likely to be in the low single digit percentage, if that.
I get a "ripping the bandaid off" sense of it. Like for a lot of them the assumption is "okay, this is the rest of it, and then we are reset to the new normal". No idea whether that assumption is correct, but it seems the mentality is more that than "oh crap, batten down the hatches, another storm is coming".
> Like for a lot of them the assumption is "okay, this is the rest of it, and then we are reset to the new normal".
Not to say this is universal, but I read a comment here on HN just earlier that said their company said this last year... then did the exact same thing this year.
Lots of social and casual-entertainment companies hired a ton for the pandemic "nobody goes outside" surge too. Some of this (and the last year or two) is simply shedding unsustainable increases as everyone gets a better idea of what changes have actually occurred and will stick around.
Whether that's a 5% increase or a 500% increase in amount-laid-off though, no idea. And I do worry that the increased media attention will simply make these easier to pull off unjustly, as people get more and more used to seeing it happen.
Really need the government to start heavily penalizing companies who lay people off. Layoffs can't be a tool for a company to get ahead financially. We're ruining lives and triggering suicides with these layoffs.
I don't think its the role of the government to penalize layoffs. If a company needs to do a layoff to remain viable it must be allowed to - the downside (everyone loses their job) is worse. And trying to apply some mechanism where the government decides if its ok or not seems too intractable.
I think the approach of things like the WARN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...) act are more plausible. Use legislation to make the workforce more informed, resilient and ahead-of layoffs. You don't want mass layoffs crippling your economy because people are unable to plan.
It's a direct consequence of the WARN act that most tech layoffs have extremely generous severance.
So should companies be prohibited from doing stock buybacks or paying dividends for some period of time if they do a layoff. Or should they be required to rehire laid off workers before doing any new hiring? When it’s truly about maintaining company viability, I have some sympathy for the corporate position. But companies reporting increasing or record profits AND doing layoffs smells of financial engineering and socializing costs while privatizing profits.
Isn’t it net good that tech companies regularly overhire? I’d be afraid that too much regulation would end up making companies hesitant to hire in the first place. And why are we asking companies to act as charities here. That’s so against their nature. Tax them instead and have government improve the safety net.
Why not just tax stock buybacks the same or higher than regular profits? This would force companies to either increase R&D/CAPEX spending or lower prices.
Or, instead of the government dictating those kinds of company decisions, put in place a system so that you're ok if you do get laid off, like a real health care system that is not linked to your place of employment.
>put in place a system so that you're ok if you do get laid off
the being laid off part itself takes a huge mental toll, regardless of material circumstances. There's a reason the mental health of phd candidates and a good chunk of white collar workers in nominally lucrative professions is in the gutter. The hire and fire hamster wheel is in itself completely pathological. The industry just has done a really fantastic job of marketing permanent insecurity and precarity as individual choice.
Yeah, you have a point... it's trickier to figure out a good way to create stability without also creating genuinely harmful rigidity too, though. I lived in Italy for a long while and you do see a lot of negative effects. People stay in jobs they hate because they have landed a permanent position. Companies reticent to hire because they're stuck with you.
I agree that a lot of US companies have behaved very poorly and casually with people's lives.
I guess I just see stuff like health care as easy wins. The rest of it is trickier.
The question we really need to ask is – why are people driven to bankruptcy and suicide because of their employment situation? Why can't everyone have a cushion so they aren't reliant on their next paycheck to have food and shelter? Why can't everyone have healthcare? Why can't we have reasonable vacations, sabbaticals, maternity/paternity leaves? These are the issues government should be solving. And when they do, companies should happily lay off as many people as they want as frequently as they want.
Not everyone is getting laid off from Google. Most people are handed their last paycheck and shown the door.
As for "someone has to pay for it", well we already are. We have the highest per capita healthcare spending in the world, also the highest rate of medical-related bankruptcies in the world and lowest life expectancy in the developed world. We are putting 6-12% of our paycheck into social security and will likely never see a payout when we need it. Different industrial sectors are getting hundreds of billions in subsidies. The military is getting trillions.
The money is there, we just need to have the will to spend it to everyone's benefit. But no, we'd rather set it on fire instead so the wrong people don't accidentally get helped.
It’s not exactly related to the parent, but in many parts of Europe, yeah, you can’t just fire someone after the probation period, and the firing needs to be for cause (which is genuinely a high bar to cross).
To the point of the parent, in a lot of Europe it’s not so simple to just lay off some small portion of the company. It needs to be justified and a decent percentage, and employees are often entitled to some compensation (some severance) to offset the layoff.
Yeah, obviously depends from country to country, but for a layoff the company often has to be in some problems. It's difficult to do a layoff when you have record profits.
Of course there are other ways to fire employees but those have their own rules.
Right. My point is that the company can’t just say “we’re not doing well, we need to get rid of a few people” and do a layoff with impunity. They have to lay off a pretty decent amount of people (in some cases like 30%) and they need to pay severance to the laid off employees. In most of Europe it’s basically a tool of last resort besides going bankrupt, unlike in the states where it’s easier and done somewhat regularly.
should extend to H1b, J class visas and others, and for longer than 6 months, maybe 2 years. Give other companies a chance of getting those people, htey just proved they cannot manage them properly.
Blocking the EB GC applications of an employer that had layoffs screws over the employee, not the employer. If anything, the employer gets to have that employee tied to them for that additional time, regardless of the desires of the employee to move on.
I don't think penalizing will work. I think government shouldn't constantly inflate bubbles where companies have way too much investment money so they constantly overhire until the shit hits the fan. It would have been better to slowly more away from the low interest rates over the last decade.
Companies need to stop defining growth in terms of head count and instead in terms of revenue and profit and learn that just because you have access to money doesn't mean you should go on a hiring frenzy.
There's already a known way to combat these sorts of things... they're called unions. Tech jobs will be a lot more stable and bearable when more people understand that, and that we aren't all embarrassed millionaires.
It's shareholder capitalism. On one hand, you get stock options in your comp that might be worth a lot. On the other, you could get booted if it means that the company's earnings per share beats Wall St estimates.
