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Comment by logicalmind | Hacker News Reader

One thing I'd like to know about is how google deals with declines in productivity. Undoubtedly, their hiring process gets them highly qualified individuals, at least initially. But over time, there has to be people who become lazy and take advantage of their good graces. And it would be expected that as people age they start a family and their work priorities may take a back seat.

Is there some kind of process, ala Jack Welch, where people are ranked and the bottom 10% are removed? How does google deal with under-performers?

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It's the same as pretty much any big company - underperformers are notified that they're underperforming, put on a performance improvement plan to help improve their performance, and if they still don't improve, they're fired.

There're no quotas for removing people (good riddance, the "fire the bottom 10%" school of management always struck me as the best way to create a poisonous, stressful company culture). But it's usually blatantly obvious who the underperformers are...they're the folks who haven't accomplished anything over the last 6 months...

Google has it easy in this respect. At many other companies it can be hard to know if people are slacking off or just not that smart.

To be honest, what difference does it make? It may sound cruel, but why not just fire someone if they are not performing (given adequate time to improve, etc...).

Please treat this as a genuine question - as someone who has only started working a few years ago and never had a management position, I feel my view is correct but am open to learning if/why I'm wrong.

You are correct. It doesn't matter, if someone is getting nothing done you can fire them unless their performance is due to a medical issue. I was referring to the people who get very little done.

Other companies would love to hire only Google caliber employees but there isn't enough people to hire. So you end up with a company that may have a few superstars and a lot of average programmers. If a superstar slacked off they would have the same productivity as the average coders. It is hard for a manager to complain to that superstar when his productivity is just as good as many of his peers. At Google the slacker would stand out because his peers are all superstars and get A LOT done.

> It's the same as pretty much any big company - underperformers are notified that they're underperforming, put on a performance improvement plan to help improve their performance, and if they still don't improve, they're fired.

On the teams I was on, this was true in theory but not in practice. There were a few weak performers. If they were mediocre, they slipped by unnoticed; if they were really bad, they would get a ton of performance improvement meetings, second chances, etc, and firing was put off for as long as possible. Not sure if this was due to legal fears or what, but it was my anecdotal experience over 3 years.

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