Expensify's firing strategy

This trope is unadulterated bullshit. The whole article sometimes seems to border on a parody of the worst premises and shallowest-possible way of assembling and managing a (software) team.

There is certainly a feeling, especially when you're a manager or an unhappy team member, that there are 0.1X employees out there - perhaps even a great many. By all means, these people should be made aware of the problem and if necessary fired (heck, I had to do that a few times). But the most self-destructive assumption you can make as a manager is to unilaterally declare yourself an "A players only" team.

The performance of people depends on many factors, including working conditions, personal situation, management style, motivation to work on a certain project. The idea that somewhere there is a pool of global "A players" and you just need to find them is not only unrealistic and ignorant, it actively harms your company by turning it into a locker room popularity pageant. The people who thrive in such an environment of arrogance and self-promotion might be the ones you want (because they project a vacuous aura of success) but they're probably not the ones you actually need.

Furthermore, you don't really need to fill your company with "rockstars", if all you're doing is building another interchangeable ad-driven mobile app. It's perfectly acceptable, probably even preferrable, to have a base group of decently-performing "grunts" who can actually work on your app without feeling depressed after a month. People who aren't exactly highly motivated visionaries but have a stable 9-5 work output are more important than many people seem to think.

1) How does this not degenerate a zero-sum game where the people who can subtly undermine their peers relatives to themselves succeed?

2) Why does expensify need 10X programmers? Here are some questions to help define where a 10X programmer might benefit them

Q: Are they doing something that is pushing the boundaries of computer science? A: No, they make it easier to submit expense reports.

Q: Are they trying to extract the last drop of performance from a computer system - for example games, HPC, HFT? A: No, they make it easier to submit expense reports.

Q: Do they need to create massive systems that can serve a billion people and thus even "simple" programming problems can be difficult due to scale. A: No, they make it easier to submit expense reports.

Q: Are they creating tools such as new languages, libraries, operating systems / environments to massively increase the productivity of computer programmers. A: No, they make it easier to submit expense reports.

Q: Are they trying to tackle hard problems like making secure computing ubiquitous? A: No, they make it easier to submit expense reports.

Q: Do they support other companies and help other companies solve difficult problems by providing expert consultation. A: No, they make it easier to submit expense reports.

Before a company decides it needs 10X programmers, they should answer the Jeff Dean question: "If Jeff Dean came to work at my company, what current project do I have that I would put him on, and would he be bored?"

Too many companies it seems decide they want 10X programmers (without paying 10X salaries) and then use this to justify poor treatment of their current workers.

> did so when they found their peers increasingly unwilling to tolerate to their disruptive attitudes, and thus less fun to work with — misery loves company, and if your peers aren’t as miserable as you, you leave to find others who are.

I worked at a fortune 500 company that measured productivity via a ticketing system. "Write a device driver" was measured the same as "Change 'OK' to 'Accept' on a button." Guess what the 10x'ers did all day and what got assiged to consultants like me?

I worked at another fortune 500 company that measured programmer productivity via a ticketing system, and they focused on issues. I finished my work 6 months early with no bugs or issues, but the outsourced labor continiously generated as many issues as they fixed to the tune of roughly 80% reopen rate.

They told me I they weren't going to extend my contract and I laughed and told the lead -- I finished my work six months early with no bugs, and you are going to let me go and keep the guys to write as many bugs as fixes. They kept me and let six other overseas contractors go.

I could give dozens of other examples how people are smart enough to game the system.

Or some clever lead in to the next script for "Silicon Valley"?

As I read it I was envisaging a background advertisement for working at Expensify with upbeat music, groovy offices, quick cut shots, smiling faces, people enthusing at a whiteboard over some software diagram, snap the camera to screens full of code and concentrating people, and then a big Donald Trump at the end pointing down the barrel of the camera "YOU'RE FIRED!" Then a sad person leaving the office with their head hung low because they were only 8X

The truth about software development is that you absolutely need to fire problem team members ASAP, but this is not something to build into your hiring strategy as a positive. In fact if you need to do that then your hiring strategy is not working in the first place.

This sounds alot like stack ranking which was popular at places like Microsoft and has been shown to be a disaster.

Usually hiring and :-) FIRING! strategies like this have been concocted by non technical or less technical people.

Expensify would be well advised to take down this post and rethink.

And have a guess what link every staff member at Expensify is emailing to each other right now?

Where does exponential come from? The naïve model (which is obviously worse than reality at the extremes, since it would at some point imply that each person is spending > 100% of their time distracting) would seem to be quadratic -- O(n^2) [0] -- not exponential -- O(k^n), which not only is clearly worse than reality for the same reason that the quadratic model is, but doesn't seem to have any coherent basis at all.

This really sounds like "lets throw some mathy-sounding words, made up numbers, and pretty-looking charts out to try to rationalize an approach we decided on based on intuition" rather than explanation of actual coherent, quantitative reasoning.

[0] proportional to the number of dyads (n(n-1))/2

It's like someone read the Netflix HR presentation and took the message a bit too seriously.

> We don’t negotiate during the hiring process. Our first offer is our last and best offer. If it’s basically in the right ballpark, then we encourage you to take it and we’ll adjust it later if we were off. But if we’re so far off that we’re not in the right ballpark, then clearly this isn’t going to work anyway. There’s no need to fight over a few percent: let’s just get started and adjust later.

Apparently they'd like to hire "10x engineers" (lol), but not quite enough to actually talk with them to determine a mutually beneficial compensation scheme. Their offer is the fair one, and a counter-offer is the engineer quibbling over a couple percent. If that's the case, why can't that few percent go the engineer's way? Nice to see that they've resolved the problem in their favor.

If a prospective employer gave me a non-negotiable offer and refused to countenance alternatives, I'd run far, far away from that paternalistic prison, no matter the offer or company.

Sticking with the self inflicted strawman I see it this way; There are constraints on where you can eat (vegans, paleo, vegetarians, low gluten, etc.) When you have good leadership they understand the various constraints that individual team members bring to the problem. So in the "place to eat" question, the leader starts with places that already meet the constraints, and then surface any concerns about the available choices, shares the concerns with the team and solicit rankings, and then tells everyone where they are going to eat that day. If they are consistent, and they rotate through equivalent alternates over time, everyone is ok with the outcome and nobody feels left out.

A 100 people walk into a room and are told to pick a place to eat and it doesn't work because there isn't a shared understanding of resolution. Is my preference stronger than yours? Is my dietary restriction something I can impose on others? on and on. Teams are most productive when they trust their leadership and least productive when they do not.

If you want to have a high performance team, establish trust, listen to concerns, and communicate clearly respect and understanding.

Everybody has heard the common trope: great programmers are 10x more productive than average programmers.

Then everybody heard wrong.

A 2nd edition of Peopleware summarises it; the 10x programmer is not a myth, but it's comparing the best to the worst; NOT best to median. It's also not about programming specifically; it's simply a common distribution in many metrics of performance.

The rule of thumb Peopleware states is that you can rely on the best outperforming the worst by a factor of 10, and you can rely on the best outperforming the median by a factor of 2.5.

This of course indicates that a median developer, middle of the pack, is a 4x developer.

Obviously, this is a statistical rule, and if you've got a tiny sample size or some kind of singular outlier or other such; well, we're all adults and we understand how statistics and distributions work.

Peopleware uses Boehn (1981), Sackman (1968), Augustine (1979) and Lawrence (1981) as its sources.

[ "Peopleware", DeMarco and Lister, 1987, p45 ]

That all said, if anyone's got some more recent source materials (a bit more solid than Mr Expensify's source of some guy telling him in college some time), let's have them.

Addendum: "Performance Improvement Plans" are a papertrail. If you ever get put on one, the trigger has been pulled already. Even if it seems to go well and performance targets are reached and the threat of firing is off the table, your cards are marked and your days numbered. Know that, and start looking for your next job.

Building a 10x Team

At Expensify, we’re betting it is possible, and that it can be accomplished with two main tactics. The first tactic involves identifying superstars * early in their career, and then backing them to the hilt.