Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdiupIGPWEfh | Hacker News Reader

You can always stack rank your employees and select some people at the bottom, regardless of how amazingly awesome your entire talent pool may be. Those at the bottom are not made awful at their job due to your having ranked them there. No need to label and insult them on their way out when you have to tighten your company's belt.

View on HN

You will always have a worst employee, but that's not what "dead weight" means. To be dead weight at a company with good talent, you have to be multiple categories below almost everyone.

>No need to label and insult them on their way out

You never need to say when someone didn't do their job, but it's not a terrible thing to do so either. Don't go out of your way to be insulting, but if the basic facts of the situation are insulting, then so be it.

>when you have to tighten your company's belt.

They stated very clearly that it was not about belt-tightening at all. Do you think they're lying?

Only disagreeing that that "dead weight" even needed to be brought up.

> Do you think they're lying?

No, no, I implicitly trust all communications from corporate authority figures, of course.

> Only disagreeing that that "dead weight" even needed to be brought up.

I think it's relevant in a discussion of why a firing occurred. (And that overall discussion has a lot of upvote weight.)

> No, no, I implicitly trust all communications from corporate authority figures, of course.

That's a total deflection. Lack of trust does not let you figure out if any particular statement is true or not. Even dumber than blind trust is to assume everything a corporation ever says is a lie.

So is it your evaluation of the situation that this particular statement is a lie?

Lack of trust should mean the burden of proof is on the untrusted. Waiting to fire (not lay off) bad employees en mass at least smells funny, you have people who weren't fired saying it hurt morale, and possible ulterior motives. But no, no hard evidence, only justified lack of trust.

I never said that statement was a lie (your word not mine); I have no reason to take their claims at face value either.

So by all means, let's continue talking about how much those loser dead weights who got fired must have sucked.

You seem actively hostile to the idea of there being bad employees, and I'm not sure why. Such an idea is completely independent of whether corporations are involved at all.

But corporations are usually very reticent to say negative things about people, so for them to specifically call these people out as bad employees at least makes it plausibly true.

> You seem actively hostile to the idea of there being bad employees, and I'm not sure why.

Why do you say that? Of course there are (were?) bad employees. If they did indeed fire the worst performers, some of them were quite likely bad employees.

> But corporations are usually very reticent to say negative things about people, so for them to specifically call these people out as bad employees at least makes it plausibly true.

Also plausible that it's misdirection or that they're assholes. =)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com