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Comment by xkjkls | Hacker News Reader

First of all, no one on Wall Street wears Prada suits. Prada suits are high fashion trash. They wear Zegna or Canali or bespoke.

And second, what about this story reads you as sociopathic? Sure, there's alot of shuffling in this business, but how much worse is that than any other? Restaurants and bars close down all the time, and no one accuses restaurant and bar managers of being sociopaths.

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In a restaurant and bar though the employees are viewed as humans, they actually know the person deciding their fate and the reason for that decision. In his story there was always an invisible hand guiding decisions that could completely devastate or make his life.

I mean, the largest percentage of restaurant and bar layoffs are just due to the restaurant and bar closing. In that case, the invisible hand of the free market can be even more cruel than these.

Especially since you won't get severance.

Anecdotally I've heard my friends who work in small business food and alcohol places as servers, cooks, bartenders, etc. call their bosses and business owners sociopaths more than once in unrelated conversations.

I mean, that's always going to be a standard capital v. labor argument. What I'm saying is that industries like tech shouldn't be singled out for run-of-the-mill decisions.

They are, and they should be. Which industry gave us stack ranking?

Depending on how broad your definition of stack ranking is, every industry does stack ranking.

Every single successful business has the problem of "we have this large amount of money in bonuses that we would like to distribute out to our employees and we want to figure out equitable way to do it". Invariably they end up having the rank and group the employees to do that.

“The behavior this engenders, people do everything they can to stay out of the bottom bucket,” one Microsoft engineer said. “People responsible for features will openly sabotage other people’s efforts. One of the most valuable things I learned was to give the appearance of being courteous while withholding just enough information from colleagues to ensure they didn’t get ahead of me on the rankings.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-l...

How’s that different than Jack Welch’s famous “fire the bottom 10% of your workforce” that he implemented in GE in the 80s? Honestly, it was close to textbook management strategy when originally implemented at Microsoft.

Now, sure management science has advanced since then, and a lot of the ways that Microsoft implemented stack ranking at the beginning we’ve realized are counterproductive.

But that doesn’t really change the core principle that they end up ranking employees at some point in time

I've already been refuted by the fact that GE did it first.

The shocker to me is that such a huge player in our industry applied it to a collaborative task like software development.

I don't know the specific case of GE, but could imagine that, as it was a novel strategy at the time, workers weren't already in a competitive ranking-focused mindset.

Additionally firing the bottom 10% is something that should happen naturally as you discover hiring mistakes. Of course just firing the bottom 10% when they are close to average performers is counter productive.

The most famous example is GE which is a huge conglomerate that spans many industries.

Not tech. Jack Welch at GE gave it to us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve

1.) I hardly think the brand of suit detracts from my point.

2.) Go read the comments on the article itself. It’s littered with antecdotes about training your own replacement, being fired before a stock vest, etc.

3.) I would argue that bars and restaurants are a different story all together. The article mentions being a contractor in charge of six-figure decisions which to me reads as a could treat people appropriately chooses not to.

> 1.) I hardly think the brand of suit detracts from my point.

Not saying it does; I'm just saying you should learn some more about suits.

> 2.) Go read the comments on the article itself. It’s littered with antecdotes about training your own replacement, being fired before a stock vest, etc.

I did. The major anecdotes are:

* layed off from a job with one month severance, three months healthcare, because the company realized it needed a different direction

* multiple difficulties with interviewing and attempting to find a new job

* another layoff when a company is acquired and his position is eliminated, where even the author says he considered his severence "more than fair"

* one experience as a contractor where his contract was cancelled with no severence

Sure, it's crappy to have all of those events happen to you, but other than the one contracting gig, I'd consider those layoffs extremely empathic and generous.

I’m interested where you are going with this. I made what I thought was a pretty innocuous comment about actions mattering more than appearance. Are you making the point that tech in general is not building in some sociopathic behaviors as an industry?

I think that backlash against tech has reached such a fever pitch at this point that a huge number of criticisms of it are overblown.

Does tech have problems? Sure. But in order for the criticism of it to be effective, we shouldn’t mix it in with general compliants about our current economic system.

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