Comment by strict9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by strict9 | Hacker News Reader

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>Many employees say they see the keeper test as a guise for ordinary workplace politics while some managers say they feel pressure to fire people or risk looking soft.

I worked for a place like this. Regular firings, sometimes every month. The CEO (who also self-funded the company) believed that regularly letting people go was a way of eliminating bad apples and forcing people to work harder and smarter. Similar to Netflix philosopy, but on a smaller scale.

Firings happened for all the reasons you'd think--politics, cliques, not being a "cultural fit." "Not being a team player" was often code for not trying hard enough to make your lead look good.

It was toxic and led to massive tech debt accumulation, as a succession of engineering managers all made new and different decisions on frameworks and technologies as soon as they were hired. Very little institutional knowledge.

Implicit quotas for regularly letting people go is just an insane way to run a business.

(edit: clarity)

> The CEO ... believed that regularly letting people go was a way of eliminating bad apples and forcing people to work harder and smarter.

Microsoft called it Stack Ranking.

Also known as "Management by Bestseller".

Some CEO of a successful company writes a book claiming his management wisdom led to his company success and then a bunch of CEOs read the book and try to replicate the same success because they don't have any original ideas themselves. In this instance the CEO was GE's Jack Welch and his policy was 'rank and yank'

Similarly, some CEO will write that you must have a mission statement and distill your management philosophy into 3 or 4 words preferably starting with the same alphabet. Next thing every CEO has their own tag lines: 'Agility, Accountabilty, Ambition' or 'Passion, Persistance, Performance' or <insert words from thesarus>. My previous company CEO spent thousands of dollars on polished metal tangram squares with her three words embossed on them given to every-single-employee at the company.

Ah yes, the "Conjoined Triangles of Success" from Silicon Valley is a parody of this.

Action, Urgency, Excellence, Dick Brown of EDS. Every employee got a book full of power point slides.

Sounds like those squares were conjoined triangles.

Presumably it wasn't structured like MS's stack ranking, it was arbitrary. It's a weird feeling to come in regularly and be uncertain if you'd still be employed by the end of week, but not for anything you specifically did.

Now that I think about it, it was a bizarrely nepotistic environment. An engineering manager would hire their friends, many speculated as at least partial insurance against being fired. But once that manager was gone, job security for those people was also gone.

Weird how people put up with madness like that when your field is in high demand.

> when your field is in high demand

Well, when everywhere is pretty much the same...

You mean cronyistic, not nepotistic.

Stack ranking goes back to the 80s at GE under Jack Welch.

Its obviously done Microsoft so much good /s

Rank and Yank

> "Not being a team player" was often code for not trying hard enough to make your lead look good.

Replace often with always. That's coded language that exactly means this. It's really hard to avoid this though.

> massive tech debt accumulation

Do you know any company that doesn't have that? Honestly I've never seen it. I've worked in a 10 people company, I founded a company with a co-student, I worked in a 50 people company, I currently work in a 95,000 people company and there's always huge loads of technical debt. Also I now often work with Google APIs/tools/frameworks as well as AWS. Also loads of technical debt, right there.

> Implicit quotas for regularly letting people go is just an insane way to run a business.

That's for sure. It's great for getting investors though.

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