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Comment by setr | Hacker News Reader

That's only true if the population is static: if you fully replenish, and then discard the bottom 10%, on repeat, then your overall quality should be going up.

If you only make new bad hires, the 90% good population will stay the same, and the newly hired 10% will be fired.

If you make n good hires, such that that they're better than some peer in the previous 90% population, then the worst n peers will be shifted into the 10% firing population, and replaced with the better new hires in good 90% pop.

So, assuming your metric is solid, and replenishment occurs, the strategy should be successful.

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I think it's a mistake to view individuals as having some objective constant measure of "quality".

A "bottom 10%" employee can thrive in the right environment. A formerly-star employee might completely tank when placed in the wrong environment.

Your statement would also only be true if people could genuinely identify low performers every single time without causing collateral damage, you are able to always ensure you hire people that are good and the company culture does not devolve into a empire building system and managers are not power hungry people looking out only for themselves. And this happens, it happened at many silicon valley companies (including one I worked for that is well known). Stack ranking does not work. It creates a culture that ends up embodying all of what I said above.

>if people could genuinely identify low performers every single time without causing collateral damage,

I'm not sure about collateral damage, but that's what I meant by a solid metric.

If the metric isn't worth shit, then you're probably not doing much better than random selection, and perhaps worse, selecting on a trait you didn't mean to, or didn't want. e.g. power-hungry.

But if you believe in the metric, the strategy is sensible (and its probably safe to assume such managers do indeed believe in their metric).

Probably the bigger problem is there's no strategy in place to test the metric

Apply this to a sport team where you usually have solid metrics and replenishment occurs. A contrived comparison at a smaller scale, but I don't see this strategy working. The assumption that you get better hires is where I think it falls over. In practice you would get similar hires and It would just cause more disruption in the team. ie you would lose chemistry for little or no gain in skills.

The problem is that they take an org wide "cut 10%" and pass it down to every team and say "cut 10%". That mean any team that is a well oiled machine is going to loose some pretty important gears.

Mean while team B which is full of fuckups will just lose their least popular fuckup.

Also assumes less than 10% voluntary high-quality leavers, which is a big weakness of the strategy. (Because it is likely true for almost all firms who cannot afford Netflix-level compensation.)

Assuming you only lose employees to firing.

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