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Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see anything technically wrong with that approach. The top performers are usually outsized contributors compared to the bottom tier or even mid level coworkers. It’s better to keep a very high performing team even if it’s more expensive.

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You do sometimes get weird effects from top heavy structures like that though. The classic example is Google hiring “super good people” for them to end up doing pretty low level (but important!) ops work

To take Amazon as an example, you can hire a bunch of high performing engineers but you still need people actually putting stuff into boxes so they get shipped (robots nonwithstanding)

no you’re equating pay to skill and there’s no correlation. there’s incredible pickers and you still want your team staffed with them

You can have high performers in every position, not just software engineering.

Sorry, you're definitely right about that.

I guess I was thinking about "ambitious" people who see certain kind of work as beneath them. I feel like if you had a room full of million dollar engineers than a lot of "papercut"-style issues wouldn't get fixed.

There's a rumor that for a while Valve had this problem because to many people wanted to make games, and not enough wanted to maintain Steam

Logically there's nothing wrong if "human" is viewed as a finite resource or as livestock.

Humans are a finite resource but the comparison to livestock seems unwarranted. A business optimizing talent isn’t inherently removing humanity from its workers.

If the business is only optimizing one specific focus then yeah it is removing the humanity aspect from the co-operation of its worker and focusing only in resource extraction/consumption.

Specific focus of getting the best workers? Since when is competence divorced from humanity? A business isn’t a family, I don’t see your perspective here.

The alternative seems to be that they keep poor talent because it’s more... humane?

You miss a group in between: the average.

We shouldn’t give them much credit on this. It’s not really an approach it has to do with regulations for large companies. This “hr strategy” is just a friendly way to tell an employee to leave or figure out what to do. I wonder if the genius behind this also came up with the term “unlimited vacation”.

https://www.edd.ca.gov/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WAR...

Well I personally like unlimited vacation policies and it’s been a hit with most teams I’ve worked on. Adding some basic “mandatory” time off usually solves the problem of workers feeling like they shouldn’t take it. It’s really just dependent on office culture.

Vacation is a great thing. Properly setup PTO policies are better. Eventually you reach a point where accrued time ceilings force you to take a vacation. That’s typically too late from a burnout perspective.

IMO unlimited vacation is simply a sugar coated way to not keep track of time off.

Out of curiosity have you kept track of how many days you’ve taken off?

The company keeps track to make sure people take off the minimum amount. After that take off as much as you need. I don’t keep track but I’ve taken off a day every other week for months. Comes down to company culture and how healthy and focused it is.

It also keeps track of the “maximum amount”. Don’t fool yourself :)

Obviously there are reasonable requests and making sure you get your work done, but the last two companies have been my own startups and we have no hard limit.

If you have one where you work then it looks like it's a culture issue, as I've been saying.

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