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Comment by parkingrift | Hacker News Reader

Scale up rapidly and then mass fire the bottom 10-25% of performers. This is a well known tactic.

> bottom 10-25% of performers

I've been around awhile and seen plenty of layoffs, layoffs are almost never about performance at the individual level.

It's nice to believe they are because in times like these thinking to yourself "I'm a least in the top half of performers" can give the illusion that you're safe. However, this thinking is ultimately harmful because when you or your friends and colleagues do get laid off you will continue this thinking and considering it a valuation of your self worth, or the worth of colleagues you respect.

They're not primarily about individual performance, but if a company decides to cut X% of some group, it's going to make an effort to cut those it can most afford to lose, which is going to tend toward those they evaluate as lower performers, accurately or not.

I’ve recently seen this, but still performance was not the driver. A small company had two teams, a data eng team and a cloud products team. Both very high performing. The economic tide turned and they needed to cut % headcount to survive. Instead of cutting from both teams, they cut the cloud products team and put the idea on hold. This kept the long term play on data intact. They’ll hire full stack later. Yes they could afford to lose people, but not due to individual performance.

The differentiation here is that these layoffs are not for urgent financial reasons. This is similar to the recently announced Tesla layoffs.

You don’t lay-off 10% of your work force without need, and you don’t do it at random.

I imagine this sort of move makes some of the top people leave along with the worst people. If I was in a company that cut 25% of the workforce I'd look for the door regardless of how good I was. Nothing happens in isolation.

I think the part about that strategy that bugs me is that the workforce doesnt know they are effectively doing a tryout for the company

But at the same time, these are probably the same companies that say "competitive work environment" somewhere on the job application so maybe employees should expect it

> these are probably the same companies that say "competitive work environment" somewhere on the job application so maybe employees should expect it

Anecdotally, I've seen touchy feely corporate tone along with this strategy, and would suspect that is a fairly common combination. What you describe certainly exists, but it's not always so obvious.

ugh, i hate it. "We are a family here" ... "haha jk, get lost"

I keep hearing people say this, but when I worked doing layoffs I don’t think I ever saw a stack ranking happen. It was always either a)every team loses x% or more commonly b) getting rid of a function or location entirely.

At the end of the day the differences in employee performance just aren’t that big and everyone knows it’s hard to accurately judge.

I only saw the highest paid/everyone in HCOL area and in many cases it was the top performers of the team.

This happens too. Its great to get paid top of band, until cost cutting comes around - you better be justifying it.

Netflix and Amazon are big, vocal proponents of this.

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