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Comment by synu | Hacker News Reader

How does this work well? Aren’t the good people the first to leave if you decide to make everyone miserable?

It turns out that "increase expectations of delivery" is not synonymous with "make everyone miserable."

Even if you can do this accurately the second order effects in terms of stress on the team, friends and colleagues getting kicked out and self doubt do make the job more miserable. The people that are nominally “safe” aren’t some island of calm unaffected by their coworkers and culture shift that isn’t. And I’d expect that the actual approach will end up being a far blunter instrument and make the situation adversarial.

That’s true, but at a company that size when the order comes all the way from the top to “turn up the heat?” Sounds like a recipe for misery generation.

Where should the order come from?

I'm agnostic about whether or not Facebook will implement this well. Certainly it's possible to implement these kinds of initiatives badly. But the whole HN attitude of "how dare you?!?" doesn't strike me as people who are taking an appropriately realistic view of the real problems in trying to make a large organization be high performing, it strikes me as entitlement.

I also feel like Zuckerberg has had a fairly large amount of success building a highly performant organization in the past, and while that doesn't mean he hasn't lost touch or that FB hasn't gotten too big to do the same things with or whatever, this certainty that you see in these comment threads that he's just like tripping on his shoelaces and doing self-evidently idiotic things seems extremely overconfident.

I think that building a high performance organisation starts way before you get to the point where you need an emergency leadership directive at the beginning of a downturn that from now on you’re going to turn up the heat and hold people accountable for performance. If you are pulling that lever to some extent I think you have to admit you took a wrong turn somewhere.

I dunno, maybe there was a wrong turn -- or maybe just you're responding to rapidly changing conditions.

But if there was a wrong turn, and now you're error correcting, that still seems quite a bit different from, "Lol what does this doofus know, he's just an idiot."

I don’t recall having said anything like that.

I recall you saying that Zuckerberg's plan was to "make everyone miserable," and that the result of that would be that the highest performers would quit.

I think paraphrasing that as "Zuckerberg's an idiot" is, if anything, charitable.

Yes, good people that know they can find something else will leave first. Those who stay are mostly very comfortable and well positioned that they know they far in the queue of layoff or those that know they cannot find something similarly well paid.

the good people are the ones that perform well in the kitchen when it gets hot.

Lol. Bullshit.

The good ones know to get out when a company treats it's employees like shit. Just because they aren't the target today doesn't mean they won't be the target tomorrow. The idea that people should wear bad working conditions as a badge of honor is just silly and something I'd expect people (the good ones) to grow out of after a few years max in the industry.

you know, there are economic times where it's tough to find a job in certain industries, no matter how awesome you are.

Just so I'm clear, your response to "good workers don't put up with that shit" is essentially "they will if they can't find a different/better job"? Cause that just sounds exploitative and scummy. I'm sure companies make those calculations but it doesn't make it right/moral.

In a vacuum I can understand and empathise with your comment but as part of this chain (where you say "the good people are the ones that perform well in the kitchen when it gets hot.") I can't take it seriously. Which is it? Do the good people perform well (and enjoy) when it gets hot or are they held hostage by the economic times?

It's probably a combination of both. After all, the answer to an equation typically has two or more values associated with it.

They might.. for a little while, but eventually most people will just say 'meh' and head for greener pastures. A lot depends on the relationships and once the first link breaks, odds are, more people will follow the first 'defector'.

It is really not that complicated. Few will put up with 'heat' if it gets to an annoying level; especially if they have other options.

The good people are the ones who don't have to stay in a hot kitchen if they don't want to

I wonder... will the people who hired deadwood get shafted, or will they consider how to improve their hiring process? (ha. ha. ha.)

Lol no. They go find nicer, cooler kitchens.

Never underestimate the power of a bored bureaucrat under pressure to keep his job.

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