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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

If a company is collecting a lot of "dead wood" underperformers, the correct response is to start raising performance expectations and hold people accountable to those standards.

That's essentially what Meta is saying they're going to do. The "...so employees will quit" was an editorialized addition to the headline. The real story is that they're tightening their employee expectations and holding people accountable, which IMO is a totally reasonable thing to do. HN comments are always full of people claiming that FAANG employees are nothing special, so I'm a bit surprised to see the negative reaction to a FAANG company going on record to say that they're raising expectations for their employees.

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> Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me.

That it's so employees will quit is the truth of the matter. We shouldn't assume that this is to target "dead wood underperformers". Facebook has a ridiculous performance review scheme that, whatever else it does, is effective at firing people.

They already push people out to sea as a matter of course -- what's happening now is that the economic outlook is unfavorable, and they need people, including decent employees, to quit. They declared a hiring freeze and have announced a policy of attrition. These are normal things that happen during a downturn. It shouldn't be framed as somehow making their workforce more excellent, or as if the people who'll lose their job were "dead wood" anyway. The economy is going to put a lot of people out of work this year, of all sorts.

It's more of a summary:

> "Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn't for you, and that self-selection is OK with me," he said.

Some in leadership view cost of risk of employees who quit as being cheaper than employees who are fired, or if they're narcissistic enough that "the most loyal" employees will stick it out. It's normally common sense that this kind of strategy is kept very far away from anything that might come up in discovery if there's legal pushback. Zuckerberg saying this to Reuters in an interview requires a depth of innocent cluelessness that suggests he's insulated himself from critical feedback. This statement is going to be referenced by employees who feel the need to pursue recourse for perceived constructive dismissal.

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