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Comment by correlator | Hacker News Reader

Yes,

Team of 5 and 1 person is coasting. Get rid of the 1 and you just reduced burn by 20%.

You lose the output of the coasting team member, but that's small to begin with by the scenario's setup.

If you believe coasting is contagious (why am I working so hard when clearly I don't have to like this other person), you could potentially see a boost in output.

Of course, this needs to be weighed against the risk of everyone being upset and leaving after such a decision, but in this market, that risk may be mitigated.

PS. It's really hard to make specific statements about vague hypothetical scenarios :)

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All of this requires the coasting person to be identified correctly every single time.

Some of the team leaders will fire a non-coasting person because that person looked like coasting, while the real coaster looked busy.

And then morale crashes even more, and you start looking over your shoulder, especially if you have a boss that does not understand who really carries the load.

So much management theory supposes all managers are super competent. In reality they are the people version of bad php developers.

You're right, but to reason about a hypothetical scenario, we've got to make assumptions. Identifying under-performers with perfect precision is my assumption of a spherical cow! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow

> All of this requires the coasting person to be identified correctly every single time.

Isn't there a famous story about Bell Labs, where there was this guy who made others signficantly more productive because he asked good questions?

Obvious coaster who should be terminated forthwith!

I remember the time I really hoped Google would be the Bell Labs of our time. This era seems so distant now...

You don't lose the output of the coasting team member (even if you get rid of the right person); that workload just gets transferred to the other 4 people. So let's say you have 5 people, 4 of which each are doing 22% of the work, leaving the one "coaster" to be doing only 12%. You fire the coaster, and now you've got 4 people doing 25% of the work each. An already burned-out team is now filled with people who have a larger workload.

And this of course is a simplification that assumes workload is a continuous rather than discrete measure. If the fired guy had two or three Jira tickets he wasn't making progress on, now you've got two or three of the remaining workers getting another entire feature dumped on their pile of work. The burn-out is higher than 3%. Until they quit, of course, transferring their workload to the remaining 3 people, increasing their burn-out, etc... it's a dangerous chain reaction.

Yeah generally even a coasting employee is doing some minimum amount of work. If burnout is a concern it's actually better to hire someone with the intention of PIPing and kicking out the coaster after. Since the coaster has been there as long as they have, a bit of extra time won't really change the situation.

[Note: This is WILDLY different if the coaster is actively generating more work for peers. I'm talking producing mediocre code that needs extra code review or not completing assigned tickets forcing peers to pick up that slack to finish the sprint. Get the team's opinions on the situation in 1:1 and boot ASAP if folks find this is a source of friction for them.]

> Of course, this needs to be weighed against the risk of everyone being upset and leaving after such a decision, but in this market, that risk may be mitigated.

The market where people are already quitting?

The market is really hot right now, and yes, a lot of people may be quitting. There are also a lot of hiring freezes and layoffs happening at the same time.

If a lot of people continue to quit while available jobs continue to decline, the result is fewer people feeling comfortable quitting.

So... people are quitting, and in response, companies are enacting hiring freezes, effectively refusing to compete with each other, to make people more afraid of quitting?

Does... does that not sound very collision-y to anyone else?

It could be :)

Another possible explanation is: A bad economy lead to a lot of layoffs: https://layoffs.fyi/. These layoffs resulted in employees being upset and quitting in addition to layoffs. Now there are a lot of job seekers and fewer jobs making it a bad time to quit.

IDK :shrug:

If people are quitting then people are quitting. Whether or not that is a bad idea doesn't seem to matter right now. Maybe it will matter in the future but that's not today.

Employee: I quit.

Employer: That's a bad idea!

Employee: Thanks for the advice. Bye.

Related recent anecdote: while the higher-ups at my company have been pushing terrible, burnout-inducing policies on us, my immediate manager is extremely supportive to the extent he's able to be (and always has been). When I recently told him how burned out I am and how I want to quit and find a better job, but the job I'm looking for would require skills that I'd need to learn first, his response was, "Don't quit... until you have those skills... which by the way, you have access to educational resources from the company via Udemy... the access is meant to be to advance your current job, but you have access to everything if you... wanted to check it out... just sayin'. And also apply to the jobs you think you're not qualified for yet, you may be surprised."

In other words, rather than saying "don't quit, it's a bad idea", he said, "it's a bad idea to just quit, here's some resources and advice on a better way to quit; I'll miss you" :D

When the Great Resignation meets a great recession

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