If you have a problem with someone being a burden on your team that you and others have to deal with, that's understandable and you should bring it up with your team, but managers talking in these sorts of ways in public conversation about the people working at their company, it's just awful.
Every company - especially every company over a certain size, knows there are a certain percentage of people that just 'phone it in' and aren't pulling their weight relative to others - pretending that isn't true, really doesn't help anyone.
More importantly, it is demoralizing to the people you want to keep - to make it seem to them that putting in the extra effort doesn't do anything for you, so they start looking for the exits to find a position where there effort and talents are better appreciated; retaining the best people, at the end of the day is more important than a low-performer's hurt feelings.
as they start to dominate the organization, they actually cast shade on people that are trying to get something done. nothing is getting done so the giant company starts sucking in as many people as possible to try to replace the outflow and to try to start getting something done.
does anyone know of a company that survived this process?
sometimes it only takes one conversation or someone else saying something about you to your manager.
if you think companies work fairly at identifying people « coasting » you are deadwrong. everything is politics.
Most first-level tech managers don't have the courage to fire fast enough. The best feedback I've ever gotten from a member of my team is that I should have fired under-performers faster to preserve the motivation of my top-performers.
It's absurd that someone who has negligible, or oftentimes negative impact, should stick around claiming their $250k participation check every year.
"Soft coaching" instead of a PIP.
PIPs that end in "retain," leaving the PIP recipient to revert to their previous level of output afterwards. These are often celebrated as management success stories.
Working out an "exchange" deal with another team that has headcount or backfill so the under-performers float around.
The most common strategy from a manager who knows of a disparity in competency, but is unwilling to address it directly, is to over time expect (and ask) less and less of the under-performer, implicitly putting more workload on the rest of the team. Basically, take the under-performer out of all critical paths. This is especially likely if the direct manager was also the hiring manager, in which case they're reticent for their peers & boss to recognize that they made a hiring mistake. Even moreso if the hire helped the org's D&I numbers.
I have a suggestion: take these findings and send them to your direct report and their direct report too (or whoever the appropriate party is in your organization). You’ve spotted some major issues and I think your organization would benefit from your insights. Include the names of the specific underperformers to establish credibility, and so that the appropriate parties can observe and take action to benefit the team.
These operational insights are too valuable to languish on an anonymous forum.
Relevant to the top-level topic here, that's why many managers welcome environments in which the barrier drops for cutting their worst employees. It's nice to be able to do that, when the whole company is going through it, without bringing scrutiny down on your team (and you, specifically, as someone who potentially made a bad hire).
It could be like SNAP that fired the entire company that they acquired because they had to cut costs but the product was meaningful and I'm sure the team worked very hard on it.
No, this thread:
> Some of these comments mentioned in the article coming from Meta's leadership about there being people who shouldn't probably be there or to get rid of coasters seems so inhumane and demoralizing.
...is specifically about this quote from the article:
> Separately, the company’s head of engineering issued a call for managers to identify employees who were coasting and place them on remediation plans as a prelude to their termination.
It does still feel like a marketing spin on "we're cutting headcount, make it work" to me though. I find it impossible to believe that Meta wasn't already doing this.
The same leadership that thought those people met the caliber for working there in the first place.
I won't deny that there's low performers at any organization, but this is giving the people making the cuts too much credit imo. Double-digit cuts say more about leadership than the people being let go.
I agree with due diligence, but the “frame of mind” argument is way to subjective.
What if, hear me out, in their opinion it’s me who refuses get in their frame of mind or meet them in the middle?
When you said you hate others who won't come over to your point of view. How many feel similiar that you won't come over to theirs?
For every person like you who doesn't think the execs are talking about them, there is a person who is actually performing very well, who management would like to keep around, who does think it applies to them, and it is killing their morale.
And you don't know definitively that they aren't talking about you either, Mr High Performance. Your management chain could easily have a different view of you than you have of yourself, whether it's justified or not.
1. Very unlikely. Which means they're lying.
2. They are incompetent for keeping people that are slacking
If people are truly just slacking off then they should be let go as part of the normal business process. This focused effort to get leaner suggests that there are many known slackers that they were OK with up to this point.
There is really no reason to call people slackers even if it's true. They should have went the patreon route of saying they fucked up and hired too many people into roles that didn't provide as much value as they need.
Couple years ago, we had a lot of talks saying that engineers should have slack time to polish things. That's kinda counter-productive if slack time goes into working for other companies.
If they entered agreement (no matter legal form), that led company to believe that they will dedicate full time equivalent to given company and then did the same with another company, and charge both for full time, then it's obvious scam. It's simply beyond mental capacity of regular human being to carry out such contract.
People tend to rationalize latter one, but they will end on bad side of the layoffs, because it's simply unsustainable to pay full compensation for half-time work.
I think the executive getting rid of their usual fake friendly corporate talk, reflecting the degree how bad their bottom line is hurt.
Nothing is wrong doing it, we are following the money as we should.
Just neither empathy or loyalty is relevant to me, not reliable both ways.
The idea of capitalism is that you trade your labor/expertise/skills for a wage. You don’t own the means of production and you don’t own the outputs of them. Your labor is sold on the market and you are free to bargain and negotiate and step away.
So yea, there’s no reason at all to be loyal. It’s a beautiful system that way. It’s liberty and freedom to do as you choose. To decide if you value personal time or working for money.
I mean, sure there might be people not giving their best. But most people want to do work, want their work to be meaningful, and will generally do the right thing if guided correctly. The number of "slackers" who try to get by with no/0 effort is small, no way it could be large enough to meaningfully affect the bottomline.