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Comment by zhdc1 | Hacker News Reader

> There are industries & companies that have grown fat & lazy and could use a few annual 6% culls, but you eventually run out of fat.

Agreed, but there's also an unaddressed issue of whether many (most?) positions at large tech companies provide an actual economic benefit to the company or whether they exist simply because of organizational inefficiencies (Parkinson's Law).

To put it another way, a hire may have been the best candidate out a very selective interview process, but if his position exists simply because of internal silo building, forced ranking - as bad of a system as it is - may work.

Is there any economically valid reason for Meta to have ~75K employees?

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Forced ranking in your use case doesn't work because it's generally firm wide cascade. Is 6% of every team in every department in every org unnecessary?

No, in fact.. there's teams that should be 2x as big and teams that should be completely let go.

Management actually needs to do what they get the big bucks for and make strategic decisions about what business lines do/don't need to be staffed rather than culling arbitrary %s everywhere.

Think - Google Bard vs Search vs Ads vs Youtube vs their 27 different chat/video apps vs .. etc.

> Management actually needs to do what they get the big bucks for and make strategic decisions about what business lines do/don't need to be staffed rather than culling arbitrary %s everywhere.

The performance management process and 4-6% "unregretted attrition" (to use the technical term) target at Amazon is totally independent from figuring out project resourcing and headcounts. An employee who is fired for performance reasons doesn't change the headcount on your team.

Do hairless employees in a vacuum interfere with each commutativelly or anti-commutativelly?

Yes, that is my point. Past a few iterations, there is not a lot of value in doing this company wide over and over.. versus making hard big picture decisions on resourcing departments properly.

I don't understand what you mean. The 4-6% URA target is for continually managing out low performing employees. It may not be the most effective way, but that is the intent. It has nothing to do with resourcing departments properly; that's a totally different process and conversation.

Again, I think you are confusing layoffs, which are a reduction in headcount for a department/team, with attrition, where the people themselves are let go but the headcount remains so you can hire to replace them.

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