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Comment by ramshanker | Hacker News Reader

The old saying....Some variation of.... If you fire your bottom 10%, your top 10% will also leave.

That so called "old saying" you mention makes no sense in the real world. From my experience top % engineers hate working with bottom % engineers since they massively drag things down for everyone, so firing the bottom % ones actually makes life better for the top % and convinces them to stay, and vice versa, keeping bottom % engineers around for long actually convinces top % engineers to leave since they want to work with equally competent people who can get shit done and not be around incompetent people who coast and watch the clock, or worse, drag everyone down.

Over here in the real world of bottom 10% firing company cultures: those top engineers are leaving the company because they are tired of the culture of infighting and backstabbing, because setting up to others to fail and blaming them is just as effective as doing good work. Also, your super helpful generalist collaborator just got fired because everyone on your small team is highly performing and top down ruling was to fire 1/10 of each team.

I cannot think of a successful tech company that is still applying the GE 10% management style. It has consistently been shown to fail.

Where do you see me promoting the GE style? I was talking about getting rid of the incompetent people that skilled people don't like to work with (if you disagree you were probably never paired with one) since then your own performance suffers and makes you want to leave ASAP. Not about firing the bottom ranked 10% according to some random stack ranking that can be gamed.

How would you actually pull that off at corp scale, if not via stack ranking?

It makes perfect sense in context. You're assuming that the bottom % of engineers drag things down because they're bad. That's not what it's about.

Some companies imposed rather brutal policies of "we do an annual review and sack the bottom x% of employees". This is done irrespective of whether they are bad, or simply the lowest strata (by your, possibly flawed, estimation) but still good. Because workers often don't know which group they will fall into, it produces enormous stress throughout. Few people like working under those conditions so those that can, leave. Who will that be? Those most able to leave. Who were they? Your best workers. Goodbye top tier...

Be aware that some people who contribute least to the bottom line are actually still very useful.

This kind of management brutality I believe is mostly died out now, for good reason.

>> This kind of management brutality I believe is mostly died out now, for good reason.

Bad news, after all the layoffs over the last two years, stack ranking and quotas are coming back.

> From my experience top % engineers hate working with bottom % engineers since they massively drag things down for everyone

You live in a different world than I do then, because the overwhelming majority of people don't care at all, let alone they would "hate".

They care when those people impacts their own performance.

That is not supporting evidence for a policy of "fire the worst X%" being anything other than a recipe for internecine warfare.

In the real world companies have no idea who the top and bottom 10% are because they use extremely low quality productivity metrics

Obviously it excludes all of the connections, institutional knowledge, and other duties as assigned that typically make up the brunt of the magic that keeps things functional but that managers are generally too afraid to acknowledge or ask for resources for, if they're even aware.

Double the savings! (This quarter).

No one told Jack Welch

He fired the one who told him that. It didn't matter, as long as the books looked great on the next quarter and the bonuses kept flowing, Mr Welch didn't give a fuck.

Welch was an addict (addicted to growth for himself) that made his problems everyone else's problems.

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