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Comment by elevatedastalt | Hacker News Reader

It's understandable that in an organization that hasn't tightened its screws on employees, you will be able to find 5% low performers. But do you expect to find 5% low performers even after 5 iterations of these firings? Like eventually you are left only with medium to high performers, and you are just making their lives miserable by turning work into a meaningless Hunger Games season.

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I would imagine a lot of the firings are new hires, or people being replaced by new people who are a better fit; so it really depends on the rate your company is growing.

If the company is growing 10% a year and firing 5% a year you're still growing significantly.

So I think it's pretty important to look at the rate of hiring, not just the rate of firing.

Isn't the average tenure low enough that after five years, most of your workforce has turned over?

Varies. What I have seen happening often is that many teams end up with a mix of very tenured people (who are strong contributors and who are sticking around for whatever reasons), and new hires who are too early in the role to be properly evaluated or to be thrown the lowest rating at.

Isn’t performance relative?

It sounds like you missed the fun that was stack ranking in the ‘90s. Combine that with “360 reviews” like we had at GE where team members rank each other and the only sensible thing was to “defect” and rank everyone low in the hopes someone wouldn’t understand the game and rank you higher.

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