Statistically, some of your employees probably aren’t good enough to be worth employing. But managers are human, hard conversations are hard, there are lots of incentives to not manage those people out.
By having an attrition target and forcing people to cut the bottom 10%, you basically skip over the soft fuzzy human factors keeping people around, and instead fall back to the statistical truth that the worst 10% probably are negative value employees.
Not saying I agree with this, but I think that’s the strongest case you can make for it.
In particular quotas flow down into teams with zero percent of people who should be fired. The effect on the remaining 100-X% employees morale is negative.
Further, in any big organization the weak performers are not evenly distributed. However the PIP / attrition % rates are uniformly forced. So the over performing team has to start cutting into good performers within a year or two, whereas the low performance team can cut and still have many lower performers..
Why is this a statistical truth? In a large, Gaussian distributed population MAYBE this is true (but hiring isn’t random, is it?). But the thresholds are not applied to large populations anywhere I’ve worked. It’s pressure applied to management at all levels.
That means people will devote SUBSTANTIAL amounts of their day-to-day labor in jockeying and positioning.
People will be hired (wasted money and time) explicitly to be fired/PIP'd.
The jockeying will result in disruption of team development.
People will sabotage their coworkers.
Trust disappears.
Paranoia grows.
Blame deflected.
Difficult problems won't be tackled because why risk it.
Bandaids rather than solutions will result.
YOUR BEST PEOPLE WILL LEAVE. Let me emphasize this. You are selecting for people that aren't good, because good people will have OPTIONS and THEY WILL LEAVE.
What are you left with? A management hierarchy of sociopaths. A subpar set of employees that furthermore will not cooperate in good faith (in the best case) or actively engage in institutional sociopathic behavior. You will have a cesspool, and cesspools repulse good people.
And the signal is right in front of people that apply: the hiring process is abusive hazing with the "raise the bar" bullshit.
Staff turnover means abandoned systems. Abandoned systems will be avoided as bad career risk, or reimplemented before the org has gotten good ROI from them.
THAT IS NOT GOOD MANAGEMENT.
Remember: AWS had a CRAP Christmas. Crap. This is starting to boil up.
How does one qualify the new candidate being better than 50% of current team. Better than 50% at what?
Every role has many dimensions, and most members of the team have a mixed set of strengths. You form a cohesive package if you hire complementary people and get 2+2=5 type of output.
The idea that everyone can be treated as an interchangeable cog and objectively, quantitatively ranked is pure silliness.
Where do we get one of those?
The central limit theorem doesn't give us one of those. Not even the Lindeberg-Feller central limit theorem. Neither does the strong law of large numbers. Nor the weak law of large numbers. Nor the martingale convergence theorem.
There is some old material, from about 100 years ago, in schools of education that given a performance measure and a large population the measure will be Gaussian distributed on that population, and the larger the population the closer to a Gaussian distribution. An example is supposed to be the size of the largest eigenvalue in a principle components decomposition. Uh, that largest eigenvalue was long called IQ (intelligence quotient). Nothing intelligent about it. Nonsense. 100% total crackpot nonsense. Brain-dead, cult nonsense.
"Low performers" in need of a "performance improvement program" (PIP)? Start with the managers who believe in a Gaussian distribution. Then move to the managers who believe that the "bottom 20%" are always low performers.
A lot is known about how to be a good manager, and the Gaussian probability density distribution is not part of that.
I've seen a lot of bad managers. A pattern is that they are tyrants, have lots of rules and measures, are big on formality over reality, dot i's and cross t's with great reliability, and have everyone with their nose to the grindstone, ear to the ground, shoulder to the wheel and trying to work in that position. But the organization is stagnant, is not changing or keeping up with the market or technology. So, after a few years like that, it becomes obvious to everyone, customers, BoD, stockholders, employees, even nearly all of the managers that the organization is about ready to die, and often that's what happens, e.g., by firing 50% of the people and going downhill from there.
Once I saw a failing organization where nearly all the managers except at the lowest level were part of a tight clique, cult enforcing failure. Finally the BoD installed a new CEO and fairly soon 80+% of the clique, cult were given "PIPs" and demoted out of management or retired.
But there is also good evidence that even such a sick organization does not have to die and, instead, just needs some good management, starting at the CEO level. In particular, with a good CEO, suddenly, wonder of wonders, 90+% of the employees can be seen as great performers.
So, net, as bad as the situation can be, it is fair to say that Darwin is on the case with improvement on the way!
At one time Amazon was a small mail-order book and record shop run by Bezos from a small office. At least looking from 10,000 feet up, Bezos was a good manager, and, thus, I doubt that he was playing with the Gaussian distribution, firing his bottom 20%, stack ranking, etc. Instead he knew all the employees and the work of each. Sooooo, it sounds like now Bezos should leave outer space, return to Amazon, and fix the destructive nonsense that is ruining the company.
HAHAHA well said.
1. It doesn't work, obviously because they are not in a closed system. Their policies affect their reputation, which will affect their ability to hire ICs who have to contend with an increasingly higher bar to clear.
I wish I could have said that's better than the alternative, but it's not. I suspect the ground is always shifting beneath you at Amazon. Even if your performance is fine, a colleague or your manager could get PIP'd
For a company that's vaunted for it's long-view philosophy, it's a terribly short-sighted policy.
(Somehow stack ranking logic never gets applied that way.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/07/17/h...
I also want to point out that a lot ppl who suffered or even lost their lives during such period were actually sabotaged or framed by their peers (neighbors, coworkers), rather than the authority.
All the counterpoints about whether 10% is accurate, whether you get the right 10%, whether they’re evenly distributed, whether there are other costs, why not apply the same logic to managers and execs, etc etc etc, yes, I agree!
All this being said, in the context of an organization that actually deserves to exist (a rarity, given that we live under capitalism), it is impossible to say what percentage of people will be ill-fit to their roles, let alone what percentage will be so ill-fit to any role that separation is the only option.
