Okay, apparently once every year or two I try to do real talk with HN about attrition, and tonight's that night.
Firing people is unpleasant and emotionally draining. Everyone likes to talk about the failure mode where someone is overly quick to fire, but the truth for large orgs is that it's far more common to be overly slow to fire people. Absent other incentives, for every one person that you fired overly aggressively, you'll have 10 people sitting around drawing salaries despite being low-productivity or zero-productivity or negative-productivity and their managers are just avoiding conflict.
There are no perfect hiring practices, and no perfect ways to turn around failing employees -- as soon as your org gets to be a certain size (much, much smaller than Amazon or Microsoft), you'll have bad hires and/or employees who used to be productive who no longer are who you need to fire. And if you don't fire them, you get more of them -- they drain the morale of people around them. People say, "Why should I work hard if Bob is transparently doing nothing and still getting his paycheck?"
When you're a smallish org, maybe 100 people or fewer, you don't need processes for this, you just need the ultimate leaders of the company to demand accountability. If I'm the CEO of a 100 person company, I can tell my managers that it's really important that we have a high-performing team, that that means firing sometimes, and then do some spot checks to make sure that they're taking me seriously, and that's fine. And not having a process is preferable to having a process at this size.
But at some point in the triple-digit employee numbers, that falls apart. Once you have people 4 or more levels from the CEO, it starts getting really hard to make sure that everyone is just holistically doing what they're supposed to, and you start to need a process.
And once you've got, you know, high 4 digit numbers of employees or more, you also have to start being realistic about what value having a really high-performing team of 10 or 20 people somewhere deep down in your org chart really gets you: not that much.
Ignore gaming the system for a minute, let's just talk about first order effects. Just say, "Okay, in some kind of system that forces attrition, stack ranking or something similar, you remove the possibility of recognizing the reality of a team that has 10 members who are all high-performing."
If Amazon sacrifices the ability to have some random engineering team having 10 high performers, in return for getting a hundred teams to get off their ass and remove their low performers, that's a great deal for Amazon. Teams of 10 high performers are rare. They happen, sure. But they are rare. And at Amazon's size, they don't move the overall fortunes of the company much. In contrast, teams that accumulate deadweight are common, and because they are common, in aggregate they do move the fortunes of the company. Any smallish team of high performers that is actually in a position of high-leverage that it can affect Amazon's overall fortunes is going to be some weird exec-created team that's insulated from these kinds of performance metrics anyway.
But of course we can't ignore gaming the system, not entirely, and that's where the rubber hits the road. What's worse than 100 teams where deadweight is accumulating is 100 teams where deadweight is accumulating but also the managers are hiring to fire. But I guess the question is: is that actually a failure mode that happens relatively frequently? Are there enough cynical managers who have low enough empathy to hire someone just to fire them, but high enough empathy that they want to do that in order to protect the tenured deadweight on their team? I don't know the answer, but it seems like a bit of a snowflake situation. I'm sure someone is out there is basically a psychopath who'll hire someone just to fire them, in order to protect their buddy. But it doesn't sound like a common pathology.
There's no perfect system here, clearly. One of the real competitive advantages that smaller companies have -- a big reason why we all don't just literally have only five companies in tech -- is that people hierarchies get inherently less efficient as the org scales. But HN commenters, especially anyone here who aspires to one day run an org, whether as a founder or just a manager, should get past this whole business of, "the only failure mode we'll think about is being overly fast to fire."
My company gets around that by making it nearly impossible to fire anyone. I know a handful have been fired, but they have all been big HR offenses (I'm not told any details but reading between the lines I'm guessing some form of sexual harassment) not performance. The result is we are careful about interviewing because we know we are stuck. The other half is we put a lot of effort into training because we know we need to make people work out because the next opportunity to get rid of them will be the early retirement (which only applies to someone old enough to at least think seriously about retiring - and applies to everyone including those you don't want to get rid of)
It turns out in practice you can make good employees out of anyone if you are forced to. Sometimes it means taking a poor engineer and turning them into a great marketing person though.
>>you also have to start being realistic about what value having a really high-performing team of 10 or 20 people somewhere deep down in your org chart really gets you: not that much.
Seriously questionable conclusion. It is exactly those types of teams that will create the next generation of outside-the-box product/service that will lead the next generation of profit for the company. E.g., it wouldn't surprise me if Amazon's data management team was such, and now AWS basically is the golden goose while their core biz is marginally profitable and has many problems (counterfeiting, stuffing, fraud-rife review system...).
That said, the value of such teams is often squandered by higher management that too often sees the new product line as cannibalizing their existing cash cow products. Fixing that problem is more key than fixing the problem of deadweight, or at least as important.
I'm no Apple-head but my impression was that Jobs' leadership focused not at all on deadweight, but on being the first to cannibalize their own products with new innovations.
> I don't know the answer, but it seems like a bit of a snowflake situation. I'm sure someone is out there is basically a psychopath who'll hire someone just to fire them, in order to protect their buddy. But it doesn't sound like a common pathology.
I generally agree with your comment, and the above is a great way of phrasing your point. However, I do think the above behavior is extremely common. There are tons of people out there who show great loyalty to friends, but not strangers. I personally know many people who have said that they will help cover up their friends' crimes, regardless of the severity of the crime. Taken one step further, there is no shortage of people who are extremely patriotic and loyal to their fellow countrymen, but completely callous to foreigners and immigrants.
If you want to pursue the psychopath angle, there is ample avenue there as well. Everyone has a handful of work-friends who they know will have their back. They will give them glowing feedback to upper management, references, and job referrals. Cultivating this inner circle of peers, is a fantastic way to grow your career. "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine."
I do agree with the overall point of your post. But I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss managerial pathologies or hire-to-fire practices.
Not only does the manager have to have low empathy and questionable morals, they also have to get throwaway head count, collude with bar raisers to hire low performing employees, and they need to fool their directors. Like the OP stated, it's bad overall for the company / organization, and doubtful executives at the organizational level will let you get away with it if found out.
It stretches imagination that all of the above align and this is a common practice at Amazon.
It's not like they are choosing whether or not to fire someone. They know they have to let someone go. They are just strategically choosing who it should be. Their headcount doesn't change as a result of this
> collude with bar raisers to hire low performing employees, and they need to fool their directors
They don't have to go this far. As a manager, you could simply allow the hiring process to play itself out as it normally does. And then hire someone with the knowledge that they will be your sacrificial lamb when needed
> doubtful executives at the organizational level will let you get away with it if found out
How exactly is anyone going to find out. As long as you don't do it repeatedly and in a blatantly obvious manner, there's no way anyone will find out
> it's bad overall for the company / organization
Racism, sexism and homophobia would have never existed in the corporate world if everyone did what's best for the company. Surprisingly, the 20th century wasn't a great time to be a gay minority woman.
Life is a feedback loop. What this means is if they hire to fire then the dead weight is not going anywhere, just the people who were hired to be fired and the problem is worse.
I'll give Bezos credit, I've had good insight into 50+ companies from 5 person to 300k and I've never seen this level of accountability at anything over 10 people. The natural tendency for the average employee is to devolve into a "how do I not get fired" mindset, rather than "how do I and my coworkers keep our productivity very high".
Tesla also has had some success with productive teams, but Musk can only scale so far. If he isn't showing up regularly and drilling down into teams and firing the people who are not productive, there becomes more incentive to make friends and play politics than to be productive at the expense of pissing someone off.
Interesting points here. But, in round 2 of these dynamics, and if the article is true, it means ~every team contains a sacrificial lamb. So, rolling with the hypothetical 'team of 10' approx 10% of your payroll could be spent on ablative armor. Furthermore there's no guarantee the unofficial core teams aren't subject to the same dynamics as before, they're just operating, nominally, above the threshold set relative to the lambs.
Firing people is unpleasant and emotionally draining. Everyone likes to talk about the failure mode where someone is overly quick to fire, but the truth for large orgs is that it's far more common to be overly slow to fire people. Absent other incentives, for every one person that you fired overly aggressively, you'll have 10 people sitting around drawing salaries despite being low-productivity or zero-productivity or negative-productivity and their managers are just avoiding conflict.
There are no perfect hiring practices, and no perfect ways to turn around failing employees -- as soon as your org gets to be a certain size (much, much smaller than Amazon or Microsoft), you'll have bad hires and/or employees who used to be productive who no longer are who you need to fire. And if you don't fire them, you get more of them -- they drain the morale of people around them. People say, "Why should I work hard if Bob is transparently doing nothing and still getting his paycheck?"
When you're a smallish org, maybe 100 people or fewer, you don't need processes for this, you just need the ultimate leaders of the company to demand accountability. If I'm the CEO of a 100 person company, I can tell my managers that it's really important that we have a high-performing team, that that means firing sometimes, and then do some spot checks to make sure that they're taking me seriously, and that's fine. And not having a process is preferable to having a process at this size.
But at some point in the triple-digit employee numbers, that falls apart. Once you have people 4 or more levels from the CEO, it starts getting really hard to make sure that everyone is just holistically doing what they're supposed to, and you start to need a process.
And once you've got, you know, high 4 digit numbers of employees or more, you also have to start being realistic about what value having a really high-performing team of 10 or 20 people somewhere deep down in your org chart really gets you: not that much.
Ignore gaming the system for a minute, let's just talk about first order effects. Just say, "Okay, in some kind of system that forces attrition, stack ranking or something similar, you remove the possibility of recognizing the reality of a team that has 10 members who are all high-performing."
If Amazon sacrifices the ability to have some random engineering team having 10 high performers, in return for getting a hundred teams to get off their ass and remove their low performers, that's a great deal for Amazon. Teams of 10 high performers are rare. They happen, sure. But they are rare. And at Amazon's size, they don't move the overall fortunes of the company much. In contrast, teams that accumulate deadweight are common, and because they are common, in aggregate they do move the fortunes of the company. Any smallish team of high performers that is actually in a position of high-leverage that it can affect Amazon's overall fortunes is going to be some weird exec-created team that's insulated from these kinds of performance metrics anyway.
But of course we can't ignore gaming the system, not entirely, and that's where the rubber hits the road. What's worse than 100 teams where deadweight is accumulating is 100 teams where deadweight is accumulating but also the managers are hiring to fire. But I guess the question is: is that actually a failure mode that happens relatively frequently? Are there enough cynical managers who have low enough empathy to hire someone just to fire them, but high enough empathy that they want to do that in order to protect the tenured deadweight on their team? I don't know the answer, but it seems like a bit of a snowflake situation. I'm sure someone is out there is basically a psychopath who'll hire someone just to fire them, in order to protect their buddy. But it doesn't sound like a common pathology.
There's no perfect system here, clearly. One of the real competitive advantages that smaller companies have -- a big reason why we all don't just literally have only five companies in tech -- is that people hierarchies get inherently less efficient as the org scales. But HN commenters, especially anyone here who aspires to one day run an org, whether as a founder or just a manager, should get past this whole business of, "the only failure mode we'll think about is being overly fast to fire."