[judemelancon]

I'm glad you admit everyone deserves breaks; it seems to have been remarkably easy to convince you. I'm also glad to see your position on paying for the rest shift from outright opposition to unspecified contracts being excessive.

None of the rest of your reply is actually a response to what I said, though some of it is interesting. You also notably didn't respond to what I said about politicians.

Regarding Fortran programmers' contracts being honored, I would certainly hope any business would meet its contractual obligations (when they are moral and legal). Surely you aren't actually suggesting they shouldn't? Whether signing such a contract was a good idea or not, the very concept of a contract is founded on actually executing the terms of the agreement afterward.

I have never encountered a business that consistently swiftly dropped the underperforming parts of the team. I know that stack ranking firms supposedly exist, but they are far from typical. Even if your employment history is atypical, surely you've encountered less than efficient employees at clients, at vendors, and just out in the world in retail or restaurants; have you never happened to observe some of them staying in those positions at length? If you have seen private enterprise up close, it's hard to fathom the idea that it runs lean operations without waste.

Furthermore, many businesses have employees, sometimes many of them, who don't have the kind of clear work products that would make "the underperforming 25% of the team" potentially conceptually coherent. Plenty have employees with as little to do as a TBM oiler or an elevator operator. The market isn't just taking its time in pushing them to be more efficient, either. Actual markets and actual managers don't work like in an entry-level economics class.