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by mdgrech23 1659 days ago
The government would find a way to fuck it up - most likely through forced diversity hiring. Look at truly innovative companies - every year they can can 10% or so of the lower performers - if you're not doing your job your fired - doing that in a gov ran business? good luck. everyone would claim wrongful termination so it becomes cheaper to keep the lower performers which leads to our current situation w/ the post office.
5 comments

> Look at truly innovative companies - every year they can can 10% or so of the lower performers

So you're a fan of stack ranking, huh? I thought that was pretty widely discredited, and "truly innovative companies" know better by now.

Your 10% example was used by Jack Welsh GE and Enron right? Do you consider them innovative / forward looking?
So because Enron is bad, everything they did is bad? I’m not arguing in favor of firing the bottom 10% each year, but your logic here is ridiculous.
It is commonly speculated that the Darwinian "10% off the bottom" layoffs were one of the reasons why Enron had so many failings as a company (fear of getting laid off led to dishonest dealing and creative accounting) and that is supposedly one reason why it fell apart.

By arguing that effective, innovative companies get rid of dead weight, anyone making the argument needs to confront that there are obvious cases where this isn't true, and that it creates perverse incentives.

As for the topic in general, I'm of a mixed opinion about similar government services. The mail service in Canada is overpriced and feels poorly run (like most everything that is Federally run in Canada), but Japan Post was excellent the whole time I lived in Tokyo. Finding what works and reproducing them makes a lot of sense to me.

how does diversity hiring fuck up companies and government?

it shouldn't be consider a 'quota' to give equitable access and try to catch up the the actual balance of diversity in this country.

Tech I get is harder because of the century of lack of education and lower opportunities.

But you can't write off entire races as less performant.

Because it moves the hiring focus from skills and "meritocracy" to something that should be irrelevant: age, tattoos, hair color etc.

Skills give value to an organization making it more competitive and productive, your appearance does not. If you make decisions on who to hire based on the former you're basically saying "Guy X is better than guy Y but I'm gonna hire Y because some people are offended by the fact that we're not 50/50", which is obvious in every single part of life.

Also, I know a lot of friends that are saddened by their hiring process and they feel like they've been hired just because the HR had to and not because they were the top choices.

But yeah, this is controversial nowadays so I don't really try to put it out there at all and let it be.

> Look at truly innovative companies - every year they can can 10% or so of the lower performers

Name the truly innovative companies that have this as a policy right now.

You don’t think big companies have diversity quotas in 2021? Where have you been for a decade