[UncleMeat]

You can just fire people. If I had a report that was not meeting expectations I sure as hell wouldn't make "deny their remote work application, hope they are dissatisfied with the office, and wait for them to quit" be my plan.

[berg117]

In big tech companies, who gets fired has very low correlation to performance. Instead, it usually comes down to:

(1) people who make their bosses look bad are first to go.

(2) next are people who are perceived to cost their bosses time, regardless of whether it's their fault.

(3) after that, it's usually the infanticide cases: i.e., the people who did nothing wrong but haven't been there long enough to establish themselves.

The infanticide is especially ugly, because (a) it means the company is firing people basically at random, and (b) it rapes the shit out of the resumes of the people affected, because they now have <1 year jobs to explain. The reason it happens is that, empirically, most of the people cut in mass stack-rank purges are new members of underperforming teams... who, by inspection, have had the least to do with the team's underperformance.

Underperformance does get people fired, but rarely. It's at least as likely to get someone promoted, because underperformers usually have a career's worth of experience of being shitty, and therefore have developed such political skills they can easily fail up every time.

[lodovic]

Exactly my experience as well

[_j5l3]

> You can just fire people.

Not at Google, you can't. Firing someone who's performing abysmally still takes up to 6 months, between all the process and PIPs and paperwork and shit.

[UncleMeat]

Sure, but that is way faster than "wait for them to quit."

[berg117]

Google's preferred method to "fire" a lousy programmer is to make him a PM.

[UncleMeat]

In my experience, SWE -> PM ladder transfers are very unusual.

[berg117]

I'm sure they are. Most SWEs hired at Google are pretty good at programming and don't need to be tucked away in PM.

[dvirsky]

Xoogler here, from what I've seen, SWEs converting to PMs did it because it was what they were interested in it, unrelated to their skill, and it's not trivial at all. IIRC (never done it myself but seen a couple of people who did) there is a trial period and if you don't perform well enough as a PM you either go back to being a SWE or need to resign.

[berg117]

PM is a negative contribution role, so what does "performance" even mean? Getting programmers to accept Jirafication?