[nafix]

I like it. I really dislike working with under-performers and people who just refuse to do due diligence on their end. I dislike working with people who always want you to come over to their frame of mind rather than trying to get into yours or meet in the middle. I saw a ton of people coasting during Covid. People need to get negative feedback when they deserve it.

[rosywoozlechan]

The arrival of Covid was a period of great stress and change in people's lives. Maybe they were dealing with some things and not really coasting? Just maybe needed some more support? This way of thinking about people, coworkers, without understanding the situation in their lives and what they've been talking to with their managers about, is just alien to me and I don't understand it. I don't think it's a good way to manage people.

If you have a problem with someone being a burden on your team that you and others have to deal with, that's understandable and you should bring it up with your team, but managers talking in these sorts of ways in public conversation about the people working at their company, it's just awful.

[ejb999]

IMO, it is not awful to state the obvious.

Every company - especially every company over a certain size, knows there are a certain percentage of people that just 'phone it in' and aren't pulling their weight relative to others - pretending that isn't true, really doesn't help anyone.

More importantly, it is demoralizing to the people you want to keep - to make it seem to them that putting in the extra effort doesn't do anything for you, so they start looking for the exits to find a position where there effort and talents are better appreciated; retaining the best people, at the end of the day is more important than a low-performer's hurt feelings.

[retinaros]

the problem is that it is really hard to identify. to some manager even a good employee might be a low performer. some managers only see like 1% of you through your days. now imagine you are having a bad day or a bad meeting and on the day your manager is looking at your performance it appears to be subpar because that day you had other worries?

sometimes it only takes one conversation or someone else saying something about you to your manager.

if you think companies work fairly at identifying people « coasting » you are deadwrong. everything is politics.

[convolvatron]

if its 10% phoners, this isn't a problem. because there is a natural turnover with everyone else, and the phoners tend to stick they generally represent an increasing faction over time.

as they start to dominate the organization, they actually cast shade on people that are trying to get something done. nothing is getting done so the giant company starts sucking in as many people as possible to try to replace the outflow and to try to start getting something done.

does anyone know of a company that survived this process?

[laweijfmvo]

i was at google when the pandemic started. it was certainly a difficult change for a lot of people, but IMO those aren't the people that should be targeted. it's the ones who were worthless/coasting well before the pandemic and/or have no real excuses for their lack of performance since. at least for the first 6 months of the pandemic (when I left google), Google was VERY considerate of employees and their difficult situations.

[ProfessorLayton]

This is under the presumption that most/all of the people being let go are actually low performers, and that leadership is able to correctly identify them.

The same leadership that thought those people met the caliber for working there in the first place.

I won't deny that there's low performers at any organization, but this is giving the people making the cuts too much credit imo. Double-digit cuts say more about leadership than the people being let go.

[Firmwarrior]

Microsoft ruthlessly fired tons of "low performers" for over a decade, which gave them the organizational efficiency they needed to ship such resoundingly successful products as Bing Search, Windows Mobile, and Windows 8

[sfvegandude]

Performance isn’t static. Hiring is hard. Organizational priorities shift, people lose interest, etc. It’s often better for both parities if one just moves on.

[strix_varius]

Agreed. It's demoralizing to have an under-performing colleague stick around for months or years. It's even worse to work with someone who's mastered the art of "talking the talk" to get a job, who makes big promises but always has some excuse for why they can't deliver, and who never actually ships anything.

Most first-level tech managers don't have the courage to fire fast enough. The best feedback I've ever gotten from a member of my team is that I should have fired under-performers faster to preserve the motivation of my top-performers.

It's absurd that someone who has negligible, or oftentimes negative impact, should stick around claiming their $250k participation check every year.

[fleetwoodsnack]

Seems like you have a responsibility to yourself and your team to bring this up with the appropriate party and go farther if need-be. Proactive feedback is more useful than passive resentment.

[strix_varius]

Of course, and that tends to happen, but the alignment of the manager to their team's mission isn't perfect. So you'll see:

"Soft coaching" instead of a PIP.

PIPs that end in "retain," leaving the PIP recipient to revert to their previous level of output afterwards. These are often celebrated as management success stories.

Working out an "exchange" deal with another team that has headcount or backfill so the under-performers float around.

The most common strategy from a manager who knows of a disparity in competency, but is unwilling to address it directly, is to over time expect (and ask) less and less of the under-performer, implicitly putting more workload on the rest of the team. Basically, take the under-performer out of all critical paths. This is especially likely if the direct manager was also the hiring manager, in which case they're reticent for their peers & boss to recognize that they made a hiring mistake. Even moreso if the hire helped the org's D&I numbers.

[fleetwoodsnack]

Seems like I’ve ruffled a few feathers and ended up -2 on my previous comment here, not clear what rule I violated but that’s beside the point.

I have a suggestion: take these findings and send them to your direct report and their direct report too (or whoever the appropriate party is in your organization). You’ve spotted some major issues and I think your organization would benefit from your insights. Include the names of the specific underperformers to establish credibility, and so that the appropriate parties can observe and take action to benefit the team.

These operational insights are too valuable to languish on an anonymous forum.

[strix_varius]

While that's a nice ideal, it's often not practical. As an IC, you'll rarely be rewarded for pointing out inefficiencies like this publicly - especially if it makes your boss look bad. As a manager, it's often better to expend your social/political capital to advocate for your best employees, rather than to address your worst.

Relevant to the top-level topic here, that's why many managers welcome environments in which the barrier drops for cutting their worst employees. It's nice to be able to do that, when the whole company is going through it, without bringing scrutiny down on your team (and you, specifically, as someone who potentially made a bad hire).

[fleetwoodsnack]

Seems like the deficiencies exist throughout the entire organization’s vertical. Under-performing workers and underperforming managers acting in their own self interest and shirking responsibilities that would otherwise benefit the organization.

[llbeansandrice]

You do understand that this is entirely different than company leadership laying off entire teams right?

It could be like SNAP that fired the entire company that they acquired because they had to cut costs but the product was meaningful and I'm sure the team worked very hard on it.

[strix_varius]

> You do understand that this is entirely different than company leadership laying off entire teams right?

No, this thread:

> Some of these comments mentioned in the article coming from Meta's leadership about there being people who shouldn't probably be there or to get rid of coasters seems so inhumane and demoralizing.

...is specifically about this quote from the article:

> Separately, the company’s head of engineering issued a call for managers to identify employees who were coasting and place them on remediation plans as a prelude to their termination.

[llbeansandrice]

Ah my mistake. I see the context now. If that's truly what Meta is doing, all the more a garbage company.

It does still feel like a marketing spin on "we're cutting headcount, make it work" to me though. I find it impossible to believe that Meta wasn't already doing this.

[KerrAvon]

That's fine. The place to address it is directly, in private, with those employees. You do not humiliate people in public, not a single person, not a group of people. That's what flailing, incompetent managers do.

For every person like you who doesn't think the execs are talking about them, there is a person who is actually performing very well, who management would like to keep around, who does think it applies to them, and it is killing their morale.

And you don't know definitively that they aren't talking about you either, Mr High Performance. Your management chain could easily have a different view of you than you have of yourself, whether it's justified or not.

[sfvegandude]

I also like it, and believe that Meta’s way of going about this is more humane than keeping people on who aren’t performing. We are not talking about underpaid wage slaves here. These are professionals who deserve honest feedback about their work.

[noncoml]

> I dislike working with people who always want you to come over to their frame of mind rather than trying to get into yours or meet in the middle.

I agree with due diligence, but the “frame of mind” argument is way to subjective.

What if, hear me out, in their opinion it’s me who refuses get in their frame of mind or meet them in the middle?

[ipaddr]

Should you be worried that others might consider you the under-performer? Perhaps others felt you were coasting.

When you said you hate others who won't come over to your point of view. How many feel similiar that you won't come over to theirs?