[klabb3]

Insanely spot on, for once (most of organizational analyses are not).

Another fun thing pointed out in the article is the obsession over weeding out poor performers, ie the lazy ones. My theory is that it’s done solely to scare everyone else to work harder, whatever that means exactly. It’s about creating a culture of constant busyness which is only really a good proxy for work in domains that don’t require long term thinking. For engineers, it’s detrimental.

If you wanna go after the ones who are contributing the least value, why obsess over the lazy? There are sooo many examples of people who added huge negative value, from the rockstars who create an unmaintainable mess to some product manager that re-steers the ship and changes something that was completely fine the way it was. Especially when they leave the mess behind which opportunists often do. Dead weight is nothing compared to the whales that swim towards the bottom and drag the rest of them down.