[bko]

This sounds good, but in my experience bad employees were known to everyone. It was difficult to pinpoint exactly why they were bad or toxic, but pretty much everyone agreed. If you gave them some benchmark they would need to hit (e.g. close tickets, be on call, etc), they would be able to do so. So creating a documentation trail is difficult, especially if its based on people saying they don't think he does good work or people don't want to work with him.

This is where I break with the "pro worker" dialog you hear online a lot. In my experience, competent employees are incredible difficult to come by. Recruiters are paid a few months salary just to get someone through the door. To think that employers are just randomly firing people for no reason has never struck me as being even remotely true. I'd prefer the quick to hire, quick to fire economy. Especially since employers would be much less likely to take a chance if they know there are a lot of hoops they'd have to jump through if it didn't work out

[legitster]

I worked in fast food and this resonates extremely with me. There were only 4-5 people in a kitchen during the busy rush, and there was a list everyone knew of people they didn't want to get stuck in a shift with. If someone sucks to work with, it really sucks, and because everyone is pitching in and working together, there is no indication that the person was bad at their job. If you were fired, it was usually because your fellow workers said you were bad.

I'm all on board with better pay and benefits. But protecting mediocrity doesn't benefit customers or other workers. Companies may occasionally arbitrarily fire good employees without a good cause, but that would be their loss.

One thing you'll notice in employee-owned companies (as opposed to unionized companies) is that they generally do no tolerate such clauses in their contracts.

[shagie]

Price's Law is "50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work."

https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/

https://routine.co/blog/what-is-the-prices-law-and-why-is-it...

[hughesjj]

"law" is an incredible term used for "an observation a physicist made about the author citations of academic papers at one point in time", especially when you try to extend that to software development, and realize that there's other competing theories with supposedly better fits. I have not independently re-run the analysis myself, but lotka's law claims to be better an in general these are all special cases of zipf's laws, which is admittedly where I personally first heard this concept.

...which is probably why you only see this stuff regurgitated in blog posts and right-wing Malcolm gladwell (Jordan Peterson is quoted as the source in one of your cited blog posts).

Either way, I'd be highly, highly suspect of parroting Price's "law" as a fact.

(I get stuff like Conway's law or Moore or Murphy are all also cited as laws, and I don't like that terminology either. "Conjecture" would fit so much better, save for Murphy's)

Even if the law were true regarding authorship, and applied to software, that still wouldn't show that the "valuable contributions" are only made by virtue of a small set of excellent contributors -- see "Matthew effect"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

[araes]

So, extending that rule (approximately):

All the actual work on Earth is performed by sqrt( 3,630,000,000 )[1] or:

~60,000 workers

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.TOTL.IN

"Based on choosing the current estimates of Labor force, total"

[shagie]

Half of all of the work - not all of all of the work.

[legitster]

You are missing the implication in the equation that smaller projects/teams are more efficient.

[hughesjj]

Gotcha, Singleton sole proprietorships it is. Down with complexity, break up every business! /s

[Dylan16807]

You're making a fine argument against optimizing for one variable. But that doesn't discredit the "law".

[ars]

Is everyone on earth working on the same project?

[taurath]

> To think that employers are just randomly firing people for no reason has never struck me as being even remotely true

Have you only ever worked with reasonable management? The problem with quick to hire quick to fire is that eventually you might be quick to fire. I suspect you have a much higher level of security than most people to have quality of coworkers as a top priority!

[RHSeeger]

Heck, there's companies where standard practice is "fire the lowest x% of workers on a regular basis". Doesn't even matter if they're doing a good job or not; just that someone else is doing a _better_ job.

Optimal strategy is to sabotage your coworkers in such an environment.

[ta_1138]

And don't forget that the percentages are not global, but in small buckets. This makes the worst performers extremely valuable, because not only you have someone to get rid of, but if they are bad enough, the rest of the team knows who will be laid off, so they can be far less tense.

It's also bad for the high performers, as working in the same team is bad: Having 3 great performers in a team means at least one, if not two are going to get a middling review. Everyone's behavior gets warped in ways that don't align well with what would be good for the company

[JamesBarney]

And the problem with slow to hire, slow to fire is one day you might be incredibly slow to hire.

And overall if you're looking to be employed as much of your life as possible quick to hire/quick to fire is obviously better based on unemployment data.

[vundercind]

The looser overall firing rules are, the harder it is for the union to protect members from e.g. firing for insisting on adherence to safety/security/contractual/employment policies/laws. Threat-of-firing-backed pressure on all those fronts is incredibly common outside companies with strong unions.

[tssva]

If they are meeting the metrics set to judge their performance how are they bad employees? If the metrics don't properly measure whether the job is being done then change the metrics.

[umanwizard]

> If the metrics don't properly measure whether the job is being done then change the metrics.

Nobody has ever come up with a good set of objective metrics to judge software engineer performance. So the best we have is still the subjective opinions of your managers and peers.

[joenot443]

Like in the cases of US courts defining obscenity or fair use, there isn't necessarily a set of metrics which can be used to perfectly taxonomize something.

Imagine I sent a manuscript to a publishing house and they rejected it for being bad. I wouldn't expect they got to that conclusion by comparing it to a set of metrics, I would assume they have people in authority whose judgement is the decider on whether something is "good" or "bad".

[tssva]

The original comment was regarding employees currently being judged via metrics bringing up whether certain jobs can or cannot be judged using metrics is pointless.

[39896880]

Your analogy only works when applied to the hiring stage, as that is when the publishing house decides to work with you. If the publisher accepted your manuscript, assigned you an editor, gave you a target publish date, and gave you advance and then suddenly booted you and said “your work isn’t good” you’d have some questions, and rightly so.

[stickfigure]

This sort of thing happens all the time? Many manuscripts and screenplays are stillborn. Movies make it halfway through production before the plug is pulled. Software projects fail left and right, with millions of dollars spent (sometimes billions!)

Human endeavors sometimes fail to live up to expectations.

[WalterBright]

> If the metrics don't properly measure whether the job is being done then change the metrics.

For workers who work with their heads, "metrics" is a fantasy. How do you measure a better writer?

[tssva]

Well the comment I was responding to specifically called out employees meeting metrics and still not being considered good employees, so your point is a little moot to my comment but I will reapond anyways.

How do you measure a better writer? It depends on what the purpose of the writing is. If it is an author directly selling books then you measure by books sold. If it is an online publication you can conduct surveys to determine the impact of a particular writer on subscription or view rates. If it is a techincal writer doing product documentation you can measure based upon meeting schedule, number of defects and by conducting customer surveys.

[WalterBright]

There are no objective criteria as to what is "good" writing vs "bad" writing.

> If it is an author directly selling books then you measure by books sold.

This is a fairly lousy metric. It depends enormously on the marketing campaign and the ability of salesmen to sell it.

For example, I read an article about the author of the "Slow Horses" book. It languished for years selling at a rate that was indistinguishable from zero. Then some journalist read it, wrote a glowing review of it, and it took off. Now it's a best seller, with sequels, and a miniseries.

[tssva]

Good writing is writing that allows the publishing house to achieve their end goal and bad writing is that which doesn't. The end goal is the same as for other businesses to make money. If you don't sale books you are a bad writer for their purposes.

[RHSeeger]

It is possible to both have some metrics and not have them be the only way you determine if an employee is doing a good job. Because some things can't be measured, and some can.

[isbvhodnvemrwvn]

They meet these metrics while they are under formal process just before termination. I used to work with a couple people clearly working multiple jobs who switched focus when they were PIPed.

[tssva]

If they are refocused on their job and now meeting metrics why terminate them? People can become unfocused for a variety of reasons beyond working other jobs. Life happens. If they don't remain focused and again don't meet metrics they have already been given an opportunity and should then be terminated.

[fallingsquirrel]

What metrics do you propose that aren't susceptible to Goodhart's law?

[lmm]

> To think that employers are just randomly firing people for no reason has never struck me as being even remotely true.

Of course not. They fire people with different taste in music, or who don't listen enthusiastically to their complaints about other people, or who refuse them sexual favours, or...

[axus]

It's like the unpopular, friendless kids in high school, you just know. And there's nothing they can do to change it.

[mensetmanusman]

Less negativity and more listening by everyone can be a place to start.

[ars]

I tried that with someone once, I got an enormous list of complaints about all the wrong things everyone else was doing wrong.

And utterly zero awareness of what they themselves were doing wrong.

Attempting to explain it to them was a complete failure.

[mensetmanusman]

It’s a fun challenge to try to enlighten them about how things can go wrong with their approach.

[MichaelZuo]

With what time?

Middle managers don’t suddenly get 28 hours in a day after someone offers this suggestion. Their schedules are already maxed out, so every extra minute of focused attention needed is literally coming from someone else’s (or some other department’s) budget.

[akdor1154]

And then they go on to be a (difficult to work with) 10× developer?

Instinctive social judgement definitely exists. Is it a good metric to find good employees? Dunno, maybe?

[beepbooptheory]

You can still be pro-worker even if you think sometimes a certain worker is bad, or hard to work with, or otherwise a "bad employee." It is more something political and something about how you view the world/humanity in general. It is not an "identity politics" where the discussion is around certain kinds of people or not. That would be kinda silly anyway on its face, we are virtually all workers!

[slg]

>If you gave them some benchmark they would need to hit (e.g. close tickets, be on call, etc), they would be able to do so.

Isn't this just a sign of bad management? If employees are capable of doing the work when their job is on the line, it isn't a question of skill or ability. It is a failure of the company to properly motivate, challenge, and reward them for their work.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Isn't this just a sign of bad management? If employees are capable of doing the work when their job is on the line

It’s HN. We’ve all been maliciously compliant. I can close tickets without solving any problems or be on call in the most useless ways imaginable just fine.

[slg]

I just read that as "management has no idea how to evaluate the quality of work of their employees".

Either the company should be able to evaluate an employee's performance and therefore can show proof of poor performance or it can't properly evaluate an employee's performance and therefore shouldn't be firing people based off an admittedly inaccurate measure of performance.

[umanwizard]

> I just read that as "management has no idea how to evaluate the quality of work of their employees".

You probably couldn't explain how you walk, or how you cook an egg, or how you speak English, at the level of detail that would be required for something like this. Yet you do know how to do all those things.

Just because you can't write down detailed objective instructions for how to do something does not at all mean you have no idea how to do it.

[danaris]

So should we apply this logic to other areas where one person's "gut reactions" can have a huge negative effect on someone else's life?

Should we not require any due process under law, because the officer "just knew" that it was that brown guy who stole the bread?

What's being asked for is accountability for decisions that can literally result in someone ending up homeless—and that are hugely subject to bias, both conscious and unconscious, in a country that is currently riven by divisions of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

[umanwizard]

I would be very surprised if there is anyone who would become homeless if they were fired from their tech job at the New York Times.

[JumpCrisscross]

> So should we apply this logic to other areas where one person's "gut reactions" can have a huge negative effect on someone else's life?

Maybe we're balancing the wrong side of the equation? Expanding teach-to-the-test across the economy strikes me as the wrong move.

[haswell]

> Should we not require any due process under law, because the officer "just knew" that it was that brown guy who stole the bread?

This is a bit fallacious and a false analogy. Due process under law exists because it's definable. We have standards for evidence, burden of proof, reasonable doubt, etc.

The challenges in cleanly defining what it means to be a "good employee" don't somehow mean other aspects of society that can be defined shouldn't be.

[haswell]

This assumes that evaluations can be neatly defined and tracked. There's another front page post right now about exactly this. The soft (often difficult to define/measure) skills required of a manager are the same skills that are required to make the decisions to fire people.

I think almost everyone has worked with someone who they know shouldn't be there, but they still are because they keep finding ways to technically meet the letter of the law when it comes to "performance". And yet they are clearly a huge anchor for the team, and everyone knows the team would be better off without them.

I wish we could perfectly evaluate what it means to be a good employee, and we could show the exact measurements used to do so. But this simply is not realistic, never has been, nor will it likely ever be. The spectrum of possible behaviors and the intricate interplay unique to various teams makes such a task impossible. I'm not saying an effort shouldn't be made, but that these decisions are often highly subjective, without much hope of arriving at something more objective.

I've worked at places that had stringent requirements for firing people. The net result was that good people all leave voluntarily instead of being stuck with the problem individuals, ultimately resulting in teams full of mediocre-to-awful teammates.

Managers can both know how to evaluate quality and fit while not having any hope of perfectly defining and documenting those evaluations. I'd rather work in an environment that has at-will employment with all of the downsides that come with that than a place that can't fire employees without spending a year creating a mountain of paperwork that ultimately doesn't get anyone much closer to the objectivity people are striving to achieve.

[JumpCrisscross]

> but they still are because they keep finding ways to technically meet the letter of the law when it comes to "performance"

Remember that homework assignment or group project where you spent an inordinate amount of time and effort on not doing the work as intended in some silly way? This is the adult version of that.

[WalterBright]

I've found it amusing how some people will spend more effort pretending to work than actually doing the work.

The same with students who'd go to great lengths to cheat, rather than spend a few minutes learning the material.

[WalterBright]

I was going to reply with something like this, but you nailed it.

[stickfigure]

How are you going to accurately measure "your code is shit"? If it was that easy, it would be a standard git hook.

[WalterBright]

I've noticed it is entirely possible for code to be written that absolutely conforms with every good coding style rule, and is utter garbage (even if it works!).

[vundercind]

Comically, the entire world basically has no idea how to evaluate the quality of management. Not with metrics, anyway. It's all vibes and guesswork, or else it's "data-driven" but transparently bullshit.

[WalterBright]

Good employees make the company successful in spite of bad management. If you don't want to do this, fine, find another company to work for where you do want to do this.

[JamesBarney]

For white collar jobs management's job is to guide and mentor not babysit adults into doing a job they are paid a salary to do.

[_bin_]

...crazy that pro-labor has gone for "reasonable wages and hours please" to "there cannot possibly be a lazy employee." Sure, sometimes there's a lousy manager or exec. But honestly people aren't expected to be particularly "motivated" beyond salary, incentive pay, etc. Like what do you want, the kindergarten-style pizza party tactics? The cringey corporate slogans? Are those actually motivating anyone? There are garbage managers who de-motivate people but that's something of a different problem and hits the whole team rather than just one person. When there's a bad, lazy employee, or when there's that one guy who's just a jerk, fire him. Contracts that say you can't do that are dumb, and they are bad for the majority of workers.