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by narnarpapadaddy 513 days ago
Relative to your competition.

Performance is only adequate if it’s at least as good as the engineers of the other players in your industry. Otherwise, you’re losing ground. As long as anyone in your market space is actively trying to manage their engineering talent (recruiting your top performers, releasing low performers, being more selective in hiring) so must you just to keep pace. An “adequate” engineer may make the company money, but the opportunity cost of not hiring someone better who could make even more money can be higher still.
1 comments
psb217 512 days ago
The sorts of decisions and results that make a company the size of Meta succeed or fail happen above the levels of the folks who will get cut. Most of the net value produced by individual engineers is determined by which projects they're on, rather than whether they're good at their job. A savy entrepreneur with a few engineers worth of openai credits can create more value in a week than a median FAANG middle management career maxxer with 10-100 engineers in their subtree of the org creates in a month.
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narnarpapadaddy 512 days ago
Personally, I think it’s both. Yes, the strategy is important but it’s nothing without the ability to execute. And we’ve all worked with the god-tier engineer who creates never-ending boondoggles because they can. And, yes, the larger the org the harder it is to get both strategy and execution aligned at once.
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psb217 511 days ago
My point was that the scope/impact/value/etc of the contributions made by individual engineers will be determined more by the projects they're working on than by their inherent ability to contribute. So, if we go through the org and cut the bottom 5% of engineers by how much value they added to the company, most cuts will be determined by the context in which an individual was operating rather than their inherent ability to contribute. Ie, the cuts will mostly just punish people for getting stuck with bad managers or lackluster projects.

Of course, some people are obviously great in any context and some are obviously useless (or worse) in any context, but those folks should already be handled appropriately even without the "cut 5%" mandate.

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