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Comment by brentr | Hacker News Reader

Certainly. Jack Welch had a similar policy while running GE. Get rid of the dead weight and reward those who outperform.

EDIT: It's simply a matter of economics. When you realize that a project is performing poorly you sever it to prevent further waste.

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This policy of Welch's undoubtedly helped fuel GE's massive profit growth while he was there, by removing a lot of the dead employee weight. (It's outlined in "Straight from the Gut", which is a decent read, if a little too conversational in tone.). However, I've always thought that there approaches a point where this is counter-productive. You're assuming that you can replace those 10% with workers better than they were. But, after you do this long enough, your bottom 10% are probably at least average, or above average, and it may be a better business decision to keep those on instead of hiring and training unknown candidates. At some point there's got to be reduced returns.

In your example the assumptions you make seem to be along the lines that there is a fixed workforce. New candidates enter the market every year. Assuming that the collective whole of graduating seniors from the universities are normally distributed in ability, you are always going to hire a group of people who ultimately will flesh out your bottom 10% even if it is not readily apparent in their first few years of employment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Tenure_as_CEO_of_GE

Here's a link to support my statement.

EDIT: Wikipedia is good enough for this off-the-cuff reference.

One side effect is that no one has any incentive to let their coworkers take credit for anything. Instead, the incentive is to make your coworkers look bad whenever possible. They become your competition.

You are making the assumption that teamwork is not a metric on which people are scored.

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