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Comment by kennywinker | Hacker News Reader

Citation needed. alternative strategies would include:

Rewarding good employees and firing bad ones.

Deciding on actual useful performance metrics ahead of time and measuring people against them.

What you say makes sense, but have in mind that it's not that easy to selectively fire employees (as opposed to mass layoffs) in big companies, at least in California. It's arguable whether it should be easy to do that, but firing any employee - even with a very good reason - can open your company to a nasty lawsuit in many states. You can simply call it the cost of doing business, but big companies are scared to death of big labor lawsuits, especially class actions, as clever lawyers can often find some interesting pattern in the fired employees.

If I had one wish, it would be that we would all give up that rude “citation needed” trope. I agree with you, yet that’s such a childish way to argue that it hurts the point. Just have the confidence to say you don’t agree!

What I mean by that is more than “i don’t agree” - it’s “hey, it looks like you asserted an opinion as fact”.

I’m pretty sure all ways of saying that come off rude. Sometimes rudeness is irreducible, and I think this is one of those times. I like “citation needed” because to me it seems like a playful version of rude rather than a serious version of rude. Shrugging emoji

A very reasonable interpretation of turning up the heat is exactly to start doing a better job of holding people accountable to your already established ladder.

That would be a reasonable interpretation if the next words out of his mouth weren’t

“Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals…”

First, I think goals and expectations are different. That said, it’s possible to have intended to always be setting ambitious goals but look back and see that maybe you were unintentionally coasting. Fixing that problem isn’t nefarious.

I think reading into this any deeper is just succumbing to a leakers goal of finding sound bites which sound bad to get people all excited and angry.

You can word dance around it all you want - his intent is clear: working at meta is going to be harder tomorrow than it was yesterday, with the intent that some people will quit over it.

How you feel about that depends on if you see yourself as more similar to an owner of meta, or as a worker at meta.

I’ve seen the pain low performers cause others around them as an IC and having the company try and fix that problem seems very reasonable. But who knows, for all we know this could just be rhetoric to inspire some initiative.

Assuming people that don’t support your strong gut reaction to this leak view themselves as “an owner of meta” is strange—my views here are very much colored by my experience as an IC at a similar company where I thought I’d be happier, as a worker, if we could do a better job at both managing low performers and firing leakers.

Why do you care, as a worker, about leakers and low performers? I understand being frustrated if people you work with are obstructionist, poor communicators, or have bad attitudes - but in my experience most of those people would be classified by the company as HIGH performers. The “low performers” are, in my experience, the most fun to work with.

This is exactly what they are doing with one improvement: instead of firing, they are allowing attrition to happen naturally. That’s better than layoffs

Why is that better?

Making everybody suffer until some people leave because it’s intolerable to them… that doesn’t sound better to me.

It’s not “making people suffer”. It is having high expectations for performance that A-players and teams can easily hit. If companies are going to survive during a crisis time when the whole world is facing headwinds, there is no margin for error, at FB or anywhere.

Layoffs are always awful, they take jobs away from people without them having a say. They should always be a last resort.

End result is the same people without jobs. Raising expectations and making people quit has the side effect of those “low performers” leaving, some people easily hitting the expectations, and most people busting their ass to keep up. Sounds bad to me.

I don’t really see this as an extinction level downturn for fb. Time will tell, but I’d be shocked if this seriously threatened the company in any way except its share price.

It seems unlikely to me that they'll turn up the pressure on the high performers. More likely they'll just raise the bar for what is considered adequate. The real pain will be having less people to do the work, but that happens with layoffs as well.

Ok so high performers are fine, low performers are out. What about everyone else?

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