Hacker News Reader

Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

I'll take the unpopular opinion and say I don't think the occasional team/company shakeup is always bad.

Often times, the resulting team can be stronger than it was before. Particularly if the organization just went through an extremely ultra-fast hiring spree where it's likely low quality candidates were hired.

The "cut 10% of my pay to save my coworkers" works well if you have a high performing team/company. If you don't, the high performers may become resentful if they start to feel like they're subsidizing the salary of low performers.

View on HN

I am truly amazed at the mythology of "high performers" as separate from the org. Teams can be high performing, but high performing individuals are often built by the environment.

Yet, in the US we have this almost Stakhanovite mythology where a single worker can pull an entire organization.

I have worked with individuals who had been pariahs in the previous org (got that info over beers with the individual) but were rockstars in our org. Also with so-called high-fliers from other teams/companies who just cratered when they joined our group.

Personally I think cutting 10% pay is preferable because a) the work doesn't go away - if 10% are let go, I'll probably end up doing 10%+ more work. b) it's a commitment by the organization and that shows they care enough to not unilaterally make a decision.

  > Yet, in the US we have this almost Stakhanovite mythology where a single worker can pull an entire organization.

wow never heard that term until now, it puts into terms something i've noticed a lot at companies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement

Amusingly I was also quite unaware of this historical footnote until I listened to this song [1] from a Putamayo album that mentioned Stakhanovism and had to look it up.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sncLH_1oONg

> Teams can be high performing, but high performing individuals are often built by the environment.

This is a common bias I experience in American corporate culture and it drives me nuts. Viewing things at the individual level makes it really difficult to understand and cultivate productivity in a sustainable way.

Often I find it more useful to look at productivity at the team level. It tends to have more explanatory power than at the individual level because it gets more into psychological safety, communication, attributes that are crucial for high performing teams but are difficult to suss out if you are just focused on individuals. Like you, I have seen way too many smart people stuck in situations where their skills and talents were completely underutilized. Vice versa there's way too many politically adept but inept individuals out there who have the companies that employ them in a stranglehold. All they do is empty these companies of resources, time and money while bringing nothing of value in return.

> Particularly if the organization just went through an extremely ultra-fast hiring spree where it's likely low quality candidates were hired.

The trick is identifying those low quality candidates. You can try to measure them, but once you measure them they become a target, and you get to the equivalent of the person who takes all the easy jobs from a queue because they then think they'll be higher in the value queue.

> If you don't, the high performers may become resentful if they start to feel like they're subsidizing the salary of low performers.

But then they can always walk, and be replaced by high performers who were axed at other companies.

Most (all?) companies don’t want their high performers to walk away. Especially during a layoff.

Sure, but during mass layoffs, those high performers are a lot more replaceable, and they themselves would know as well, and be disincentivized to walk.

High performing employees are not always fungible. You risk are losing significant expertise and institutional knowledge.

And you might lose more of them by pursuing mass layoffs!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com