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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

It's not possible to measure with 100% accuracy, but let's not kid ourselves every company and every division can easily pick out the bottom 10-15% of devs who have close to zero real impact. The actual number in fact is likely far greater than that.

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Anecdote coming up, but when Google laid off a bunch of people those that I know that worked there said the most critical people on their teams were the ones let go.

And yet there has been no operational impact at Google since the layoffs...so maybe they weren't so critical after all?

What do you mean "no operational impact"? How did you measure that? People on this site are constantly complaining how horrible the Google services became.

Over the last 3+X years, not suddenly after 1-2 years of layoffs.

I can bet that if you bring Google Reader up, you'll get a lot more complaining - than any "horrible Google services" topic.

Layoffs were 6 months ago.

Google services became worse in periods when they doubled headcount year over year than when they did layoffs.

Again, how did you measure that? Because that sounds like the same kind of MBA crock.

How do you measure everything you are claiming?

In my opinion, if you haven't measured something then it's kinda disingenuous to make objective-seeming quantifiable claims about it. Especially without including a qualifier like "in my experience... " or "I'd speculate that... ".

I mean people can be critical without being load bearing.

If you decide to stop paying your water bill you don't lose service that same day. Typically these layoffs either cause or are a sign of stagnation and then some scrappy startup starts eating away at your market share.

> And yet there has been no operational impact at Google since the layoffs...so maybe they weren't so critical after all?

How do you even know that?

Usually the only way that you will see that, as a customer, is when the people who left are unable to keep up with all the firefighting and things ultimately explode. Either with outages or a security breach.

You can accumulate a _lot_ of tech debt before customers notice. For smaller companies, that's often a fatal amount of debt.

Hah - you never know! Maybe they failed to innovate a way to cram another above the fold ad onto the SERP page due to laying off too many of their “best” people

The intersection between politically/socially unpopular and low impact.

in my experience is greater than the intersection between the politically/socially popular and low impact.

This feels like an appeal to intuition. I have no doubt that senior management believes they can do this accurately, but I'm not sure why I ought to agree.

> every company and every division can easily pick out the bottom 10-15% of devs who have close to zero real impact.

Can they? In my experience, they don't tend to do this when it comes to deciding who to lay off. I assumed this was because they can't tell who the bottom 10-15% are.

Team members can tell, but can upper management?

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