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Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

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29athrowaway·

If your CEO is a MBA you will have 10% layoffs every year, with hiring happening simultaneously.

It is called the vitality curve.

They believe that in a given workforce, 10% are non-producers and have to be put in a PIP or laid off.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve

These layoffs usually happen at the same time during the year.

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Yup, and I find it incredible that seemingly very intelligent people make absolutely insane decisions like this. Is this short-term greed that makes MBAs do dumb stuff?

MBAs do not use the scientific method. They do whatever has worked before even if the understanding of how it worked is incorrect.

In other words, they keep cargo-culting it, claiming responsibility for the wins and blaming staff, the economy, etc. for the losses.

Yes. That is why AI will outperform them.

would be funny explaining to the markets that the company is doing a double blind experiment with layoffs.

Well, when the observed conclusion can't absolutely follow from the premises, you are supposed to reevaluate your premises.

I'd start with that "very intelligent" one.

I don’t get why everyone is so skeptical of this. It makes sense to me based on my experience. Everywhere I’ve worked has had an obvious bottom 10% that was low or negative productivity.

I think stack ranking is bad, but accelerating un-regrettable attrition is a no brainer if you want high performing teams.

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