It's been my experience that, if a company has not had recent layoffs, there is almost always a bottom 10% that is bad enough to be worth cutting. This has been most noticeable to me at companies of 100+. I've always wondered if smaller periodic layoffs would work better than waiting for a downturn to make hard decisions, which seems like the norm.
That's also a great way to ensure that your employees never take risks, ever, and spend most of their time marketing their work rather than improving it.
True, but reddit has less traffic, less users, and less features. For example, Digg shows you which of your friends dugg a story, which is far from trivial.
I like reddit better, but the digg guys are also doing some cool stuff.
It's been my experience that, if a company has not had recent layoffs, there is almost always a bottom 10% that is bad enough to be worth cutting. This has been most noticeable to me at companies of 100+. I've always wondered if smaller periodic layoffs would work better than waiting for a downturn to make hard decisions, which seems like the norm.
That's also a great way to ensure that your employees never take risks, ever, and spend most of their time marketing their work rather than improving it.
Not really, in my experience. At most company's I have worked at, there were some people who were either not carrying their weight, or were in support roles with poor interpersonal skills, or management roles but shirked responsibility. Marketing would not have helped the bottom rung, and very often, they were not smart enough to consider or be able to market their work in the first place.
It's been my experience that, if a company has not had recent layoffs, there is almost always a bottom 10% that is bad enough to be worth cutting. This has been most noticeable to me at companies of 100+. I've always wondered if smaller periodic layoffs would work better than waiting for a downturn to make hard decisions, which seems like the norm.
For very large companies with hundreds of projects, figuring out the "bottom 10%" can be challenging. An average developer on a poor team will look like a rockstar to his/her manager, while a really good developer on a stellar teams will look average at best.
You're talking about average and good. I'm talking about firing "terrible." I find cowardice often prevents hiring mistakes from being corrected quickly, and the accuracy of the interview process is not high enough to prevent those bad hires consistently at most companies.
It's been my experience that, if a company has not had recent layoffs, there is almost always a bottom 10% that is bad enough to be worth cutting. This has been most noticeable to me at companies of 100+. I've always wondered if smaller periodic layoffs would work better than waiting for a downturn to make hard decisions, which seems like the norm.
Enron did something like that IIRC. It may have even been based on peer reviews.
Guilt by association doesn't make a case either way.
True, but reddit has less traffic, less users, and less features. For example, Digg shows you which of your friends dugg a story, which is far from trivial. I like reddit better, but the digg guys are also doing some cool stuff.
I may be mistaken, but it seems like Digg is broken far less often. Just yesterday, people couldn't login to Reddit for nearly the whole day.
I haven't used Digg much in about a year...it lost its charm when they started to make the site too complex with unnecessary features and ever-so-slightly related vertical topics.
I haven't used Digg much in about a year...it lost its charm when they started to make the site too complex with unnecessary features and ever-so-slightly related vertical topics. K.I.S.S. like HN !!
The site was slow and if you read via RSS you couldn't get to the article without going to digg first.
It's been my experience that, if a company has not had recent layoffs, there is almost always a bottom 10% that is bad enough to be worth cutting. This has been most noticeable to me at companies of 100+. I've always wondered if smaller periodic layoffs would work better than waiting for a downturn to make hard decisions, which seems like the norm.
This would become a morale nightmare if employees were ever aware this was taking place, unfortunately. Pretty hard to pull off with consistency/as a standard because of this.
It would only be a morale nightmare if the decisions were made randomly (or for political reasons), and not based on performance/job fit. My experience is that people tend to view letting underperformers go as a positive. It's far more damaging to morale to keep the underperformers around.