> Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here If a company has both 1) A lot of dead wood 2) No better strategy to deal with it than 'turning up the heat' Then this suggests a profound failure of management and leadership. I'd start cutting the dead wood there.
If a company is collecting a lot of "dead wood" underperformers, the correct response is to start raising performance expectations and hold people accountable to those standards. That's essentially what Meta is saying they're going to do. The "...so employees will quit" was an editorialized addition to the headline. The real story is that they're tightening their employee expectations and holding people accountable,…
That it's so employees will quit is the truth of the matter. We shouldn't assume that this is to target "dead wood underperformers". Facebook has a ridiculous performance review scheme that, whatever else it does, is effective at firing people.
They already push people out to sea as a matter of course -- what's happening now is that the economic outlook is unfavorable, and they need people, including decent employees, to quit. They declared a hiring freeze and have announced a policy of attrition. These are normal things that happen during a downturn. It shouldn't be framed as somehow making their workforce more excellent, or as if the people who'll lose their job were "dead wood" anyway. The economy is going to put a lot of people out of work this year, of all sorts.