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> Is your hiring process so flawed that you just accept that you screwed up hiring 5 percent of your people? if you only messed up 5% of your hires you'd be a

> Is your hiring process so flawed that you just accept that you screwed up hiring 5 percent of your people? if you only messed up 5% of your hires you'd be a goddamn genius and every company in the world would want to put you in charge of their hiring process the "standard" is more like 20% of hires end up being bad hires

spacemadness 2y ago
Are these numbers coming out of thin air? Gut feel perhaps? So after you fire 10% and don’t hire, that holds until there is nobody left? Maybe we should stop with the gut feel managerial apologies and think about what we’re doing and how it affects company morale, no?
- hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
  morale is also adversely affected by people having obvious underperformers on their team that they have to work around, so pick your poison
- antisthenes 2y ago
  > Maybe we should stop with the gut feel managerial apologies and think about what we’re doing and how it affects company morale, no? Maybe you can devise a methodology that reduces bad hiring to below 5% across the entire S&P 500 and then share it with us?
- lacker 2y ago
  The numbers are discussed by upper engineering management. They might change over time depending on the situation the company is in. Think of a hypothetical organization with 10,000 software engineers. You're the head of engineering. You have ten divisions, each with a VP managing 1000 engineers. Each VP has ten directors, each managing 100 engineers, and each line manager has 10 engineers on the team. The engineering team reviews the past year. You notice, overall we fired 500 people last year. Okay, so on average that was 5% of staff. Seems reasonable just as a sanity check. (You ask your buddies at other large tech companies, and the other heads of engineering are reporting similar numbers.) Now you look through the individual teams. A lot of 10-person teams don't fire anyone. That makes sense. But would you expect a director to fire nobody from their org? From 100 people... well, maybe. I'd be a little suspicious. I'd ask some other directors, does this person have a reputation of a very high quality team, or is it more likely that this director is lax, and their org doesn't manage out its underperformers? Now imagine a VP fired nobody. 1000 people and they all were high performers. Yeah, that doesn't seem right. That VP is probably letting their team get away with low standards. If you were the head of engineering meeting with your VPs, I think the group would be able to come to a consensus of, there's a problem here. It's based on the 5% target but it's not a hard and fast rule. In the long run, having a high-performing team is better for morale than firing nobody. It's the difference between working at Meta and working at the DMV.
  - voxl 2y ago
    So: You have no measure of performance and go off vibes. You have no scientific basis and go off vibes. You pretend this is all logical and common sense but it's really all just vibes. You could end up performing way better firing half of your teams. And what about your managers? How is an underperforming manager in the higher positions ever fired? I get that measuring performance is incredibly difficult, but dressing it up as if 5-10% of people are underperformers anyway is just so tantamount to how baseless and incompetent most businesses are run these days. Especially in software.
dietr1ch 2y ago
I understand that you made up your 20%, but at that point it feels like you are blaming bad team fit or environment as bad hires, and this fitting can change over time as bad politics or shifts to different goals happen.
- hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
  bad hire doesn't necessarily mean bad/stupid/incompetent person, it just means bad hire. might not be a fit for the role, might not be a fit for the company. for example, i freely admit i was a bad hire at Google because i got demotivated by big corporate/political bullshit getting in my way, it just wasn't for me. then i went to a 20 startup and, in the words of the CEO, "saved the company" and scaled it to 200 people and no i didn't make up 20%, Gartner did a study on it. and most people with management/hiring experience report the same.
  - darth_avocado 2y ago
    But firing people for performance is framed as the person is bad/stupid/incompetent. The problem with the 5% quota is that it doesn’t necessarily mean you get rid of 5% bad fits. It often results in arbitrary top down push to fire x number of people in the org, which then translates to people with most political prowess keep their jobs and their headcounts while competent people get gaslighted, overworked and eventually fired because of moving goalposts. These people get put on PIP and eventually fired, often by telling them they are bad/incompetent and criticizing them excessively and pulling apart every single thing they do. Some people don’t care about this treatment, but others often face severe physical and mental health problems due to the excessive stress that is put on them.
    - colin_jack 2y ago
      Also since we are mentioning Google, they had some interesting to say in one of their books [0]: "Ratings, although an important way to measure performance during a specific period, are not predictive of future performance and should not be used to gauge readiness for a future role or qualify an internal candidate for a different team. (They can, however, be used to evaluate whether an employee is properly or improperly slotted on their current team; therefore, they can provide an opportunity to evaluate how to better support an internal candidate moving forward.)" [0] https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch04.html#challenge_established_processes https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch04.html#challeng...
tauwauwau 2y ago
Other than agreeing with "spacemadness", I wanted to point out a small correction. Original argument was about 5% of total employees, not only new hires.
xracy 2y ago
5% of your new hires, doesn't necessarily mean 5% of your company. https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-facebook-employees/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-faceboo... ^But let's say you messed up hiring 20% of your company, and then you corrected that (layoffs for the past 2 years). You haven't hired enough people to justify perma-cutting 5%. And the number of functioning employees who stop working in a role isn't going to be as high as 5%. The reality is that most hires are probably fine in the role they're in. And you don't actually need to be this aggressive in cost-cutting.
- lacker 2y ago
  This specific target being discussed was 5% of all headcount, not just new hires. You shouldn't think of all firing as a "mistaken hire". Sometimes you hire someone, and they work effectively for years, and then they kind of "check out" and don't do much work any more. It can be a good decision to hire someone, and then later a good decision to fire them. It's also not a cost-cutting measure per se. Typically when you fire someone you get to replace the headcount with another hire or internal transfer. The point of firing people is to get rid of low performers and replace them with high performers.
  - xigency 2y ago
    This is somehow better than exploring ways to improve your existing employees' performance?
    - qwe----3 2y ago
      There are people ready to be hired that aren't checked out
      - xigency 2y ago
        Sure. This is a great model to adopt if you believe corporations exist to destroy people. If a construction site was sending formerly qualified people away no longer able to work we would definitely investigate their practices. Tech deserves the same scrutiny.

spacemadness 2y ago

Are these numbers coming out of thin air? Gut feel perhaps? So after you fire 10% and don’t hire, that holds until there is nobody left? Maybe we should stop with the gut feel managerial apologies and think about what we’re doing and how it affects company morale, no?

hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
morale is also adversely affected by people having obvious underperformers on their team that they have to work around, so pick your poison
antisthenes 2y ago
> Maybe we should stop with the gut feel managerial apologies and think about what we’re doing and how it affects company morale, no? Maybe you can devise a methodology that reduces bad hiring to below 5% across the entire S&P 500 and then share it with us?
lacker 2y ago
The numbers are discussed by upper engineering management. They might change over time depending on the situation the company is in. Think of a hypothetical organization with 10,000 software engineers. You're the head of engineering. You have ten divisions, each with a VP managing 1000 engineers. Each VP has ten directors, each managing 100 engineers, and each line manager has 10 engineers on the team. The engineering team reviews the past year. You notice, overall we fired 500 people last year. Okay, so on average that was 5% of staff. Seems reasonable just as a sanity check. (You ask your buddies at other large tech companies, and the other heads of engineering are reporting similar numbers.) Now you look through the individual teams. A lot of 10-person teams don't fire anyone. That makes sense. But would you expect a director to fire nobody from their org? From 100 people... well, maybe. I'd be a little suspicious. I'd ask some other directors, does this person have a reputation of a very high quality team, or is it more likely that this director is lax, and their org doesn't manage out its underperformers? Now imagine a VP fired nobody. 1000 people and they all were high performers. Yeah, that doesn't seem right. That VP is probably letting their team get away with low standards. If you were the head of engineering meeting with your VPs, I think the group would be able to come to a consensus of, there's a problem here. It's based on the 5% target but it's not a hard and fast rule. In the long run, having a high-performing team is better for morale than firing nobody. It's the difference between working at Meta and working at the DMV.
- voxl 2y ago
  So: You have no measure of performance and go off vibes. You have no scientific basis and go off vibes. You pretend this is all logical and common sense but it's really all just vibes. You could end up performing way better firing half of your teams. And what about your managers? How is an underperforming manager in the higher positions ever fired? I get that measuring performance is incredibly difficult, but dressing it up as if 5-10% of people are underperformers anyway is just so tantamount to how baseless and incompetent most businesses are run these days. Especially in software.

dietr1ch 2y ago

I understand that you made up your 20%, but at that point it feels like you are blaming bad team fit or environment as bad hires, and this fitting can change over time as bad politics or shifts to different goals happen.

hnthrowaway6543 2y ago
bad hire doesn't necessarily mean bad/stupid/incompetent person, it just means bad hire. might not be a fit for the role, might not be a fit for the company. for example, i freely admit i was a bad hire at Google because i got demotivated by big corporate/political bullshit getting in my way, it just wasn't for me. then i went to a 20 startup and, in the words of the CEO, "saved the company" and scaled it to 200 people and no i didn't make up 20%, Gartner did a study on it. and most people with management/hiring experience report the same.
- darth_avocado 2y ago
  But firing people for performance is framed as the person is bad/stupid/incompetent. The problem with the 5% quota is that it doesn’t necessarily mean you get rid of 5% bad fits. It often results in arbitrary top down push to fire x number of people in the org, which then translates to people with most political prowess keep their jobs and their headcounts while competent people get gaslighted, overworked and eventually fired because of moving goalposts. These people get put on PIP and eventually fired, often by telling them they are bad/incompetent and criticizing them excessively and pulling apart every single thing they do. Some people don’t care about this treatment, but others often face severe physical and mental health problems due to the excessive stress that is put on them.
  - colin_jack 2y ago
    Also since we are mentioning Google, they had some interesting to say in one of their books [0]: "Ratings, although an important way to measure performance during a specific period, are not predictive of future performance and should not be used to gauge readiness for a future role or qualify an internal candidate for a different team. (They can, however, be used to evaluate whether an employee is properly or improperly slotted on their current team; therefore, they can provide an opportunity to evaluate how to better support an internal candidate moving forward.)" [0] https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch04.html#challenge_established_processes https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch04.html#challeng...

tauwauwau 2y ago

Other than agreeing with "spacemadness", I wanted to point out a small correction. Original argument was about 5% of total employees, not only new hires.

xracy 2y ago

5% of your new hires, doesn't necessarily mean 5% of your company. https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-facebook-employees/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-faceboo... ^But let's say you messed up hiring 20% of your company, and then you corrected that (layoffs for the past 2 years). You haven't hired enough people to justify perma-cutting 5%. And the number of functioning employees who stop working in a role isn't going to be as high as 5%. The reality is that most hires are probably fine in the role they're in. And you don't actually need to be this aggressive in cost-cutting.

lacker 2y ago
This specific target being discussed was 5% of all headcount, not just new hires. You shouldn't think of all firing as a "mistaken hire". Sometimes you hire someone, and they work effectively for years, and then they kind of "check out" and don't do much work any more. It can be a good decision to hire someone, and then later a good decision to fire them. It's also not a cost-cutting measure per se. Typically when you fire someone you get to replace the headcount with another hire or internal transfer. The point of firing people is to get rid of low performers and replace them with high performers.
- xigency 2y ago
  This is somehow better than exploring ways to improve your existing employees' performance?
  - qwe----3 2y ago
    There are people ready to be hired that aren't checked out
    - xigency 2y ago
      Sure. This is a great model to adopt if you believe corporations exist to destroy people. If a construction site was sending formerly qualified people away no longer able to work we would definitely investigate their practices. Tech deserves the same scrutiny.