In most big companies I've worked at, I thought I could identify the people who made everyone slower and were a net negative to productivity. However, they never seemed to be the ones threatened to be fired. Often they were really good at playing corporate games so that it was really hard to justify firing them, while the ones fired were junior employees who had great potential but weren't as good at politics yet.
So while FB certainly intended to fire underperformers and increase average performance, I doubt they were able to identify the right people for that.
>I thought I could identify the people who made everyone slower and were a net negative to productivity. However, they never seemed to be the ones threatened to be fired.
Or maybe you're not as good of a judge of these things as you think?
Could very well be. Especially in large companies, it's very hard to judge the importance of some roles and people. That's why there are always complains about how promotions work, no one has figured out how to value the work of an employee.
Don't know much about Meta's HR department, maybe they're really good at that. But in the end we're all humans and never unbiased when we make those decisions.
Indeed. While one should always look to check on other biases in play, in my experience "F" players survive layoffs almost as often as "A" players, and it's those in the middle that get hit. (Sometimes this may be because the "F" players aren't getting paid as much, and are therefore cheap.)
Not to mention that the remaining "A" players may each be saddled with the work of ten laid-off "C" players because, as far as management is concerned, programmers are fungible. Why not have their 10x programmer take care of it?
So while FB certainly intended to fire underperformers and increase average performance, I doubt they were able to identify the right people for that.