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thekeanu t1_iwuf6ug wrote

Reply to comment by Chubacca in 10,000 Google Employees Could Be Rated as Low Performers by ThisIsNotCorn

Depends.

Imagine a team of entirely high performers. That team still has to designate the lowest 6% as low performers and then punish em accordingly.

That's not a good system.

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Chubacca t1_iwvg1hy wrote

Of course. And it's clearly intended to gear up for layoffs. At a massive, massive company though, it's hard to tell exactly how many low performers there are, and 6% is not a crazy number, especially for a company like Google.

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thekeanu t1_iwvwpp8 wrote

It's not just for layoffs. They and many other companies run this type of system on the reg.

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Chubacca t1_iwvz58f wrote

As it says in the article, they already ran this type of system at 2%, they're just switching it to 6%.

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thekeanu t1_iww0lc4 wrote

I'm just saying that the system of targeting even high performers exists in the normal system which is an obvious flaw and could be viewed as "unreasonable" in reference to your original comment.

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Chubacca t1_iww586z wrote

It's impossible to know whether or not 6% includes people who actually are high performers without knowing the internals within Google. That's why I said "doesn't seem crazy unreasonable" not "is definitely not unreasonable".

It's all relative anyways, and it depends on what you're looking for. The bottom 6% of NBA players could be considered "low performers" in that context even if they would be considered "high performers".

The problem with this methodology is you could have some teams with lots of high performers and some teams with lots of low performers, and the teams with high performers could be forced to mark people as low performers who are actually better than people on other teams.

The "right" way to do that would be to say "here is what we assess to be low performance" and then work backward and figure out what percentage of people fit within that category. However, this can be really difficult as measuring performance is very qualitative and by definition relative.

Because we, as outsiders, have very imperfect information here, it's very difficult to make an assessment of "is this a terrible policy" without knowing what they plan to do with the low performers and how they're assessing what is a low performer. I'm not even sure if it's an "each department cuts 6%" or 6% is just an approximation of what their new methodology will produce.

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thekeanu t1_iwwdszg wrote

It all depends on the details, yes, and like you I'm speculating and adding scenarios that could make it unreasonable.

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