
Ask HN: Do you work in a company that will fire you for average performance? - kisna72
I heard in NPR today that Netflix fires people that are average and only keeps those that are exceptional. Does any one have any experience working in such a company? When I heard about netflix, it seemed like life would be very stressful if you always have to worry about getting fired. But on the plus side, you get to learn a lot and work with exceptional people, which is a great way to learn. ANy experiences or opinions?
======
Delmania
In general, performance reviews are great in theory, but fall down in
application. Theoretically, a review is a time to talk about the great work
you did, what you learned, and what your goals are. Your manage can respond
will honest feedback and a merit increase.

The reality is reviews are a part of a process, and your rank in them depends
in part on the quota set by HR. Most of the time, HR wants employees to fit
within a bell curve for rankings. In some extreme examples, people's reviews
were based on a predetermined track and not on actual performance.

Netflix's policy is just HR marketing. If all you do is keep your 4 and 5,
then what makes those people 4 and 5 will start to become 2 and 3. It's a
moving goalpost, and sounds like an effort to increase productivity without
increasing compensation.

I may be jaded.

~~~
ssharp
If you fire all the 1's, 2's, and 3's, you have to hire people to fill in
those positions. And in one year, the whole group gets re-evaluated, including
the new hires. I'd think it would take quite a few cycles before the people
who were 4's and 5's became 2's and 3's, while maintaining their same levels
of productivity.

I think GE was well known for doing a similar practice under Jack Welsch and
they still had plenty of long-term employees. I don't think the system is
particularly desirable though.

~~~
plonh
Culling the bottom 10% is great when you measure accurately and you have 15%
dead weight. But what about when those conditions are not met?

~~~
kazinator
Legend has it that Vancouver's billionaire tycoon Jim Pattison ...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Pattison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Pattison)

... used to have a policy in effect in his car dealerships that the worst
producing salesman would be fired every month.

For instance, this is remarked upon in this National Post article:

[http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=fb5f68f1-5946-4b46...](http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=fb5f68f1-5946-4b46-8a1b-6428db31d1d7)

(search for word "salesman"). I think, no conditions were applied. Worst just
meant not as many sales or as much revenue as the second worst salesman.

~~~
sshine
Can you volunteer as tribute, though?

------
rhino369
I work in a law firm that will fire great attorneys. It's part of the big law
business model. Up or out and very few get up'd into partnership. So
eventually you get fired (after 8-12 years depending on firm.)

So I know eventually my ass will get fired. It's just a matter of when.

I don't really understand it. But it's how the industry works.

Edit: 8-12 is for unambiguously great attorneys. A lot of decent attorneys get
shown the door after 4-6 years. People who can't hack it (usually because they
won't put up with be worked like a slave) will only make it 2-4 years. A lot
of people quit.

~~~
brianwawok
At 8-12 years do you get paid more than a new hire? Seems a "good" way to keep
costs down, having the bulk of work done by the new guys - and a few partners
to oversee everything.

The downside is the average experience of your employee is going to be a lot
lower, but that must not be the top goal of the law firms that employee this.

~~~
kevinschumacher
Just one example of a big law firm in NY:

[http://www.lawfirmstats.com/firms/Willkie-Farr-
Gallagher/all...](http://www.lawfirmstats.com/firms/Willkie-Farr-
Gallagher/all-offices/compensation.php)

Newly hired attorneys make US 160k, while those 8 years in typically make US
280k.

There's a little bit of movement if you've changed firms, but there's a good
chance if you work for a big law firm you're in this ballpark.

A partner's comp is structured differently.

~~~
rhino369
If you add in bonus, it's there is an even bigger difference. This past year
first years got 15k bonus, and 8th years got 100k.

combined: 175k for first, 380k for 8th years.

~~~
sixtypoundhound
To your point below, I suspect the 8-10 year person is creating more value
with less supervision than a new hire. Being able to manage a project/client
solo, even a small one, makes your work incremental revenue to the firm. More
so if you're involved in bringing in the business....

I have new hires; they take a LOT more supervision... and our group's output
is limited to the speed at which our senior folks can originate projects...

~~~
brianwawok
I mean I would rather have 2 10 year experienced developers than 3 brand new
developers, even if the cost was the same.

But maybe law firms do not think this way..

------
throwawayyahoo
Each quarter Yahoo employees are rated and placed into one of five categories:
misses, occasionally misses, achieves, exceeds, greatly exceeds:

[http://pastebin.com/KEQjYynr](http://pastebin.com/KEQjYynr)

A number of my boss's reports had landed in the achieves category for all of
2014, but nonetheless received a communication from HR this past April that
they were in the bottom 5% of the company for 2014 and at risk for termination
if their performance did not improve. This surprised my boss and the reports.

Obviously if you're in the bottom 5% you're well below average. The question
is how you can consistently be ranked in the middle category yet nonetheless
be in the bottom 5%. That would seem to make the quarterly ratings a rather
pointless exercise for communicating to employees what their ongoing
performance is.

~~~
michaelochurch
Sounds like Marissa Mayer took Google's stack-ranking machinery and
replicated, awful detail by awful detail. What a queynte.

At Google, the bottom categories are rarely used and "Meets Expectations" is a
huge window (3.0-3.4) from the 3rd to 65th percentile. Since you only get your
bucket, your manager could be saying that he's giving you a perfectly
respectable 3.4, while actually raping you in the ass with a 3.0.

Often, you have managers who give the 3.0 and 3.1 to keep reports immobile
(they can't transfer) while conveying that they are getting average or
average-plus scores. But whenever there's a witch-hunt-I-mean-dishonest-
layoff-I-mean-"Low Performer Initiative" those people given 3.0s get hit with
PIPs, which is not what even their managers wanted.

~~~
dang
We've banned this account. Calling Marissa Mayer a cunt is an egregious
violation of the civility that HN requires. (Using an archaic spelling doesn't
change that, it just makes it weird.) No one gets to do this here.

I told you just three days ago that if you wouldn't or couldn't stop doing
this, I would ban your account [1]. This comes after more warnings, reminders,
cajolings, and please-dont's than anyone has received in the history of HN by
a long shot. It's painfully evident that you won't or can't stop, and it's
time we applied the rules equally.

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9994684](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9994684)

Edit: the parent comment was killed by user flags. We didn't delete it or
moderate it.

~~~
fortyseven11
The real reason why michaelochurch was banned:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10011017](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10011017)
.

~~~
dang
No. I don't know what that comment means, but presumably it's a sophomoric
joke, and we don't ban people for that.

The reasons are the ones I gave and have given many times.

------
sjbase
I worked in a company like that. Everyone was ranked against their peers, and
if you were below ~40% more than two years in a row, you were "counseled out."

I didn't find it stressful. Partly because I was never in danger, and partly
because I knew what I was getting into. But I think it's a bad practice,
mainly because it just doesn't work. Empirically what I've observed is a bunch
of people in the wrong role, not the wrong company.

It's expensive to fire people: companies could save a lot by making lateral
moves easier, and doing better internal matchmaking. As in matching people
<\--> responsibilities, not like... dating :).

~~~
plonh
How did you find enough new hires to replace the massive attrition? Or did
high achievers alternate between working hard and slacking off?

~~~
brianwawok
What is the normal tech company attrition? I would think 20-30% seems
normalish, but I never had full HR docs of a fortune 500 company or anything
to look at. Generally a bunch of people quit after 1 or 2 years - if not you
stayed for 10-20. If most of the fired people were the going to quit anyways
people, no big change. (But i assume at least some of the low performers are
the 20 year vets as they are burned out)

------
shawabawa3
Imo it's just marketing.

They want to be known as a place where only exceptional people work in the
hopes that they'll get higher quality hires.

In reality they'll fire people for the same reasons any other company does

~~~
ams6110
All our programmers are above average. LOL. Garrison Keillor maybe helping
with their PR?

------
overgard
I have a theory that the talent level at most companies has almost nothing to
do with ridiculous HR policies, but rather two things:

1) Project/Field 2) Name brand recognition

The game industry has a lot of overqualified people on very poor salaries in
poor conditions because games are sexy. Google has both sexy projects and name
brand recognition, which allows them to recruit top level talent despite the
fact that their interview process is absurd and frankly, pretty insulting to
qualified professionals (can you imagine doctors or lawyers going through
similar processes?). Reason being, having google on your resume opens a lot of
doors, and there's a chance you get to work on something really cool.

So I don't know anyone that works at Netflix, but I would believe they have
mostly above average engineers not because of this bizarre practice of firing
"average" people, but because they have enough recognition to find above
average people in the first place.

------
analog31
_But on the plus side, you get to learn a lot and work with exceptional
people, which is a great way to learn._

Exceptional at politics and boss management.

------
rhino369
That certainly colors the year long parental leave program Netflix just rolled
out.

Yea take a year, no problem!

But remember, we fire average people! Do average people take a year? You
decide for yourself!

------
thearn4
"average" with respect to the company, or the population of programmers as a
whole? If normally distributed and sufficiently large, you'd be getting rid of
half your company under the former. The latter seems like a tough thing to
measure to begin with. I can't imagine either really being the case.

Though it does sound somewhat similar to the concept of "stack ranking", which
a few companies (such as MS) are notable for having used as part of their
annual review process in the past.

Stack ranking has always sounded to me like an absolutely poisonous thing to
implement in an otherwise healthy office. But if the organization knows that
it needs to implement a reduction in force regardless, then I guess it might
make sense if management does not have a feel for who their best engineers
are.

~~~
brudgers
The advantage of stack ranking is that it's a formal process, and one in which
managers' behavior is more measurable and reviews are definitively scheduled.
It also aligns employee churn with performance to some degree, moving weaker
hires out and encouraging better hires to stay, again via a formal process.

What it reduces is the tendency of less formal processes to give raises to
those who ask and to stiff those who don't and to throw up the "your salary is
confidential". All those things it avoids are known to create a high potential
for bad company culture and moral.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Considering the quality of software and innovation produced by MS while stack
ranking was in place, and the drop in software quality coming out of Google
after its own version of stack ranking was introduced, it seems unlikely to be
effective.

As I understand it individuals were stack ranked within teams, so even if a
team outperformed the company or industry average, individuals were still
tagged as underperformers.

And generally it became a matter of politics, popularity, and self-promotion,
not objective competence - which is hard to measure anyway.

To me, it seems like a fast road to madness.

As for Netflix - I can't imagine any company needs to be staffed entirely by
ninja rockstar code demi-gods. Many development projects are mundane and by
the numbers, and basic competence is fine. If you want to be disruptive, hire
a core of creative innovators who can code. They probably won't be ninjas, but
for product development, talented customer-oriented innovators are a really
good thing in any business that sells stuff to real customers.

------
bsg75
If you eliminate the "average" segment of your staff, then the "exceptional"
team members become the new average, and you terminate the next average group,
you eventually wind up with one - maybe two.

~~~
Eye_of_Mordor
If you eliminate the "average" segment of your staff, then you fire good staff
next time around.

Alternatively: if you eliminate the "average" segment of your staff, then you
fire their "average" replacements next time around?

~~~
notahacker
In practice, many firms eliminate the "average" section of staff and replace
with fresh grads who aren't particularly likely to be better than "average"
but are cheap.

Rinse and repeat often enough (and preferably with an incentive scheme that
justifies average starting pay and ridiculous working hours with the promise
of fantastic rewards _if you manage not to get fired for the first three
years_ ) and bizarrely, you get a reputation for high standards.

------
rm_-rf_slash
I work in academia, where things move slowly. When lag is expected, turnover
is expensive. Also, it being a university, my employer is much more concerned
with educating us and broadening our skill sets, rather than discarding
employees like a half-eaten slice of pizza that didn't quite have as much
pepperoni as you wanted.

------
iimpact
Looks like Intel sure does...

[https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/3fvss3/r...](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/3fvss3/regarding_recent_intel_layoffs/)

------
johngalt
Have you ever met someone who was a hobbyist or amateur engineer at best, but
always has grand ideas about how things _should_ work? But has no idea of the
type of investment or execution it would take to pull off. That is what I
think of whenever I hear management strategies like these. It is like the
management version of the compost fueled cars guy:

[https://youtu.be/DkGMY63FF3Q?t=10s](https://youtu.be/DkGMY63FF3Q?t=10s)

Deciding that you only want the best people is easy. Is there really a
business out there who decides they want terrible staff? Determining who those
people are is extremely difficult. Even if you are successful in identifying
the best people, can you keep them? Whenever I find exceptional people, it
takes more than 'not firing' them to keep them.

More realistically. Policies like these aren't designed with any idea of
identifying or retaining talent. Instead they are usually a means to affect
work culture. Like grading on a curve. It makes everyone work harder.

------
ChuckMcM
I would be worried that it make performance management of _managers_
difficult. Which is to say a manager who fires people as a way of preventing
themselves from being fired. The trick being "Yeah, last quarter did kind of
suck but we fired that loser Bob, this quarter will be great." In fact there
are a couple of reasons why the quarter was poor, it could have been poor Bob
but it could also be the manager isn't cutting it. Unless the group has the
option of voting the manager out of the organization, the whole "save the
best, fire the rest" algorithm has problems. Or more accurately it has a blind
spot with respect to management.

The interesting question for NetFlix will be how durable it will be as a
structure. My impression is that it selects for the wrong attributes in
management. But time will tell.

~~~
brudgers
Because there is a structure, I suspect stack ranking makes it easier to
identify empire building. Highly ranked individuals should exhibit behaviors
that correlate with their high ranking such as moving to more challenging work
within or without the team and company. High ranked individuals should be the
sort of people that the next couple of layers of management are aware of
because they create value and solve hard problems. High ranked individuals
should be the ones other managers are trying to poach sideways. High ranked
individuals should be the ones that the manager relies on to explain technical
detail to upper management layers. They should natural have a particular kind
of visibility on email strings.

Any culture where a manager can explain away a bad quarter by blaming their
underlings is already screwed.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I agree with that last bit, but there is anecdotal evidence from employees
that there is some validity to keeping a ready supply of people you can
jettison out of your group in order to maintain altitude.

~~~
brudgers
If I put myself in the shoes of a good manager, what do I do under stack
ranking?

If my team is strong bottom to top, I try to find soft landings for my lower
ranked employees because...well making people successful is what good managers
do and concern for people as individuals beyond instrumental value is also a
positive trait and it just seems fair and right in a karmic sense of the
world.

On the the other hand, if the bottom people aren't really strong, a good
manager gets cover for going against their positive traits.

~~~
ChuckMcM
As with most things, it works great with the design ideal person in the key
positions. All organizational structures can work fabulously well when all you
have are good managers and employees[1]. The question then is how does the
organizational structure/guidelines deal with bad actors? All management
structures include some sort of performance management, both for individual
contributors and managers. Generally there is an incentive plan, a retention
plan, and an attrition plan. You provide incentives to encourage people to
perform beyond their own expectations, you provide a retention plan to keep
the people who are delivering day to day, and you provide an attrition plan
for helping people who aren't working out into a position somewhere else where
they have a chance of being more successful. This is just management 101, the
trick though is forced attrition and grain level boundaries (outlines of
various attrition pools).

Forced attrition plans set up the dynamic that you find yourself in a pool of
peers and you know that no matter what, every year one of you is going to get
let go. You don't want it to be you, you know that you can be meeting all of
the objectives of the organization and still be "the guy (or gal)" because no
matter what, someone is going to get picked. My assertion is that bad
managers, ones who embrace behaviors that good managers do not, can find ways
to protect themselves at the expense of the good managers. It isn't good for
the company of course, but the dynamic is already launched into motion. Given
a very small epsilon that bad (in this case unprincipled) managers are
probabilistically slightly less likely to lose their jobs, the system will
slowly over time select for effective, but morally ambiguous managers. This is
a very common evolutionary experiment folks run in simulation all the time.
The smaller the epsilon the longer it takes, but it always happens.

[1] Sometimes that leads people astray into thinking it is their
organizational structure, not their people, which accounts for their success.

------
jondubois
I think it's wrong. It creates an arrogant, elitist culture within the
company. Also I don't think anyone in the world knows what an 'exceptional
engineer' is - If there even is such a thing.

If you put too much pressure on engineers to produce lines of code, they will
optimize for that at the expense of quality/maintainability of the project.

I have worked for a number of startups which advocated the practice of
'cutting corners'. I think it doesn't work in practice because technical debt
tends to creep up on you much sooner than you think. Unless the whole
company's future is hinging around meeting a specific deadline for a specific
feature, then there is no excuse for cutting corners.

I think the personality of the engineer is much more important than their
skills. I have worked at companies that fired people after the first month -
This is ridiculous.

You wouldn't fire a business executive after 1 month on the job because of
poor growth metrics - The downtrend is probably a flow-on effect from past
periods of mismanagement. This is exactly the same in engineering. You can't
measure the consequences of technical decisions until many months of even
years after they are implemented.

While you might think you're firing 'bad engineers' \- You are in fact just
firing random engineers based on random events like market timing, which team
they are part of, direction of the wind, phase of the moon, etc... Just chaos.

------
PythonicAlpha
The question is also very much, how performance is measured. I saw performance
measuring that was on the level of "solved tickets" \-- with some special
cases: E.g. when you did all the research and somebody else closed the ticket
(with minimal effort), it was his.

There where plenty of fraudulent abuse of this system and in the aftermath, I
guess it would have been better to flip a coin!

In such a system, the performance measuring as such, is undermining the
corporate culture.

------
visakanv
"Fire you for average performance" is a bit of a loaded term and implies a
certain unfairness or vindictiveness.

I'd rephrase that to be– do you work in a team with uncommonly high standards?
I'd imagine this to be the case at any cutting-edge company. Consider say, the
special forces in any military. If you don't meet the grade, or you don't
carry your fair share of the weight, you don't get to stay. That's just tha
name of the game. I assume that this must be the case at all the exciting
companies– Tesla, Google, Apple, Facebook, etc etc.

It's not stressful if the expectations are set in advance, and the precise
conditions for firing are clearly stated, and you get the feedback and
assistance you need to stay afloat.

I work with a small team that prides itself on being results-oriented, and I
love it. As far as I can tell, everybody we hired is hired because they bring
their A game.

I'd much prefer this to being a part of a team that "carries" people who don't
perform.

Of course, we've all also heard horror stories by now of ridiculous young
founders who come up with extreme ideas about productivity, 80-100 hour work
weeks and whatnot. Sustainability is important.

------
Simulacra
My company will fire you for average performance. They do it quite pointedly.
One day you're at your desk, and an HR rep with an armed security guard will
come and get you. They'll escort you to an office, explain that you're being
terminated, and remind you that you're an at-will employee. They'll give you
some forms about insurance, and then the guard will walk you to the door. They
do not let you clean out your desk. They not let you say goodbye to anyone.
Sadly, this is the same procedure that my company uses if you give notice.
They do not except two weeks notice. The same day you give notice, or perhaps
a day or two later, you will go through this ritual.

To your point, I work for a sales organization. It doesn't matter if your
performance reviews are outstanding. If you go more than a couple of weeks
without results, the director of sales operations begin sending you nasty
emails. Within a month after that, your escorted out the door.

This might be just the sales world, but at some point people deserve to be
treated like human beings. Not like replaceable cattle.

------
rwhitman
The keyword you're looking for here is "topgrading". Basically it's management
social darwinism that breaks down a team into "A Players" "B Players" and so
on with the end goal being to weed out anything below "A-" by applying extra
pressure on them until they either turn into "A players", or quit. Firing is a
last resort. Netflix in particular is well known for encouraging people to
voluntarily quit if they can't hack it.

The question is of course if all the "A Players" live and breath the company,
voluntarily coming into the office on weekends, doing conference calls at 4AM
etc - and you are the kind of person who values their family for instance, and
wants a little work life separation, what score do you get? What happens if
when offered a year long paternity leave, you actually take them up on it? How
hostile will the environment be at the company when you return? Or what
happens if you have a medical problem that impacts your job performance? And
so on...

But, to answer your question... I once got sucked into a management overhaul
at a company that used Netflix-style topgrading as justification for a wave of
layoffs. The whole self-deportation aspect of it doesn't work very well -
people dragging their feet in a job are often reluctantly there because they
need things like medical insurance, have bills to pay and families to feed.
Being able to just up and voluntarily quit a job because you're "not a good
fit" is a luxury. So everyone who was a "B Player" (aka in a role that wasn't
well defined) got put through hell for a month then fired, and then the
remaining "A Players" lost morale and took up the voluntary quitting aspect.
So basically it backfired into brain-drain and a chronic "A Player" retention
problem.

------
seiji
Old but good post ("where everybody is above average"):
[http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-
wobeg...](http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobegon-
strategy.html)

~~~
BraveNewCurency
Interesting post, I hadn't seen that before. Here is another factor to worry
about: If you hire too many mediocre programmers, the good ones will leave.
(Trust me, they can get jobs easily.) You'll be stuck with the mediocre ones.

[http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-
the-d...](http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-dead-sea-
effect/)

I think the NetFlix strategy is partly a response to this.

People pretend there is a 10x difference between programmers. I assure you
that is way too low. The difference is actually Infinite, because
contributions can be negative (I've seen a bad programmer set back a project
by 6 months). Even worse, a programmer can create a toxic atmosphere, causing
good programmers to leave.

I like the NetFlix strategy. Some people are just a hell of a lot more
productive than other people. (Example:
[http://bellard.org/](http://bellard.org/) )

~~~
seiji
_I assure you that is way too low. The difference is actually Infinite_

Exactly. There's also the case when someone is highly productive but only for
_themselves_. They create all their own tools, their own environments, their
own platforms, they follow their own homemade software development practices,
use their own testing tools, and none of it integrates with the rest of the
world. But, because one person made everything, that _single_ person is super
productive (as long as they never step outside their own platform). They don't
need documentation because they made everything from the ground up and their
systems reflect their personal brain state.

Then you have to ask, even though one person is 10x, does it really help if
nobody else can integrate with their work? Then every request, feature, bug
fix is a bottle neck of 1 person no matter how much outside help you give
them.

Your link also relates a lot to social platform evaporation:
[http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-
sundays-2-the-...](http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-
sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/) — all the good people leave because
too many mediocre people become a burden. Now you're left with a platform for
ants.

------
luck87
That doesn't seem to be true: [http://www.quora.com/Does-the-Netflix-work-
culture-create-a-...](http://www.quora.com/Does-the-Netflix-work-culture-
create-a-culture-of-fear-amongst-its-employees)

~~~
kisna72
"Whenever I started feeling like I was falling short of what the company
required from me, I viewed it as an opportunity to learn and grow, instead of
blaming the culture for my anxiety"

\- I would argue that the way this guy thinks is a personality trait. I like
the way he thinks. Does this mean, if you are going through some tough time in
your personal life and can't put in as much hours, places like netflix is not
for you?

------
oneJob
I worked at one of the worlds largest investment companies. Everyone in each
group was reviewed and then fit to a bell curve. All compensation, title, and
responsibility issues take the bell curve into consideration. This had the
effect of making it possible to get fired for being "above average". If you
have a group of 5, and they are the best employees in the company (all above
average), well, a couple of you will still get, at the least, substandard
raises and bonuses or, at the most (generally in times of cutbacks), fired.
This is not uncommon for similar companies.

------
jhildings
But, wouldn't it be that per definition that the most people are average? You
can only be exceptional compared to something that is not exceptional

~~~
dragonwriter
> But, wouldn't it be that per definition that the most people are average?

That depends _which_ average. The usual "average" (arithmetic mean) isn't
defined in a way that any actual individuals in the sampled group have to be
at the average. (Some other "averages", like the mode, must be represented,
but even with the mode it only is the most common single value, its quite
possible, and normal, to have more not at the mode than at the mode.)

While empirically lots of things are distributed so that the area _near_ the
arithmetic mean on the most common scale is most heavily populated, there are
cases where that isn't the case on any scale, e.g., bimodal distributions
where the values cluster at two extremes and the average is somewhere between
them.

> You can only be exceptional compared to something that is not exceptional

Yes, but a firm could in theory (if it could measure performance of its own
staff and in the marketplace accurately enough) fire people who are at or
below the _market_ average, and only retain those of above _market_ average
performance, and everyone there (that survived those performance reviews)
would be (by their most recent measure) above average -- exceptional, in that
way -- for the market. (And this is true for any definition of "average" you
want to use.)

This seems to be what Netflix is suggesting that they do.

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taternuts
My only experience with rated evaluations at a larger company were pretty
ridiculous; I was rated a 4.5/5 by my immediate managers, but the higher-ups
decided that everyone should be nerfed to between 2-3. Otherwise, they'd have
to pay people. I'd bet netflix does a little better of a job but I'm sure it's
mired in politics and other bullshit

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edkennedy
Sales for a publically traded company. If you don't show growth above average,
you will be fired. Unrealistic quotas and complete ignorance of market
conditions (quota is the same in a boom or bust) leads to high performance
standards. It's a constant high pressure environment and most people quit
before they are fired to avoid the shame of a firing.

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weavie
No. I work for a very large organisation. There have been cases of staff who
did virtually no work at all and it was still a couple of years before they
were fired.

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rtets
Have they clarified that those they retain are exceptionally high performers?
Or their performance could simply be exceptional in some other regard...

