
Expensify's firing strategy - Analemma_
https://blog.expensify.com/2016/07/11/expensifys-firing-strategy/
======
Udo
> _Why not only hire people 10x better than everyone else? It’s such a simple
> idea, it seems deceptively obvious._

This trope is unadulterated bullshit. The whole article sometimes seems to
border on a parody of the worst premises and shallowest-possible way of
assembling and managing a (software) team.

There is certainly a feeling, especially when you're a manager or an unhappy
team member, that there are 0.1X employees out there - perhaps even a great
many. By all means, these people should be made aware of the problem and if
necessary fired (heck, I had to do that a few times). But the most self-
destructive assumption you can make as a manager is to unilaterally declare
yourself an "A players only" team.

The performance of people depends on many factors, including working
conditions, personal situation, management style, motivation to work on a
certain project. The idea that somewhere there is a pool of global "A players"
and you just need to find them is not only unrealistic and ignorant, it
actively harms your company by turning it into a locker room popularity
pageant. The people who thrive in such an environment of arrogance and self-
promotion might be the ones you want (because they project a vacuous aura of
success) but they're probably not the ones you actually need.

Furthermore, you don't really need to fill your company with "rockstars", if
all you're doing is building another interchangeable ad-driven mobile app.
It's perfectly acceptable, probably even preferrable, to have a base group of
decently-performing "grunts" who can actually work on your app without feeling
depressed after a month. People who aren't exactly highly motivated
visionaries but have a stable 9-5 work output are more important than many
people seem to think.

~~~
kafkaesq
_This trope is unadulterated bullshit._

Thanks for beating me to the punch. If they want to run a company on the basis
of snappy, feel-good slogans ("We're all 10x-ers here!"), that's one thing.

But the thing that gets me about the 10x-er line is that it isn't even in
agreement with the original research (whatever you may choose to make of that
research -- there was at least _some_ research done on this, and its basic
findings don't seem out of line with subjective, day-to-day observation).

Unfortunately, those findings never said that top performers were "10x better
than average." Rather, that they were 10x better than the _worst_ performers,
on the very bottom of the scale. So if there's anything all to the
quantitative side of their findings -- it's that the "best" formers are
merely... 3.16x better than average. Which, sadly, doesn't make for a catch
slogan that you can use to emotionally manipulate people with.

And if you ever brought up this inconvenient fact at an Expensify meeting --
next time you heard that it's time to go on the warpath, and root out all the
lowly 8x-ers and 7x-ers -- I'm sure you'd be pegged as a disruptive,
miserable, self-hating narcissist bent on bringing others down to your own
level.

And of course, immediately be put on PIP.

~~~
flukus
I'm pretty sure negative 10x-ers exist though. The people who can build
something but it then takes someone else 10 times longer to iron out all the
bugs ad performance issues.

In fact, I think these people are often mistaken for 10x-ers, especially in
their own mind.

~~~
kafkaesq
There are extremes on both scales, to be sure.

What makes the (far more common) negative outliers most vexing to deal with is
not just that they're +10x-ers in their own minds -- but that they're mistaken
for such in the minds of upper managers (and/or their investors) -- for a
great, great while, in many cases.

And having to explain to someone that they need to "flip" their +/\- 10x bit
on one of their "star performers" can be a really, really awkward situation to
be in.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
Two comments:

1) How does this not degenerate a zero-sum game where the people who can
subtly undermine their peers relatives to themselves succeed?

2) Why does expensify need 10X programmers? Here are some questions to help
define where a 10X programmer might benefit them

Q: Are they doing something that is pushing the boundaries of computer
science? A: No, they make it easier to submit expense reports.

Q: Are they trying to extract the last drop of performance from a computer
system - for example games, HPC, HFT? A: No, they make it easier to submit
expense reports.

Q: Do they need to create massive systems that can serve a billion people and
thus even "simple" programming problems can be difficult due to scale. A: No,
they make it easier to submit expense reports.

Q: Are they creating tools such as new languages, libraries, operating systems
/ environments to massively increase the productivity of computer programmers.
A: No, they make it easier to submit expense reports.

Q: Are they trying to tackle hard problems like making secure computing
ubiquitous? A: No, they make it easier to submit expense reports.

Q: Do they support other companies and help other companies solve difficult
problems by providing expert consultation. A: No, they make it easier to
submit expense reports.

Before a company decides it needs 10X programmers, they should answer the Jeff
Dean question: "If Jeff Dean came to work at my company, what current project
do I have that I would put him on, and would he be bored?"

Too many companies it seems decide they want 10X programmers (without paying
10X salaries) and then use this to justify poor treatment of their current
workers.

~~~
plorkyeran
I'm not sure I agree with the claim that they make it easier to submit expense
reports. They're not really any worse than any other expensing system I've
used, but they're also not meaningfully better.

------
SandersAK
"and we're gonna hire the best people, let me tell you about hiring, and by
the way, also firing. we're gonna fire the worst people and we're gonna
replace em with the best people, 10x people. You know, I have a friend who I
hired, who's 10x, and let me just say he's more than 10x, he's maybe 100x, so
right there, you can fire 99 people. And this friend he knows firing, let me
tell you. he knows it more than anyone else I know. And that's why firing is
so important."

~~~
ben_jones
You 10x bro?

Reminds me of South Park's PC principle and how our society forms cliques so
naturally.. in reality the division is an entirely arbitrary printed label
from a $1 label printer.

------
fishtoaster
As someone who once worked there and left to grow as an engineer, I'm not wild
about the part where everyone who ever quit expensify:

> did so when they found their peers increasingly unwilling to tolerate to
> their disruptive attitudes, and thus less fun to work with — misery loves
> company, and if your peers aren’t as miserable as you, you leave to find
> others who are.

~~~
peterbonney
Yes, this was pretty... something. Lord knows no one ever left a job because
they were passionate about something else, or had a life change, or had a
medical issue, or went to graduate school, or moved, or...

~~~
greenyoda
... or had a crappy manager.

~~~
peterbonney
Well all of _Expensify 's_ managers are 10X managers, so if the employee
doesn't like them the employee must be the problem.

Q.E.D.

------
atria
Too funny. I would love to see how they identify a 10x person from an 8x
person.

I worked at a fortune 500 company that measured productivity via a ticketing
system. "Write a device driver" was measured the same as "Change 'OK' to
'Accept' on a button." Guess what the 10x'ers did all day and what got assiged
to consultants like me?

I worked at another fortune 500 company that measured programmer productivity
via a ticketing system, and they focused on issues. I finished my work 6
months early with no bugs or issues, but the outsourced labor continiously
generated as many issues as they fixed to the tune of roughly 80% reopen rate.

They told me I they weren't going to extend my contract and I laughed and told
the lead -- I finished my work six months early with no bugs, and you are
going to let me go and keep the guys to write as many bugs as fixes. They kept
me and let six other overseas contractors go.

I could give dozens of other examples how people are smart enough to game the
system.

------
hoodoof
Is this meant to be a fresh new take on hiring designed to get people to be
excited about working there?

Or some clever lead in to the next script for "Silicon Valley"?

As I read it I was envisaging a background advertisement for working at
Expensify with upbeat music, groovy offices, quick cut shots, smiling faces,
people enthusing at a whiteboard over some software diagram, snap the camera
to screens full of code and concentrating people, and then a big Donald Trump
at the end pointing down the barrel of the camera "YOU'RE FIRED!" Then a sad
person leaving the office with their head hung low because they were only 8X

The truth about software development is that you absolutely need to fire
problem team members ASAP, but this is not something to build into your hiring
strategy as a positive. In fact if you need to do that then your hiring
strategy is not working in the first place.

This sounds alot like stack ranking which was popular at places like Microsoft
and has been shown to be a disaster.

Usually hiring and :-) FIRING! strategies like this have been concocted by non
technical or less technical people.

Expensify would be well advised to take down this post and rethink.

And have a guess what link every staff member at Expensify is emailing to each
other right now?

~~~
gone35
_Is this [...] some clever lead in to the next script for "Silicon Valley"?_

The author does say in his LinkedIn profile[1] he is "making the world a
better place, one expense report at a time"... so maybe you are on to
something.

[1]
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmbarrett](https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmbarrett)

~~~
hoodoof
That is hilarious. He has no idea he is a Silicon Valley character.

Seriously creating a fictional company that is precisely like this would be a
great way to promote Silicon Valley.

Trouble is there are so many companies and people who are part of the self
parody without knowing it.

------
dragonwriter
> However, in a collaborative team where everybody talks with everybody, it
> also means everybody distracts everybody — just a little bit. This little
> bit adds up over time. Even worse, while productivity increases linearly,
> overhead increases exponentially (orange line): with every new hire, not
> only do you distract one more person, but one more person distracts you.

Where does exponential come from? The naïve model (which is obviously worse
than reality at the extremes, since it would at some point imply that each
person is spending > 100% of their time distracting) would seem to be
quadratic -- O(n^2) [0] -- not exponential -- O(k^n), which not only is
clearly worse than reality for the same reason that the quadratic model is,
but doesn't seem to have any coherent basis at all.

This really sounds like "lets throw some mathy-sounding words, made up
numbers, and pretty-looking charts out to try to rationalize an approach we
decided on based on intuition" rather than explanation of actual coherent,
quantitative reasoning.

[0] proportional to the number of dyads (n(n-1))/2

~~~
jayd16
I think the concept is illustrated by some kind of ludicrous company wide
morning status meeting. Every person added to the meeting wastes more of
everyone else's time. The 3rd person wastes the time of two coworkers, the
100th wastes the time of 99 coworkers. You can indeed end up in a place where
overhead is over 100% of time spent where you're working overtime late just to
finish the morning meeting.

That said, this nonsense is pretty divorced from reality.

------
jonny_eh
I saw that "We fire people" ad on Muni here in SF. It certainly caught my
attention. Now Expensify is on my list of places to never work at.

It's like someone read the Netflix HR presentation and took the message a bit
too seriously.

------
ChuckMcM
I think of this quote: _" Think of it differently: 2 people can pick a place
to eat rather quickly; 10 is hard, but doable. 100 — impossible. Nobody will
ever eat."_ as the leadership trap.

Sticking with the self inflicted strawman I see it this way; There are
constraints on where you can eat (vegans, paleo, vegetarians, low gluten,
etc.) When you have good leadership they understand the various constraints
that individual team members bring to the problem. So in the "place to eat"
question, the leader starts with places that already meet the constraints, and
then surface any concerns about the available choices, shares the concerns
with the team and solicit rankings, and then tells everyone where they are
going to eat that day. If they are consistent, and they rotate through
equivalent alternates over time, everyone is ok with the outcome and nobody
feels left out.

A 100 people walk into a room and are told to pick a place to eat and it
doesn't work because there isn't a shared understanding of resolution. Is my
preference stronger than yours? Is my dietary restriction something I can
impose on others? on and on. Teams are most productive when they trust their
leadership and least productive when they do not.

If you want to have a high performance team, establish trust, listen to
concerns, and communicate clearly respect and understanding.

------
michael_storm
For another laugh, try [https://blog.expensify.com/2016/06/17/expensifys-comp-
review...](https://blog.expensify.com/2016/06/17/expensifys-comp-review-
process/). This quotation sums up both the pretentiousness and the bullshit
nicely:

> _We don’t negotiate during the hiring process. Our first offer is our last
> and best offer. If it’s basically in the right ballpark, then we encourage
> you to take it and we’ll adjust it later if we were off. But if we’re so far
> off that we’re not in the right ballpark, then clearly this isn’t going to
> work anyway. There’s no need to fight over a few percent: let’s just get
> started and adjust later._

Apparently they'd like to hire "10x engineers" (lol), but not quite enough to
actually talk with them to determine a mutually beneficial compensation
scheme. Their offer is the fair one, and a counter-offer is the engineer
quibbling over a couple percent. If that's the case, why can't that few
percent go the engineer's way? Nice to see that they've resolved the problem
in their favor.

If a prospective employer gave me a non-negotiable offer and refused to
countenance alternatives, I'd run far, far away from that paternalistic
prison, no matter the offer or company.

~~~
greenyoda
And yet another post from their blog - the ignorance expressed in this article
is pretty amazing:

"Why we don’t hire .NET programmers"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2370022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2370022)

 _" Programming with .NET is like cooking in a McDonalds kitchen. It is full
of amazing tools that automate absolutely everything. Just press the right
button and follow the beeping lights, and you can churn out flawless 1.6 oz
burgers faster than anybody else on the planet.

However, if you need to make a 1.7 oz burger, you simply can’t. There’s no
button for it."_

------
EliRivers
Ah yes, the 10x dogma again. Let's go back to actual source materials.

 _Everybody has heard the common trope: great programmers are 10x more
productive than average programmers._

Then everybody heard wrong.

A 2nd edition of Peopleware summarises it; the 10x programmer is not a myth,
but it's comparing the best to the worst; NOT best to median. It's also not
about programming specifically; it's simply a common distribution in many
metrics of performance.

The rule of thumb Peopleware states is that you can rely on the best
outperforming the worst by a factor of 10, and you can rely on the best
outperforming the median by a factor of 2.5.

This of course indicates that a median developer, middle of the pack, is a 4x
developer.

Obviously, this is a statistical rule, and if you've got a tiny sample size or
some kind of singular outlier or other such; well, we're all adults and we
understand how statistics and distributions work.

Peopleware uses Boehn (1981), Sackman (1968), Augustine (1979) and Lawrence
(1981) as its sources.

[ "Peopleware", DeMarco and Lister, 1987, p45 ]

That all said, if anyone's got some more recent source materials (a bit more
solid than Mr Expensify's source of some guy telling him in college some
time), let's have them.

Addendum: "Performance Improvement Plans" are a papertrail. If you ever get
put on one, the trigger has been pulled already. Even if it seems to go well
and performance targets are reached and the threat of firing is off the table,
your cards are marked and your days numbered. Know that, and start looking for
your next job.

~~~
Morendil
For more than you ever wanted to know on the "studies" about 10x programmers,
see [http://leanpub.com/leprechauns](http://leanpub.com/leprechauns)

------
geggam
Nice blatant ageism

Building a 10x Team

At Expensify, we’re betting it is possible, and that it can be accomplished
with two main tactics. The first tactic involves identifying superstars *
early in their career, and then backing them to the hilt. _

~~~
thegayngler
Expensify is asking for an employment law suit with that statement.

------
TillE
> Why not only hire people 10x better than everyone else?

Probably because a small startup working on boring things (eg, expense
reports) isn't likely to attract the relative handful of exceptional geniuses
who actually exist.

------
sillypog
Firing is actually more important than hiring. To understand why, consider
this simple chart I made up: as you see it is literally impossible to get any
work done at all with 100 people. Sound impossible? Think of it differently: 2
people can pick a place to eat rather quickly; 10 is hard, but doable. 100 —
impossible. Nobody will ever eat. 6 billion people? Our species is doomed!

------
Animats
Doesn't everybody just get a business credit card so their business expenses
are in the card system? Why does Expensify need arrangements with hotel and
transportation services, except to steer customers to them?

Now a really neat system would be one that looked at your messaging, location,
and credit card data, figured out why you were expensing something, and
annotated the expenses with "why", with zero user involvement.

------
skylark
Did the founder of Expensify seriously pass off performance improvement plans
(PIPs) as something cutting edge and original?

Poe's law is in full effect - I can't tell if this is honest or exquisitely
written satire.

------
endymi0n
Expensify: Making things more expensive.

Certainly a fitting double meaning for a company which apparently had such a
weak founder team that they had to replace hierarchy with anarchy - also known
as "survival of the loud and smarmy".

I'm really missing an opportunity to short private companies lately...

------
bpchaps
_This is why over time, even more important than your ability to hire, is your
discipline to identify those who are driving up the exponential overhead curve
— single-handedly draining more productivity from the organization than they
contribute themselves — and let them go._

In other words, "Going through a $LIFEISSUE? We don't tolerate that here!"

What an awful sounding fear based culture...

------
jarsin
> That means up to that point, 40 people had either quit or been fired. (And
> of those who quit, nearly all did so when they found their peers
> increasingly unwilling to tolerate to their disruptive attitudes, and thus
> less fun to work with — misery loves company, and if your peers aren’t as
> miserable as you, you leave to find others who are.)

That sounds like one bitter CEO. I mean who would ever quit a company where
one develops expense reports all day.

Sounds like a dream job...

------
Overtonwindow
OK, striking this company from a list of vendors we will ever use. I hate CEOs
who justify their bad attitudes with fancy jargon and Peter Thiel lectures

------
hoodoof
This is written by the Founder and CEO, so they can't even fire the author.

~~~
hoodoof
Maybe they can actually.

------
bboreham
They make it sound like they invented the PIP, but it's absolutely standard at
every bigco I've worked at. HR and lawyers drive the process, so the company
doesn't get sued for unfair dismissal.

------
deedubaya
Manager: So it says here on your resume that that from 2010 to 2011, you were
10x-ing it?

Candidate: That's actually and old resume, it should say that I 10x-ed it from
2013 to present

Manager: So are we to understand that you did not 10x it in 2012?

Candidate: There was a mental situation preventing me from X-ing it to my
usual standards so I had to take some time off until I was able to X it at 10x

------
ozten
I wonder how diversity fares? One common anti-pattern is the "clique". If you
find yourself on a clique team and aren't a cookie cutter member, then you're
identified as an under performer or troublemaker. Seems like this culture
would amplify the "clique team" problem.

~~~
some_person
Well, let me tell you: [https://blog.expensify.com/2012/01/25/weve-got-
balls/](https://blog.expensify.com/2012/01/25/weve-got-balls/)

------
seibelj
I wish this was parody, the whole thing reads like an engineer's nightmare.
You know what makes me happy as an engineer? Never having to work at
expensify.

------
SEJeff
I have a very good friend who I would consider a 10x developer. He also has
given many talks at open source conferences. He worked at Expensify several
years ago and quit saying it was a burning ship. I guess this just solidifies
his experience.

------
Overtonwindow
I'd like to invoke the spirit of General Curtis Lemay if I may:

"I'll tell you what you have to do, you have to fire people, and when you have
fired enough of them so that employees see that it's no longer in their best
interest to stay with the company, then that's when you will have destroyed
your company"

------
sytse
I don't agree with many things in the OP but I do think it is important to
have a process in place to deal with underperformance. At GitLab we documented
it in
[https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/underperformance/](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/underperformance/)

------
TheBlight
I see a bunch of 1x'ers are getting their chuckles at this one..../s

------
EliRivers
Let's not forget that the comments are being filtered, and only comments that
flatter this joker's ego are being accepted.

I think that tells us everything we need to know.

------
peterbonney
"Hm, we're having trouble scaling... Must be our shitty employees! Certainly
can't be our shitty management..."

