> the manager said there were some layoffs coming up and he would have been out with those but because of the way things worked it didn't make sense to let him go earlier.
Incentives are fucked across the board right now.
Move on a low performer today and you'll have an uphill battle for a backfill at all. If you get one, many companies are "level-normalizing" (read: level-- for all backfills). Or perhaps your management thinks the job could be done overseas cheaper, or you get pushed to turn it into a set of tasks so you can farm it out to contractors.
So you keep at least some shitty devs to hold their positions, and as ballast to throw overboard when your bosses say "5% flat cut, give me your names". We all do it. If we get back to ZIRP I'll get rid of the actively bad devs when I won't risk losing their position entirely. Until then, it's all about squeezing what limited value they have out and keeping them away from anything important.
Incentives are fucked across the board right now.
Move on a low performer today and you'll have an uphill battle for a backfill at all. If you get one, many companies are "level-normalizing" (read: level-- for all backfills). Or perhaps your management thinks the job could be done overseas cheaper, or you get pushed to turn it into a set of tasks so you can farm it out to contractors.
So you keep at least some shitty devs to hold their positions, and as ballast to throw overboard when your bosses say "5% flat cut, give me your names". We all do it. If we get back to ZIRP I'll get rid of the actively bad devs when I won't risk losing their position entirely. Until then, it's all about squeezing what limited value they have out and keeping them away from anything important.