You might be confused by the CPI. The GDP is actually adjusted using a different measure of inflation (the "GDP deflator"), which looks at the actual purchases made in the country over that period. There's not really any "reasonable" alternative calculations to be made there.

They used to have a higher bar before 2020, but since then it's been a bit soft. I think this is mostly a return to that earlier time.

Why wouldn't you wait until the vest?

(Vest is on 2/15). Honestly, quitting before the vest and your bonus payout is just silly… curious what happened

I think most companies would be jealous of this sort of "downfall".

You're absolutely right. However, 5% is so low that it's hard to believe that there isn't at least that many underperoformers.

Underperforming relative to what? If they're doing their job in good faith and overall making money for the company, is it "underperforming" if they're less productive than 95% of their peers? This notion of underperformance leaves no room for adequate performance.

I am sure there are some people getting laid off who genuinely don't do any work, though not 5% of the company - and certainly not the bottom 5% according to Meta's metrics! A lot of "mid-range" performers probably get by with pure schmoozing and mooching. And in more general sense, I don't think it's okay - either morally or strategically - to lay people off simply because you want to roll the dice on hiring more productive workers. (For a company of Meta's size this doesn't even make sense; clearly this move is about cracking the whip for the remaining 95%.)

Relative to your competition.

Performance is only adequate if it’s at least as good as the engineers of the other players in your industry. Otherwise, you’re losing ground. As long as anyone in your market space is actively trying to manage their engineering talent (recruiting your top performers, releasing low performers, being more selective in hiring) so must you just to keep pace. An “adequate” engineer may make the company money, but the opportunity cost of not hiring someone better who could make even more money can be higher still.

The sorts of decisions and results that make a company the size of Meta succeed or fail happen above the levels of the folks who will get cut. Most of the net value produced by individual engineers is determined by which projects they're on, rather than whether they're good at their job. A savy entrepreneur with a few engineers worth of openai credits can create more value in a week than a median FAANG middle management career maxxer with 10-100 engineers in their subtree of the org creates in a month.

Personally, I think it’s both. Yes, the strategy is important but it’s nothing without the ability to execute. And we’ve all worked with the god-tier engineer who creates never-ending boondoggles because they can. And, yes, the larger the org the harder it is to get both strategy and execution aligned at once.

My point was that the scope/impact/value/etc of the contributions made by individual engineers will be determined more by the projects they're working on than by their inherent ability to contribute. So, if we go through the org and cut the bottom 5% of engineers by how much value they added to the company, most cuts will be determined by the context in which an individual was operating rather than their inherent ability to contribute. Ie, the cuts will mostly just punish people for getting stuck with bad managers or lackluster projects.

Of course, some people are obviously great in any context and some are obviously useless (or worse) in any context, but those folks should already be handled appropriately even without the "cut 5%" mandate.

You still wouldn't need a quota so it's not really about underperformers in general but rather an easy excuse.

The 80s were a reaction to the "liberal" 70s. It's just the natural cycle of history, the majority of people are in the center so when culture shifts too far to one side they start pushing it back.

Sounds like the increase in the amount of information people have access to and the speed of the news cycle, the speed at which the pendulum swings may just be accelerating.

There’s definitely an element of rubber banding and I think this time some of it is built up resentment about how liberals dominated big cultural institutions like TV and movies. That said I don’t think everyone who voted for trump cares about this, but the malaise of the Biden presidency was a powerful proximate factor

The majority of people are in the center. That's kind of how distributions work.

The goal is to replace that 5% with new hires, resulting in higher average performance. It has nothing to do with total hiring amount.

... and correspondingly lower salaries.

That is the definition of higher performance. Greater contribute output for less input

It's not like the firing is random. "Low performers" get a lot of warnings throughout the year. Most people are average or above so they will be completely unaffected, it's not likely you would drop from 50th percentile to 5th.

On the other hand, do you really want to be stuck working with someone who's not very competent? I think we've all had that experience and it's miserable.

I love how so many on HN have embraced “low performers” as an unbending metric that isn’t gamed by management to fire people without paying severance. I’ve seen this happen.

It's not the perception of "randomness" that is a problem, it's the arbitrary figure attributed to getting fired with no comment on methodology or the attributes that will get you fired.

We assume there would probably be PIP for those individuals in this hypothetical scenario. However even then, saying "10 percent of our workforce will guaranteed be subject to PIP and or firing as a matter of our staffing methodology" instantly turns much of your working time into fluffing your work and backstabbing colleagues.

OR running away at great speed.

OR telling investorts "We do not grow, we abritrarilly trim regardless of market forces."

AKA, GE.

This is quite disingenuous. “Low performers” in many of these companies aren’t low performers. It’s often whoever the boss likes the least due to whatever reason.

I’ve rarely seen anyone let go and thought the person was a low performer. Most of the time the person was fired because they questioned authority.

I haven't worked in FAANG, but have seen and personally fired people before. All were justified, and in times where I had to do the firing I was always late. And I knew I was late because the team would say, 'about time'.

""Low performers" get a lot of warnings throughout the year. "

oh you sweet summer child. No, in many cases they absolutely do not.

As a former interviewer at Meta who did hundreds of technical interviews, I can tell you that the people that I hardly expected "Djikstra or Knuth". Honestly I gave pretty reasonable questions that were similar to the types of things I would do in my work (with some modifications to work as an interview question). And still the majority of people didn't do great. It's even worse at the "screen" stage, where I've had people that, e.g. didn't know what "function" means or couldn't write a loop to find the max number in an array.