I don't know about that. Companies generally do regular performance reviews, so there should be a lot of information about who the underperforming or merely adequate workers in each group are.
Performance reviews degenerating into assessment of "politics and networking" skills, as GP put it, is more common than people care to admit.
Objectively evaluating performance of somebody who is smarter than you is incredibly hard, and sliding into using "s/he is a nice person" metric instead, is an easy way to avoid that hard work.
This is really difficult to do. Ratings tend to be done mentally by managers by comparing peers. Meaning every group has top and bottom performers. It ignores the fact that the absolute level of performance of each team is likely very different. The bottom performer of a top performing team could be way better than average. Will that be caught, who knows? The inverse is also true. That someone shitty is on a great team and it's hard to observe that.
There are likely a lot of downsides to their PSC system, but Meta is way more rigorous than this. They take performance reviews written by the employee themselves, reports, peers, managers, and calibrate them in meetings involving peer managers and several levels of managers above.
It's probably one of the more rigorous systems in the tech industry that at least avoids this kind of bias, though there are certainly ways it can be gamed.
Why don't they already do something about the low performers without needing such an initiative? What I've read about layoffs also implies that its not necessarily only the low performers who are let go, that it can be quite random which I don't understand -- why would a company randomly let people go if it has information about who are its lower rung performers?
Facebook has only hinted that they have to trim headcount. Literally everything else in this article is pure speculation - no one knows what the actual process will be.
More than likely Facebook (sorry, Meta) will probably do it by team and trim underperforming departments. A low performer in an important department is probably more likely to stick around than a high performer in a money pit.
nousermane|3 years ago
Objectively evaluating performance of somebody who is smarter than you is incredibly hard, and sliding into using "s/he is a nice person" metric instead, is an easy way to avoid that hard work.
spywaregorilla|3 years ago
jmalicki|3 years ago
It's probably one of the more rigorous systems in the tech industry that at least avoids this kind of bias, though there are certainly ways it can be gamed.
llampx|3 years ago
legitster|3 years ago
More than likely Facebook (sorry, Meta) will probably do it by team and trim underperforming departments. A low performer in an important department is probably more likely to stick around than a high performer in a money pit.
nix23|3 years ago