[mcoliver]

No. The reason top firms part ways with good workers is usually political. Either the manager doesn't like the person regardless of their work abilities, or the manager is not politely savvy enough to ensure their team is being recognized for work that grows or is valuable to the business. Or they get caught up in the endlessly popular reorgs (again management failure). It's a failure of management. Nothing more. Nothing less. A healthy market would encourage good workers to move around freely (through compensation, opportunity, benefits, location, etc..), not force their hand. And healthy organizations would recognize talent and retain/retrain as needed.

I think the other thing that's perhaps missing is that some companies have so much momentum (with thousands of people) that it probably doesn't matter when they lose people. The company will continue to thrive because there is demand for the product.

[ameliaquining]

You're thinking of a different kind of company than the paper is talking about. (The headline, presumably written by the university's PR team, is a bit misleading about this.) The paper is about a certain kind of firm (e.g., the Big Four accounting firms, management consultancies like McKinsey, some elite law firms) that explicitly uses an "up or out" model, and explains why this kind of firm's business model (in particular, renting out the services of a particular employee to each customer) leads to this. The findings don't apply to other kinds of firms; e.g., in a typical big tech company, most engineers don't work primarily with a single customer, so the preconditions don't hold.

[mlrtime]

I don't think anyone here is actually reading the paper. The conversation is all about Tech workers and unions. At least thats the way I'm reading these comments as of now.

[port11]

We don't editorialise titles but this is a good case for renaming the post to that of the paper or something like it. “Why the top consulting firms fire consultants” is a very different topic.

[kamaal]

>>the manager is not politely savvy enough to ensure their team is being recognized for work that grows or is valuable to the business.

Actually in most companies, no ones watching whats happening, no ones watching who performs, who slacks, or anything for that matter.

Companies are basically a kind of a loosely assembled random crowd, where no one cares a thing about anything. In this kind of a set up both hardwork and laziness go unnoticed, which is why a persistent level of mediocrity is all pervasive. People do the bare minimum needed to keep lights on.

Getting rewards, or not getting punished in this kind of set up, largely depends on who you know, how they view you and what they are willing to do for you.

[anal_reactor]

The problem is that as you go further up in hierarchy, people by definition have less specialized, and more general knowledge. This means that there are things that lower-level employee understands but their manager doesn't. This in turn means that it's impossible for the manager to tell whether the employee is doing a good or a bad job because the manager simply doesn't understand the details of the job. This is open door for slackers and low-performers, because from certain perspectives, they're indistinguishable from hard workers.

I used to be a hard-working high-performer, but then I understood that because of numerous management problems that are beyond my control, the reward is very loosely correlated with my efforts, and given an existing job contract, the best way to maximize the reward/effort ratio is not to put more effort hoping for disproportionately higher rewards, but to put significantly less effort because the reward will drop just slightly. Do you want to up your hourly salary 5 times? Simply take 5 times as much time to deliver same feature. You might not get the 0.05x salary bump but that doesn't actually impact the calculation that much.

[mlrtime]

Sorry you've only worked in places like that. There are places where very smart people doing work that nobody in the company can do and they are well aware and rewarded for it.

[diogenescynic]

>Either the manager doesn't like the person regardless of their work abilities, or the manager is not politely savvy enough to ensure their team is being recognized for work that grows or is valuable to the business. Or they get caught up in the endlessly popular reorgs (again management failure).

This strikes me as 1000% accurate from my work experience. I see people who do amazing work but get unrecognized and then move on while other people do mediocre work but put a huge effort into self-promotion and end up being promoted despite the work not being great... The reorgs also seem like a way to kneecap the employees and lower expectations.

[jimbokun]

The article is basically describing stack ranking, where regular terminations are part of the company's operating philosophy.

[austin-cheney]

That has never been the case in my career. Perhaps things are different in the C suite or a startup but at the director level and below of an established company it’s always about money and headcount.