This is a great point. Toxicity is entirely orthogonal to performance. And you rarely have to worry about toxic low performers: if you're unlucky enough to hire them, they don't stay around for long.

But toxic top performers are IME one of the biggest challenges a manager will have to deal with. You have to root them out the moment they land in an organization because given enough they'll push out the non-toxic top performers, leaving you with a toxic asshole and a bunch of flunkies. And you have to convince everyone outside the team that yes, they get things done, but they're enough of an asshole that you'd rather risk hiring someone to deliver less but also destroy less.

All this reminds me of the quote attributed to everyone under the sun (Clausewitz, various US civil war generals, Omar Bradley, you name 'em) but apparently was said by Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord[0]

> There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.

Turns out this problem is quite old, indeed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord#Cl...

> What might look like low performance in a corporate environment can just be someone setting boundaries and refusing to let work infringe too much on their personal life.

Another is poor fit between the employee and the job. One the lowest performers in a role can sometime be a great in another because they do/don’t care about clean code, long hours, spelling / grammar issues, minor aesthetic issues, minor bugs, speed, etc etc.

The universally perfect employee basically doesn’t exist as much as organizations want everybody to be interchangeable cogs.

> What might look like low performance in a corporate environment can just be someone setting boundaries and refusing to let work infringe too much on their personal life.

After killing myself at a FAANG because it was what was expected (to my mental health detriment), I have exactly this attitude since. At the end of the day, I'm done. I'm gone. I don't care. Even while I'm there, I'm only doing the amount outlined in the job and nothing extra. When I have a task to complete, I do my best to do it well. But I also don't care and don't sweat making sure it's perfect.

This has worked out great. I think I do a good enough job to be viewed as pretty good at what I do. That's good enough for me. I don't want advancement. I don't want more responsibility. Just give me a cost-of-living bump every year and we're good.

> Toxic employees hurt the team or organization whether low performing or high performing, and with rare exceptions it’s almost always worth getting rid of them. Toxic employees are the people getting into arguments and conflicts all the time, dragging others down constantly.

Often such people have good arguments, they are just vocal about them and not the "docile" kind of people. For example the great engineer who is willing to fight to keep the code well-architected and clean.

Of course managers hate this kind of "non-docile" employee, and thus invent terms like "toxic" to be capable of bullying (and perhaps having a "socially accepted" reason for firing) them.

Talking about a "toxic person" is starting on an ontological track that is deprived of any possible way to make everyone satisfied. Instead it’s possible to think about toxic behavior. Now, maybe a behavior is so deeply enshrined in a person that abrogating it is out of reach for the social organization that is considering this person behavior as a source of nuisance. But this is not necessarily the case and maybe there are option to help the person change and become part of a more harmonious social structure.

Using a "isolate poor performers" and "excellent beings" has well known backfire consequences that history largely document.

> they take too long to reply to emails or messages, or their work needs extra review and checks and balances, or they are only capable of delivering on a relatively small set of fairly simple tasks, or they just want to work on the same part of the same product forever and can’t emotionally handle change

As someone on the ASD spectrum, who has struggled in the workplace, I resemble that remark! I found my coding job to be ok before the app was converted to be web-based, then found it to be death by a 1000 distractions as I became more senior and found the web project to be too messy, too many checkins of bad code by the overseas team, team too big, etc. Anyone have tips to help someone like me?

Lazy employees are most times unmotivated for what ever reasons. Either it’s the work they do to just very hard to motivate such people. Slow employees maybe too risk adverse so they go slowly, or they don’t know to seek out better ways to do things.

I think one should be careful with the word toxic. I’ve seen every manner of dishonesty and unscrupulousness and in some cases outright sociopathy and I’ve seen all these things done with an eye to optics: the right language, the right audience, the right timing to present stuff somewhere between “unsavory” and “fraud” in a fashionable light. This is locally non-toxic in the sense that it is unlikely to ruin the financials next quarter. It’s globally toxic in the sense that it’ll just kill your company over years or sometimes decades.

I’ve seen aspy nerds be the squeaky wheel (and very often be correct) in the long tradition of neuroatypical people who care more about an ideal than about fashionable niceties that fluctuate like hemlines called toxic way more often over the last few years. This is locally toxic in the sense that it can be temporarily disruptive until either the problem gets fixed or the aspy nerd gets fixed. But it’s in no way globally toxic: it never kills your business unless it’s one of two founders, and often saves your business from getting hit by an asteroid when the subject matter changes abruptly. Back when there was real competition at the apex of the software business you were cooked without those people around.

5-10 years ago Elon Musk was so popular in SV that people were buying up Teslas and posting every SpaceX launch and all but naming their kids after him. Today he’s anathema in huge parts of the Valley culture. Same guy, same behavior really. Good or bad? Eh, I don’t know, seems complicated.

Palmer Luckey was forced out of Meta for giving like eight grand to a conservative PAC, today he’s the darling of everyone with a family office.

Linux was built by a Linus that would call people “fucking brain damaged” on LKML, he’s mellowed but he built one of the longest-running and most successful engineering artifacts in all of human affairs acting in the “locally toxic, globally enlightened” mode.

The thing is that bad behavior at scale, bad behavior with real, lasting, irreversible consequences is almost never called toxic. This is the globally toxic behavior of those with power.

Transient words are routinely called toxic. This is the locally toxic, globally enlightened behavior of those with little.

This doesn’t seem like a word we use in a way that is either practically useful or morally sound.

I don’t think it’s helpful to use inflammatory labels like “toxic”. There’s no such thing. It’s an unfalsifiable claim.

I guess it's messy but it's not worth the cost to fix, in that case.

The vast majority of underperformers I've managed are people who are less motivated to perform, less technically skilled, not aligned to the team, have different values, etc. Almost always the answer is to keep them around and try to squeeze what value you can get. One engineer I have really values on-call firefighting which is great, except my entire org is aligned around avoiding that. I'm getting value out of him by letting him do the firefighting he likes, but ensuring he drives the postmortem process so we can avoid fires in the future.

At the end of the day, all I care about is getting an acceptable level of output compared to pay from an employee who knows the business and isn't particularly fussy. So I'll try to find the path to get low performers upskilled, find what interests them, or find another role in the company that fits & do some horse trading. Or I'll let them coast and replace them when it's easier for me to hire.

>> hiring is a goddamn mess right now.

> Any insight you can give on why? I know enough from the hirees end, but how's it on the other side?

Someone smarter than me might know the true answer. I've heard three compelling arguments:

* tons of companies were irrationally exuberant and overhired, cut roles, and now we're seeing the impact of those workers looking for new work

* increasing shareholder greed means running a threadbare team and driving the company into the ground is better than staffing appropriately if it means next quarter looks good

* most companies are big dumb herd animals and hey, if the big guys are downsizing, so should we

But even though the market is saturated, profitability is now king, so if I'm going to hire someone I need to have a compelling answer to finance saying "how does this new role guarantee us ROI?"

All I really know and can see is the knock-on effect: I posted the same role in 2022 and last month. In 2022, I had to recruit like crazy, to the point that I had external vendors placing below-average employees at above-average salaries. Last month I had the pleasure of sifting through 700 applications, and plenty were "pass: overqualified, won't stick around".

So it seems there are tons of people out there competing for fewer roles.

> However, deliberately keeping low performers around as a buffer becomes a self-own on a longer time horizon. Smart managers will negotiate hiring exceptions to replace a low performer now rather than keep that headcount occupied for safety.

This is a "the times are good" play, and it can absolutely work. But the real trick is understanding

> Once a company institutes a hiring freeze

that if you as a manager are reacting here, the die is already cast. There are plenty of unofficial "we're frozen but aren't saying it out loud" moves I & peers in other companies are seeing right now: downleveling, additional approval gates added to slow things down to a more favorable time, you name it.

Yes, over a long enough time horizon ballast will weigh down the boat, but theta is on my side right now.

The evil path for a director is to acquire a nonessential group and make it the land of misfit toys.

Bank them away from everyone else, and nuke them from orbit when necessary.

I think it's exceptionally unlikely that companies are doing layoffs instead of firing for the benefit of employees. You're holding up reasons like severance and saving face.

From everything I've seen, the much more common reason is that firing someone typically entails a much longer paper trail for CYA reasons. Batching them up and including them in the next round of layoffs is easier and safer.

>Putting a lot of restrictions on a company that does layoffs creates a perverse incentive to fire these people explicitly instead of giving them a gentle landing with a layoff. You would see far more people fired instead of "laid off".

Given that we long since decoupled terminations for being based on performance, I'd rather employers just be honest.

But they won't do that because they don't want any risk of lawsuits. Even if they are truly low performing, firing a pregnant woman or someone who happens to be an outlier race in the company is just too easy a setup for scrutiny. I've seen plenty of those kinds of people mixed up in these layoffs as well.

Interesting. Is that a law or a typical contract term?

I'd also expect that Software Engineers can ramp up surprisingly fast in different skillsets as needed. But that requires time to train (independently or otherwise), and no one wants to do that anymore.

Parent's point was about lay-offs, not firings. I'm very comfortable with their suggestion. Make the company be explicit. If it's a firing ("they are underperforming") then sure, that doesn't affect H1B eligibility, but you have to actually fire them. If it is a layoff ("we don't need those jobs") then why are you turning around and hiring for them immediately afterwards?

If some % of workers were hired that didn't meet standards, then it seems like those doing the hiring are the ones that need to be replaced first.

[dead]

But this is not punishing the company. If anything it is helping the company to avoid having all those H1B workers looking for another job. "Oh, surely, we'd love to sponsor your green card, but you see? we can't! This senator that we incidentaly gave millions for his campaign got this idea out of his mind, alone, that we now can't sponsor your green card, and yes, it is horrible to work here after the layoffs, but looks like you're stuck with us."

There’s a 6 month window between layoffs and PERM filings (green card). Employers can still submit PERM filings, but AIUI, doing so risks audits.

>Why can't people just suck

Because most people after a few years of experience do not simply "suck" in a vacuum. If you need to get rid of 2-3 people it might be a "suck problem". if you need to get rid of 200-300 people it's a more systematic issue or incentive being driving such mass actions.

I don't see the contradiction. Janitorial duties are at the very worst easy to train any person off the street for. As long as people need any sort of minimum wage to survive you can find a janitor.

But that also means that, because minimum wage, your salary will almost never exceed the value brought to that business. Outside of some super crazy regulations of cleanliness.

If you think you're not getting paid enough you should quit and start your own company. The fact that google/apple/amazon make 5-10x per employee is not proof that you're underpaid. The chef at French Laundry makes $$$$$$$, does that mean the apple farmer who supplied the apples for $ is underpaid?

The actual value is complex. The only reason an engineer’s presence at the company generates $X in revenue is because the company already has sales, marketing, finance, legal, and all the other necessary functions covered. On their own, that engineer’s output is worth less. So a light switch test does not tell the whole story. The surplus from the combined output is deserved by everyone whose input is required for those $X, not just the engineer.

In different terms, maybe you leaving costs the company $X. But if product engineer Joe Bob left first, maybe you leaving suddenly only costs the company $Y, where $X > $Y. Are you really worth $X?

That's very insightful. Thank you.

Lawsuit for price fixing for landlords using RealPage.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-realp...

As someone doing this transition, I would love some references that help me... Train myself I guess? Other than by doing and analyzing myself, which is my current situation

I have realized I can give so many tips and reference so many great content online to learn math, programming, engineering... But find myself missing anything about managing

Would you care to guess where in the range the employee's ideal would fall? The answer is missing from your thesis.

Goes further than that too, suppose the one working on the wooden part is slow and the one on the metal part is faster. And surely the value of one part or another is also different, even though its the combined value that's relevant.

Suppose as well there are a thousand people lined up to make the wooden part but hardly any for the metal, then surely the ones who work on the metal part will (try to) command a higher wage too.

Unless you fix bugs in the payment systems, then you'll probably earn more than anyone.