I think the value of low performers becomes much more obvious when you separate out the concept of a toxic employee. 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. Or they’re the managers who cause attrition or can’t retain their team or lie to their peers and own leadership until it catches up to them, often dramatically.

However, low performers are not always toxic. Often, low performers are just kind of lazy, or they take longer than they should to finish their work, or 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, or …

Non-toxic low performers can be great because they’ll often do the unglamorous work for you for relatively low pay, and all you have to do is not bother them too much. The worst thing you can do with non-toxic low performers is try to force them into high performers. It won’t work, because they’re either not capable or they just don’t care. For some people, their work just isn’t that important to them, and there’s nothing you can do to change their perception of the relative importance of their job to the other aspects of their life. 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.

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.