Termination Quota

Problem: Ensuring a high-performance team.

Context: An organization, particularly a large one, wants to have high-performance developers among its ranks. The organization may additionally want to impose a FearCulture, in order to (allegedly) boost productivity.

Forces:

Desire to weed out poor performers.
Encourage people to work harder.
Instill a FearCulture or HeroCulture.

Solution: As part of the annual performance review cycle, the workers in a company/department are rated in order. The lowest-rated n or n% of developers are summarily fired. (Sometimes it takes two or more years in the cellar to get fired; one year gets you probation and two gets you the sack). This policy is widely known to all employees.

Resulting Context: Workers, fearful of their jobs, put in additional hours in order to avoid being at the bottom of the pile. A HeroCulture frequently arises. Company often assumes that its workers are the most talented in the industry because they weed-out those who allegedly are not (who couldn't "hack it"). Employees often buy into such feelings of superiority, and may consider it a privelege to work there (see CorporateStockholmSyndrome). Employee BurnOut is quite common. Employees frequently compete with each other in a cutthroat fashion, rather than cooperating as team members, and a dog-eat-dog/me-or-him mentality arises.

This practice is likely to result in below average productivity as

highly productive employees are likely to find themselves employment with a company that is less hostile.
Remaining employees sabotage each other's work, trying to MakeOthersLookIncompetent.

Another side effect is how middle management reacts. If a department knows that it will have to lose 5% of its work force, it may purposefully hire WarmBodies so that it has someone to let go. A colleague at a major hardware company related the story of how layoffs were happening "across the board" and so every department had to fire a certain percentage of its workers, "in order to be fair."

Departments that had remained lean were punished for their behavior by having to get rid of good workers. Departments that deliberately added fat were rewarded by having the fat removed.''

Rationale: A belief that a large-enough sample of developers will certainly contain a percentage of laggards; who must be eliminated. The desire to use fear to motivate employees to greater productivity. As an added bonus, laying off employees (when management decides such is necessary) becomes cheaper--just fire your usual n%, and don't replace them--as it's a firing for cause, no severance pay is required. (Companies that make a habit of this do generally document the reasons for the termination; so employees trying to claim constructive layoff have a hard time).

Examples:

A certain microprocessor manufacturer, which frequently claims to be "inside" in their advertisements, is infamous for this. (One wonders if the nomenclature of one of their processor families is derived from their habit of "86"ing engineers). In numerous times during the past few years, when economic downturns have led to job cuts at this company, they have announced that the job cuts will be through "attrition", not "layoffs". What that means is discussed above--they're firing their usual 5% but not replacing them.

CategoryEmployment