I'm not if you are serious or not, but in case you are: it is extremely difficult to assess someone's performance at work in a fair way, especially in tech. The ways to measure performance like LoC are largely inadequate and say nothing about the quality of one's work. And in some areas like DevOps, good luck assessing someone's performance - you can discover your mistake once that person you've fired is gone.
Usually in large orgs there is multi-layer reviews, and this is a quite efficient indicator;
if the colleagues say that you are not doing your job well
+ the managers say you are not doing your job well
+ the people under you say you are not doing your job well.
+ the customers say you are not doing your job well.
Then why an employee would even stay in a company where literally everybody thinks they are not helpful ?
When you are a relatively large customer/partner of Google, you sometimes interact with genuine impostors, who are not helpful, but you still have to go through them because there is no alternative.
So a bit of clean up in the bad elements is actually good for both bottom and top line of the company.
If everyone is saying you’re not doing your job well then they might have a point. The issue is that’s it’s often just a PM or EM saying it and no one else. Firings are often made based upon how the manager feels and that’s all it takes.
People who ruffle feathers of PMs and EMs are often the best performers but get axed for questioning authority. But are they fired for asking questions? No - they’ll be axed for “performance” when in reality it’s more due to not wanting anyone to undermine their authority/job security.
I’ve worked in SV for a while - it’s extremely political and not based upon meritocracy at all. People who get promoted are most often the biggest boot lickers and average performers.
Most firings I’ve seen are pure bullshit and are only due to someone in an authoritarian position wanting slaves and not engineers.
> if the colleagues say that you are not doing your job well
> + the managers say you are not doing your job well
> + the people under you say you are not doing your job well.
> + the customers say you are not doing your job well.
How often is it actually that 1 employee is exposed to all of these groups simultaneously, and all of them are technically qualified and have visibility and insight to pass the judgment about the parts of performance that were under that employee's control?
My bet is somewhere asymptotically approaching 0.
My follow-up question to this would be - how did this person even pass the interview process to get into a position where there are people under them?
I completely agree, but we are talking about two different things. If my colleagues, customers, people from other departments say I'm not doing my job well, I should be fired - but immediately, without waiting for any global layoffs.
However, yearly performance reviews are a joke. At least in all places I worked at, and in spite of various efforts by the management to rationalize them. And I'm saying this in spite of getting great reviews all the time.
