Then the ones just above the lowest 5% become the newest lowest 5%.
Is he gonna cut them next ?
First they came for the lowest 5%,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a lowest 5%.
Then they came for the lowest 5%,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a lowest 5%.
Then they came for the lowest 5%,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a lowest 5%.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to cut below me.
What you can end up with is a lot of new hires queued up for the firing line. The “bottom 5%” is, initially, the people in the office who are currently in a slump. But then you bring on a load of fresh new hires who have little experience and a lot of pressure. They burn out fast and become the next “bottom 5%”.
Meanwhile, the more politically and technically savvy learn to survive by creating make-work tasks that look good on performance metrics but do little for the firm as a whole. Their superiors approve, because a team that is constantly appearing busy is more important than a team that’s producing anything of value. So you end up with these little entrenched departmental fiefs, dedicated to making themselves irreplaceable at the expense of the company as a whole.
There’s a ton written on the Sears collapse in the early 00s, where this exact dynamic played out. Managers turned against one another, because stack ranking mattered more than inter-department cohesion or bottom line figures. The company went from a network of high end retailers to a shitty outlet stores over the course of a decade.
Then the ones just above the lowest 5% become the newest lowest 5%.
Is he gonna cut them next ?
First they came for the lowest 5%,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a lowest 5%.
Then they came for the lowest 5%,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a lowest 5%.
Then they came for the lowest 5%,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a lowest 5%.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to cut below me.
What you can end up with is a lot of new hires queued up for the firing line. The “bottom 5%” is, initially, the people in the office who are currently in a slump. But then you bring on a load of fresh new hires who have little experience and a lot of pressure. They burn out fast and become the next “bottom 5%”.
Meanwhile, the more politically and technically savvy learn to survive by creating make-work tasks that look good on performance metrics but do little for the firm as a whole. Their superiors approve, because a team that is constantly appearing busy is more important than a team that’s producing anything of value. So you end up with these little entrenched departmental fiefs, dedicated to making themselves irreplaceable at the expense of the company as a whole.
There’s a ton written on the Sears collapse in the early 00s, where this exact dynamic played out. Managers turned against one another, because stack ranking mattered more than inter-department cohesion or bottom line figures. The company went from a network of high end retailers to a shitty outlet stores over the course of a decade.