Layoffs are rarely strongly correlated with performance, largely because performance management is hard and layoffs need to hit a large amount of people without too much delay.
The incentive structure to perform well is that you have a job.
No, that is the incentive to be as it says “perfectly mediocre”, not to do better than your peers, to as much as possible not stick out. As anyone who has experienced mass layoffs, they’re pretty close to random in their targeting. It doesn’t matter how much or how little you work if your entire division is axed. It doesn’t matter how amazing or how average you work is if it’s not on something that gets trotted out for demos.
As it says, if you find an issue you can suddenly acquire the work of fixing that issue. You won’t get rewarded for finding the issue, just fixing it will be added to your list of tasks to do. So having reported the issue you now have more work that needs to be done, you aren’t getting paid any more to fix it, and you still have everything else you were already doing. So now when perf review comes around you can be dinged for not fixing the issue you reported.
Thus you have an incentive structure that creates a very rational reason for behaving like this.
I don’t behave like this, and most people don’t, but as the article states that it seems like we’re the irrational ones.
Note that this is the reason companies try so hard to claim “we’re a family” and similar bs.
I discovered this during my last job where I was on “golden handcuffs”. Because nothing I did could meaningfully increase my comp, and my comp had a huge cliff in easy sight, I was strongly incentivized to keep my head down and stay invisible, then leave after the cliff.
Typically every C*O or EVP level get a x% reduction target and that is what will be done. It does not matter that one org may be full of highly efficient people and the other is not. You as the EVP have to bring your x% by such and such date to make the investors happy.
I disagree. The people that are doing the kinds of things the author wants are the ones that will find it very easy to get a better-paid job elsewhere if they quit or are made redundant. The company is setting up incentives for the useless people to stay.
The author seems to have some cognitive issues that he blames on one bad LSD trip. He might be right, he might not, but it’s definitely not general-case advice. LSD is definitely not for everybody.
The incentive structure to perform well is that you have a job. Enjoy layoffs I guess.
Edit: OP, are you the owner of this blog?
Layoffs are rarely strongly correlated with performance, largely because performance management is hard and layoffs need to hit a large amount of people without too much delay.
I think you missed the point of the article.
No, that is the incentive to be as it says “perfectly mediocre”, not to do better than your peers, to as much as possible not stick out. As anyone who has experienced mass layoffs, they’re pretty close to random in their targeting. It doesn’t matter how much or how little you work if your entire division is axed. It doesn’t matter how amazing or how average you work is if it’s not on something that gets trotted out for demos.
As it says, if you find an issue you can suddenly acquire the work of fixing that issue. You won’t get rewarded for finding the issue, just fixing it will be added to your list of tasks to do. So having reported the issue you now have more work that needs to be done, you aren’t getting paid any more to fix it, and you still have everything else you were already doing. So now when perf review comes around you can be dinged for not fixing the issue you reported.
Thus you have an incentive structure that creates a very rational reason for behaving like this.
I don’t behave like this, and most people don’t, but as the article states that it seems like we’re the irrational ones.
Note that this is the reason companies try so hard to claim “we’re a family” and similar bs.
I discovered this during my last job where I was on “golden handcuffs”. Because nothing I did could meaningfully increase my comp, and my comp had a huge cliff in easy sight, I was strongly incentivized to keep my head down and stay invisible, then leave after the cliff.
Sometimes even being trotted out for demos won’t save you.
RE layoffs:
Typically every C*O or EVP level get a x% reduction target and that is what will be done. It does not matter that one org may be full of highly efficient people and the other is not. You as the EVP have to bring your x% by such and such date to make the investors happy.
I disagree. The people that are doing the kinds of things the author wants are the ones that will find it very easy to get a better-paid job elsewhere if they quit or are made redundant. The company is setting up incentives for the useless people to stay.
No, I’m not.
I was curious because the post about LSD was interesting to me. Thanks.
The author seems to have some cognitive issues that he blames on one bad LSD trip. He might be right, he might not, but it’s definitely not general-case advice. LSD is definitely not for everybody.