This is multifaceted question. I agree with what you're saying, but let me add something.
Corporations are greedy and let go of many good people. But they also let go of many people who deserved to go. It's really hard to get rid of bad people, even in the US. But you wouldn't believe how many bad people were in big tech because of the COVID over hiring.
I've seen dozens, if not hundreds of people, who went to FAANG and added next to no value. As a manager in one of these companies, I had to deal with a mix of great people and many who were absolutely taking advantage of the company. I could write a book about it. Good for them, but it's not surprising that the party would end someday.
but who takes responsiblility for hiring those 'bad' people in the first place..
I am not saying you should't get rid of them,
but the issue makes me think of that kind of people, who for some reason always think that it is someone other than themselves who must adjust and adapt.
Can't speak for every company, but most companies I've worked for with detailed hiring practices would evaluate the long-term outcomes of people that hiring managers chose.
If someone hired a lot of people who had to be laid off later, they would get more supervision and review of future hires.
> It's really hard to get rid of bad people, even in the US.
Could you explain why it's hard? I've never seen anyone run into any kind of difficulty letting go an at-will employee. The manager can do so at any time, for any reason or no reason at all.
I'm not the poster you were responding to, but I have some experience in this. I am an engineering manager at medium size US company. If I want to fire a poor performer it requires a couple months of detailed documentation on their poor performance, and that's just so I can get them on a PIP (performance improvement plan). That's another 30-90 days. The PIP takes time to prepare and performance during the PIP also has to be rigorously documented.
This has been my experience at two different companies in multiple cases with egregious underperformance. I suppose if an employee assaulted/harassed someone or was doing something else outright illegal like theft or embezzlement, they would be shown the door immediately. But if someone is half-assing their work and dragging the team down, everyone has to put up with it for months as they get second chances, micromanagement, and other special attention before they can actually be let go.
I think it's due to the litigiousness of the US culture. Yes, US companies can fire people at will, but they can also file lawsuits at will, which are costly (time+money) no matter the outcome.
This has never made sense to me. In the US, you can fire someone because you don't like that they wore a green shirt! As long as it's not for one of those specific, enumerated forbidden reasons, companies have total freedom to hire and fire.
I was fired once, and there were no PIPs, no documentation, no warning, no nothing. Just "We aren't doing this work anymore and don't need you" and that was that.
> In the US, you can fire someone because you don't like that they wore a green shirt!
And if that employee can show that other people were allowed to wear green shirts without being fired, they can use that to support an illegal discrimination claim against the company.
The reason it takes effort and documentation to fire people is because companies want to have a uniform set of rules that are applied equally to all employees. They also want documentation to support the firing. Having a consistent process, applied equally and with supporting documentation discourages people from even trying to bring frivolous lawsuits.
Having additional process is also a check on managers. Some managers try to fire anyone they disagree with, dislike, or even to do things like open headcount so they can fill it with a nepotism hire. Putting process in place and requiring documentation discourages managers from firing people frivolously and adds another level of checks and balances to discourage gaming the system.
> And if that employee can show that other people were allowed to wear green shirts without being fired, they can use that to support an illegal discrimination claim against the company.
> If you get fired, and didn't see it coming, that's a failure in management. You should have _plenty_ of explicit signs of where things are heading, starting in 1:1 and culminating in a PIP.
If you happen to wear a green shirt on St. Patrick's Day, then maybe you can sue and say that you were fired because your boss is bigoted against Irish Americans. No one ever comes right out and says that they're firing someone for an illegal reason, so the PIP and the rest of that song and dance is to try to prove that it was above board for a potential lawsuit, which companies seek to avoid at all costs.
If firing a bad performer is so difficult at so many places, then it must be a feature, not a bug. Otherwise the free market would've found a way to change this.
The thing is, everyone is judged by how much inefficiency they remove. This implies that for anyone to be successful, there needs to be inefficiency in the first place. This means that everyone has incentive to create inefficiency, which can be removed at a later time.
Imagine you have ten workers. They say "if we do ten things then the system will be much cheaper to run, but further improvements will be minimal". The most efficient thing to do would be to tell them to work on all things ASAP in parallel, but this means that you'll deliver a lot in the first year, and then very little later on. This makes you look bad as a manager. A much better approach is to artificially delay the tasks and force them to be sequential, one task a year. This means that from outside perspective, your team seems to be consistently delivering added value through entire ten years.
Moreover, imagine that you value all ten employees, but one day the upper management tells every team to fire at least two workers. At that point you'll wish you had two extra guys sitting and doing nothing because you'd be able to fire them without putting your own deliverables in danger.
Not to mention that as a manager, your prestige is proportional to the number of people below you. This means that you have incentive to create bloated teams that sit and do nothing, because having five good and five bad employees looks better on paper than just having five good employees.
In most companies, information flow is extremely opaque. If you're particularly unlucky then your direct supervisor might know your performance is bad, but other than that, zero chance of anyone noticing. And even your direct supervisor might either be too busy, lack knowledge, or simply not give a fuck, because he understands the business value of artificial inefficiency.
I worked for an agency company (mostly T&M contracts) that went through a round of layoffs almost entirely because they wanted to be "like a family" and the managers didn't let poor performers go. I think they ended up cutting something like 10% of their workforce, including underperformers and all new hires, in an effort to get cash flow moving in the right direction again.
It was incredibly rough- a lot of people who weren't being told they needed to shape up or ship out were instead simply told they're being shipped out. The only upside is managers got better about supporting employees later on who weren't performing, including putting people on PIPs rather than letting them coast.
It depends on the size of the company as to what needs to be documented to let someone go. SMBs can let people go much easier, and the smaller, the easier.
But what you cannot do in any circumstance is let people go "for any reason". There are laws against that at any size, and you are looking for a lawsuit if you give a reason.
It's best to just tell them their position has been eliminated due to restructuring (has to be provable if you're a big company), and give them no reason beyond that. If you don't give a reason, they have nothing to bring a lawsuit for.
In summary, reasons are not always required, but are always a liability.
There are internal reasons as well. Letting go of people can be highly disruptive and create uncertainty in your team. It’s a very unpleasant job that can also go wrong, especially if you have to fire loads.
Then there’s the perverse incentive that bigger teams usually equals a promotion. So if you’re the honest manager who manages a tight team and fires people, you won’t get promoted as often.
Top management knows this, of course. To sidestep these misaligned incentives a company-wide one-time layoff is really effective.
And the company can be sued at any time, for any reason or no reason at all. That does not mean the plaintiff will win, but against deep enough pockets, it can be worth a try. PIPs take time, and HR isn’t about to let you skip them, and bad employees know they’ve got six months to spend their workday looking for a new job while not doing their current job. I’ve worked at those companies, and sometimes managed at same, and when OP says they have stories, I believe them.
Which is why severance payments in fang are tied to not suing the company. If that works when you lay of 10% of the company why doesn't it work when you want to fire 1 individual?
You can definitely argue it's not fair to pay somebody extra for not doing a job but the alternative seems to be you keep paying them even more to keep not doing a job (and possibly doing negative work).
Rather than put somebody on a pip for x months just offer them x months of salary to quit. Same money, same work done.
Then layoff a singular individual with severance instead of firing them lol...
(although legally "firing" vs "layoff" is irrelevant, depending on the situation you can get benefits despite being what a layperson considered quitting [1]).
It would not be worth a try if not for a very legitimate reason. Being laid off and mounting a civil case against deep pockets doesn't sound like a recipe for success.
>But you wouldn't believe how many bad people were in big tech because of the COVID over hiring.
There’s no correlation. They hired expecting a certain type of growth. They fired because of AI. The narrative that they were getting rid of bad workers was their excuse, not the reason. Many great engineers got let go. Many project managers that had been with the company through ups and downs. One guy was let go after being poached from a FAANG after his 3rd day. So don’t say anyone deserved it.
Corporations are greedy and let go of many good people. But they also let go of many people who deserved to go. It's really hard to get rid of bad people, even in the US. But you wouldn't believe how many bad people were in big tech because of the COVID over hiring.
I've seen dozens, if not hundreds of people, who went to FAANG and added next to no value. As a manager in one of these companies, I had to deal with a mix of great people and many who were absolutely taking advantage of the company. I could write a book about it. Good for them, but it's not surprising that the party would end someday.