I remember the grocery store I worked at started posting the rate for each cashier of items scanned per minute logged into a register. They didn’t say anything about it, but I now realize they were probably leading into using that data as justification for something.

My dumbass 16 year old self thought “I’m going to get that number so high it breaks the system.” I would lock my station after the previous customer, and take a little time to face all of the UPC codes and look up produce codes and make a general strategy. Then, I would unlock the register, scan like a madman, then lock it and casually start bagging. The customers would get concerned they needed to hurry up based on my fervor, so I would tell them “Take all the time you need, see that show yesterday?”

Next time they posted the rankings, my number was 20x as high as second place. After a few weeks of getting my number a little higher each time, my boss’ boss came by and told me to knock it off since I was polluting their metrics. Next week no new rankings.

I like to think I inadvertently helped prevent KPI nonsense.

I think we are already seeing that with Microsoft. Another 2-3 rounds of AI and they forget how to build windows.

It also fosters a culture of non-cooperation with colleagues (because they are now your competition), where workers and teams try to sabotage each other, or at least not help, and throw each other under the bus. So there's mutual mistrust too. And no one wants to take a risk and innovate, leading to further stagnation.

The justification they give for the figure is that it’s the lowest performing 10% according to internal key performance indicator (KPI) metrics

The thing is, that's not what layoffs are supposed to be. That's effectively firing someone for cause. Maybe in America the difference doesn't matter, but in the civilised world, at least in theory, it does. But in reality they can somehow get away with this and call it "layoffs".

If a company does layoffs, they should not be allowed to hire any staff in the same or similar roles for 12 months.

With Meta it very much looks like overhiring. What are those 8000 workers even doing, designing CSS for each individual ad on Facebook?

God willing

Yup. Not all value is easily and directly measurable. Trying to overmanage and only value measurable factors is incredibly counterproductive. But hey, that makes the stock price go up. So who cares about anything else.

makes KPIs, a measuring tool, the target which as any statistician will tell you that when you make the measurement a target it ceases to be a good measuring tool

This came up recently elsewhere and is known as “Goodhart’s Law”

The justification they give for the figure is that it's the lowest performing 10%

But that would be turnover rate, not cuts.

This means after 5 to 10 years of this cycle all that's left of the company's institutional knowledge is how to deliver for KPIs and the sycophants who best adapt to this reality. You get a hollowing out of the company.

That happened (and continues to happen) to my former employer.

After years of layoffs and outsourcing, the company doesn't have anyone on staff anymore who knows how half of the systems work.

Theae days, if something is more than 5 years old, the operations and maintenance staff (entirely outsourced contractors now) have to pray the documentation is correct (or even obtainable) if they have a hope of fixing it if anything breaks.

I actually think a few % a year is healthy (1% feels right to me). I work at a company where we never lay anyone off and it’s led to a bunch of deadweight in the company that make work harder for everyone else. You gotta have some mechanism to let low performers go.

10% is way too high though

Operating Facebook is rent-seeking, in a way. Any company could make another Facebook, but without people on it, there's no point going on it.

Japan. Layoffs are extremely difficult to pull off there. You have to show poor performance by the individual involved, and the standards for that are very rigorous. The government knows that unemployed people immediately become their problem, so they just demand that if a corporation wants to employ someone, they have to be willing to enter into that in an open ended arrangement. So unions aren’t the only way.

This is capitalism baby

Other countries handle capitalism different.

Yes that always irks me. We can have 15 “markers of a recession”, but as long as nobody says it’s name, it can’t be true. The media has the Voldemort approach to economics.

They don't get paid commission. Since people continue to work for companies like this and are OK being paid so little, nothing will change.

Just ban or heavily tax stocks.

Oh, billionaire just used stocks as collateral for his loan? 30% tax

Selling or buying stock? 20% tax

Neither have the large companies. The only difference between you and them is that you have acknowledged this loss of knowledge.

That's an interesting question. Either there isn't much tacit knowledge in the company that they can't put in onboarding documentation, or the company is focusing on short term gains at the cost of long term stability