It is all relative though. If the team average performance is 50%, one can easily identify the very low and very high performers. The very low performers will barely deliver anything at all, while the very high performers will deliver multiples of the average.
Now - if the mean is higher, variance is low, and the distribution isn't symmetric, that's when things start to become harder.
Worst case, you start firing people that are "low-performers" on paper, but in reality might be very close to the "meets expectation" workers. Which creates a very toxic environment, as your average workers will be walking on eggshells.
And we know from history that this isn't some outlandish scenario in tech. There have been companies that have had(still have) a strict stacked ranking system - and come hell or high water, someone has to go.
This is true in theory. In practice, most managers either do not understand what "performing well" for an engineer means, or willfully go against what they know to be true due to internal incentive structures. For example, favoring those whose contributions are more visible in the short-term, even if net negative over time. Through such a lens, someone who is competent at executing a longer term vision, or refuses to do only those tasks that are visible, is a low performer.
I don't say this to bash your statement, I agree with you in principle. Just useful to keep in mind that the context matters. Sometimes, the people complaining about having to compensate for the low performer, are the actual low performers.
Underperforming relative to what? If they're doing their job in good faith and overall making money for the company, is it "underperforming" if they're less productive than 95% of their peers? This notion of underperformance leaves no room for adequate performance.
I am sure there are some people getting laid off who genuinely don't do any work, though not 5% of the company - and certainly not the bottom 5% according to Meta's metrics! A lot of "mid-range" performers probably get by with pure schmoozing and mooching. And in more general sense, I don't think it's okay - either morally or strategically - to lay people off simply because you want to roll the dice on hiring more productive workers. (For a company of Meta's size this doesn't even make sense; clearly this move is about cracking the whip for the remaining 95%.)
Performance is only adequate if it’s at least as good as the engineers of the other players in your industry. Otherwise, you’re losing ground. As long as anyone in your market space is actively trying to manage their engineering talent (recruiting your top performers, releasing low performers, being more selective in hiring) so must you just to keep pace. An “adequate” engineer may make the company money, but the opportunity cost of not hiring someone better who could make even more money can be higher still.
The sorts of decisions and results that make a company the size of Meta succeed or fail happen above the levels of the folks who will get cut. Most of the net value produced by individual engineers is determined by which projects they're on, rather than whether they're good at their job. A savy entrepreneur with a few engineers worth of openai credits can create more value in a week than a median FAANG middle management career maxxer with 10-100 engineers in their subtree of the org creates in a month.
Personally, I think it’s both. Yes, the strategy is important but it’s nothing without the ability to execute. And we’ve all worked with the god-tier engineer who creates never-ending boondoggles because they can. And, yes, the larger the org the harder it is to get both strategy and execution aligned at once.
My point was that the scope/impact/value/etc of the contributions made by individual engineers will be determined more by the projects they're working on than by their inherent ability to contribute. So, if we go through the org and cut the bottom 5% of engineers by how much value they added to the company, most cuts will be determined by the context in which an individual was operating rather than their inherent ability to contribute. Ie, the cuts will mostly just punish people for getting stuck with bad managers or lackluster projects.
Of course, some people are obviously great in any context and some are obviously useless (or worse) in any context, but those folks should already be handled appropriately even without the "cut 5%" mandate.
