> Why are they firing and hiring at the same time?
Because downsizing via attrition is a death sentence. The worst people are the most likely to stay and then new hires will be unlikely to stick around and deal with the code from the worst people.
Companies can self-consistently seek to hire the best and fire the worst from the the hired-pool.
1. Hiring is a noisy process. You can tune your hiring test to lean more towards false negatives or more towards false positives, but you cannot (at this juncture in history) eliminate a large amount of bias (error) from evaluations of candidates.
2. Regression to the mean ensures that any hiring process that sets a "high bar" will result in pool of developers who are on average below that bar.
3. as an employee remains at a company, the bias in your evaluation process should decrease dramatically. One can, and probably should try to weed out false positives, especially if one is trying to reduce payroll.
Companies can self-consistently seek to hire the best and fire the worst from the the hired-pool.
Its not a spin. Its the actual business process and thought behind it.
The solution to that is challenge it with clout equal to the business. And that means unions. Only when 2 powers butt heads, will there be any fairness out of that.
> Its the actual business process and thought behind it.
Exactly. Even if one disagrees with a thought process (actually, especially if one disagrees with a thought process), one should still seek to understand it inasmuch as possible. Otherwise one is doomed to repeat it.
For the record, I am neither employed in or near Silicon Valley (not that it should matter), nor do I have any strong beliefs about whether or not actively weeding out developers is a good tactic for a business (five years ago I would have said it wasn't, now I'm agnostic).
Whatever my beliefs or situation though, it's not hard for anyone to understand how a medium-to-large scale organization with a high hiring bar could make a rational decision to "hire the best" while still making an effort to release the least valuable developers in the company.
An alternative strategy is Google's. Google tunes their hiring process to produce almost exclusively false negatives rather than false positives (they very deliberately reject qualified candidates far more often than they hire under-qualified candidates). With this hiring strategy in place, it wouldn't make as much sense for Google to "weed out" developers.
And for the record I think 20th-century impersonal, statistical business thinking is toxic, but that doesn't mean I don't see its use or that I know of a better way to do things.
I agree, it's not a feasible strategy for most companies. It's not even that innovative, it's just repeating a test with a high error rate repeatedly. This doesn't reduce error, but it does change the type of errors they make. I think that's pretty interesting. (From speaking with co-workers, it also damages Google's image considerably and reduces the probability that people will spend time and energy applying there; the their applicant pool seems large enough anyway).
It is really funny in a way and necessary in another.
Funny because companies necessarily say they aspire to have a representative workforce, one which reflects the community (local/national workforce, users, the founders?) but then when it comes down to it, they only want to keep the ones who will provide some value (which is obvious) but then remember the community is made up of all kinds of people with different abilities --so we realize we are all in it for ourselves --there is no "community" where we look after each other. It's me or them, really.
It's necessary because, well, we live in a competitive world where your competitor isn't going to say, well, let's take it easy on them, they are keeping on a bunch of underachievers, and keeping underachivers employed is good for community, so we should give them a break.
'Best' here refers to the population of job seekers, 'worst' refers to the population of the employees.
There are still some elements in the 'best of all job seekers' (= employees) who qualify as worse than the rest.
You don't even need to change the trait(s) 'best' and 'worst' refer to.
Because downsizing via attrition is a death sentence. The worst people are the most likely to stay and then new hires will be unlikely to stick around and deal with the code from the worst people.
Once the spiral starts it's hard to get out of.