Let's view this practice in the light of another HN truism: The traditional Big-tech hiring practice (e.g. in person whiteboarding) does a terrible job at predicting future job performance.
In light of this, let's assume for the sake of argument that in any technical hiring practice, 20% of the candidates that get through are going to underperform. Given this, it is a sensible approach to inflate headcounts by 25%, and couple this with a mandate to cull underperforming employees, allowing the org to converge on the result you'd get with a hiring process that perfectly predicts future job performance.
One group that benefits from this strategy is developers as a whole, particularly those who don't interview well. It gives more developers a spot at the company and opportunity to prove themselves.
Not to diminish the many comments about Goodhart's law. There's a lot of ways this scheme can cause more harm than good. Having per-team/per-manager quotas is also problematic, and shows an ignorance of basic statistics. Even if you know that 20% of your employees are underperforming, you shouldn't expect them to be evenly dispersed across many "two pizza" teams.
In light of this, let's assume for the sake of argument that in any technical hiring practice, 20% of the candidates that get through are going to underperform. Given this, it is a sensible approach to inflate headcounts by 25%, and couple this with a mandate to cull underperforming employees, allowing the org to converge on the result you'd get with a hiring process that perfectly predicts future job performance.
One group that benefits from this strategy is developers as a whole, particularly those who don't interview well. It gives more developers a spot at the company and opportunity to prove themselves.
Not to diminish the many comments about Goodhart's law. There's a lot of ways this scheme can cause more harm than good. Having per-team/per-manager quotas is also problematic, and shows an ignorance of basic statistics. Even if you know that 20% of your employees are underperforming, you shouldn't expect them to be evenly dispersed across many "two pizza" teams.