hnthrowaway6543

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"over 50% of the country i live in are irredeemably terrible people" is obviously hyperbole -- if it were true, the onus would be on you to start taking action against those terrible people. but my guess is you don't actually think they're so terrible, because you're still working your 9-5 for your terrible-person boss, getting paid like every other schmuck, and you're happy to let those irredeemably terrible people deliver your DoorDash, teach your children at public school, and keep your electricity and water running.

> But if the person in front of you has done or advocated for things that cause harm or is themself a horrible person then I disagree.

the current conflict in the middle east shows why this doesn't work in the long run.

despite what a generation that grew up consuming Marvel films was led to believe, not every conflict is a clearly defined superhero-vs-supervillain, good-vs-evil affair. eventually, you will be the one who, according to some, is advocating for things that cause harm and is considered a horrible person.

it's not really a questionable decision though. in the absence of morals, which is what we have in a capitalist society, the way to maximize the success of a corporation is to remove low performers and replace them with high performers. that's common sense. criticizing a company for doing this because it "destroys people" is misplaced anger, as you should be criticizing the system the company operates in, which again, is a whole other discussion

> Sure. This is a great model to adopt if you believe corporations exist to destroy people.

corporations exist to make money, or maximize shareholder returns, depending on how you look at it. corporations don't exist to make people happy or solve the fundamental societal issues with capitalism. there's merit to discussing that as a separate topic, but in the context of "capitalism exists and you are operating a business within it", you want to fire low performers and replace them with high performers

morale is also adversely affected by people having obvious underperformers on their team that they have to work around, so pick your poison

bad hire doesn't necessarily mean bad/stupid/incompetent person, it just means bad hire. might not be a fit for the role, might not be a fit for the company. for example, i freely admit i was a bad hire at Google because i got demotivated by big corporate/political bullshit getting in my way, it just wasn't for me. then i went to a 20 startup and, in the words of the CEO, "saved the company" and scaled it to 200 people

and no i didn't make up 20%, Gartner did a study on it. and most people with management/hiring experience report the same.

> Is your hiring process so flawed that you just accept that you screwed up hiring 5 percent of your people?

if you only messed up 5% of your hires you'd be a goddamn genius and every company in the world would want to put you in charge of their hiring process

the "standard" is more like 20% of hires end up being bad hires

last quote is the key point and tracks with the other Vibe Shift press releases Mark has been on about. i read this as, there was a fear that laying off underperformers without very long PIP processes would be dangerous to the company, now he thinks it's less likely given the political landscape, so let's fire them ASAP rather than drawing it out.

> a desire to not centralize the Internet

> If I didn't already self-host email

this really says all that needs to be said about your perspective. you have an engineer and OSS advocate's mindset. which is fine, but most business leaders (including technical leaders like CTOs) have a business mindset, and their goal is to build a business that makes money, not avoid contributing to the centralization of the internet

i heard the same shit when people were talking about outsourcing to India after the dotcom bubble burst. programmer salaries would cap out at $60k because of international competition.

if you're afraid of salaries shrinking due to LLMs, then i implore you, get out of software development. it'll help me a lot!