Having fired employees myself, I can honestly say it is the worst exercise in which a manager will ever participate. Even when the employee(s) deserved it.
Decades ago, I had to fire about 40 out of 150+ seasonal workers. All young. None "doing the job." None hurt very much by being fired. Hardest thing I ever did as a manager.
Depends on what YOUR (the firer's) employee characteristics are. Anyone who does not immediately whack the high-paid layabout (#3 in the lineup) must have VERY bad numbers themselves and, were they included as employee #5 should be the first to go or at least taken off the management track. There's also the matter of "pour encourage les autres": employees need to be made aware of their company's values and decision-making rationale.
I don't know about the extent, but we really do need to find a way to keep pay in line with productivity throughout the working years both to avoid edge cases at "retirement age" and to encourage lifelong acquisition of human capital.
I think the German pattern is the most interesting -- almost never firing one of the older two people (including the lowest performer). I believe in Germany, people supporting children are protected from layoffs in some way, so the German managers probably develop practices around retaining middle-aged people (of all levels of performance)
When there are mass layoffs in bigger companies, German law dictates that they must happen according to social criteria, e.g. based on ability to find a new job, and disregarding performance. It's not clear whether that applies here – we don't know whether there are layoffs across the company or if only this one team is impacted. Probably you're right that managers think the rule would apply.
What a funny question. You have to fire someone but all the people on your team are either good, or average. You should hire the *underperformers* on your team, not the average ones!
Too many people, including many who are professional economists, seem to forget the work of Kahneman and Tversky, and seem never to have learned that value is psychic phenomenon, not a monetary phenomenon.
Having fired employees myself, I can honestly say it is the worst exercise in which a manager will ever participate. Even when the employee(s) deserved it.
Decades ago, I had to fire about 40 out of 150+ seasonal workers. All young. None "doing the job." None hurt very much by being fired. Hardest thing I ever did as a manager.
Depends on what YOUR (the firer's) employee characteristics are. Anyone who does not immediately whack the high-paid layabout (#3 in the lineup) must have VERY bad numbers themselves and, were they included as employee #5 should be the first to go or at least taken off the management track. There's also the matter of "pour encourage les autres": employees need to be made aware of their company's values and decision-making rationale.
Please start putting the "this post first appeared on Econlog" followed by "on [date]" at the beginning of such posts.
I don't know about the extent, but we really do need to find a way to keep pay in line with productivity throughout the working years both to avoid edge cases at "retirement age" and to encourage lifelong acquisition of human capital.
#2 is relevant to young-ish academics who don't get tenure.
I think the German pattern is the most interesting -- almost never firing one of the older two people (including the lowest performer). I believe in Germany, people supporting children are protected from layoffs in some way, so the German managers probably develop practices around retaining middle-aged people (of all levels of performance)
When there are mass layoffs in bigger companies, German law dictates that they must happen according to social criteria, e.g. based on ability to find a new job, and disregarding performance. It's not clear whether that applies here – we don't know whether there are layoffs across the company or if only this one team is impacted. Probably you're right that managers think the rule would apply.
What a funny question. You have to fire someone but all the people on your team are either good, or average. You should hire the *underperformers* on your team, not the average ones!
Too many people, including many who are professional economists, seem to forget the work of Kahneman and Tversky, and seem never to have learned that value is psychic phenomenon, not a monetary phenomenon.