The company I work for has ties to another company that hires CCIE qualified staff in India, and the poor sods only get paid £5000.00 pa. Compare that the 'Western' standards of pay and I am not surprised they 'under perform'

Many companies here in the states, such as GE, have always had a business-as-usual policy of firing the bottom 3% of employees every year. Even if you assume a zero-sum game, if every business is doing that, then all that happens is these people get shuffled around until they find a job they're decent at (or keep getting shuffled around indefinitely because they're incompetent and unwilling to reduce their expectations). It's only in countries that have a hard time firing people (like France, for example) that the risk involved in hiring someone who's been fired before is so high that being fired once means you'll stay unemployed for a long time.

Granted, in an economy like today's, getting fired is a much bigger deal. Which might be why they decided to do 3.5% this year instead of the 5% they claim is their usual. Really, this isn't worth reporting unless you have previous years numbers to compare too. Certainly it's ridiculous to accuse them of simply trying to avoid severance costs if you don't include previous year's numbers.

If there is an accepted, quantifiable set of metrics that employees can be evaluated on, I know of companies that do this to 10% each year. On the other hand, if you've got a bunch of people that you just don't like, you have to lay them off with full notification and compensation. (I love 'right to work' states). My coat, because for some reason, I'm going to find myself in the bottom 10%.

There's this thing called "normalisation", which (in companies that subscribe to it)) causes the bottom X% (X usually between 3 and 10, I guess) to be subjected to either some sort of probation or firing.

Since it is not possible to do this across the company, each largish team is expected to fit the normal curve within that team's ratings.

I honestly doubt if that is even true, but one nasty side-effect is that you can't build an A-team anymore. No savvy techie will join a team that is full of smart folks -- he'll progress faster up the chain by joining a team where he's clearly the star :-(

I feel sorry for the people working on the "other" side of this whole global market thing. Let's face it, they'd be cleaning our toilets if a corporation figured out a way to fit a gloved hand with scrubber down a telephone line.

I know it's probably good for their economy in the long run, and they're probably not doing too badly out of it themselves. It just seems a bit unfair that they get the some of the worst jobs on the planet and then are subjected to such harsh "performance evaluation".

I once worked at a retail bank in the UK that insisted that all teams were assessed in that way. Our boss refused to do it. We'd been a startup taken over by the bank, and as far as he was concerned (he'd hired us all!) we were all in the top 10%, otherwise we wouldn't have been employed by and survived the start up.

This led to a bit of a stand off, as you can imagine.

But in the end, arbitrarily placing employees in buckets doesn't help anyone but the HR department, who think that all jobs can be broken down into process and that everyone is instantly replaceable (ok in time anyone is replaceable, but not always *right now*).

The person choosing the unproductives includes themselves in it.

Producing huge amounts of sloppy code is not good performance, no matter how much is made!

I have been working independantly as the Lead BA for a load of guys from Infosys for the last, on an understaffed, underfunded project that had been started late in response to a regulatory change (ie hard deadline).

The net result was that the Infosys development team was working so hard (12 to 16h a day, 6 or 7 days a week), that they had no time to go and study for their internal exams and all got downgraded for it. This means they didn't get promotion, raise or bonus.

I was and still am outraged at that bunch of management wankers fucking over a brilliant team like that and am well prepared to believe the horror stories.

(Of course the idiot developers never told anyone that they needed time off or the implications of their 'exams')

The Warden of Dilberthalli is back. Halli is village in local lingo here in the fine city of Bangalore. This moron has been confusing HR and PR for a while. Clearly not doing a very good job on either front. The ones that were let go should thank their lucky stars that they are out of the clutches of the Borg that services the West while pretending to do "IT."