> The truth of the matter I think is that you do not actually need the best.

Not all employees need to be the "best". But if you are a top tier company in a given field like Microsoft, you need the best minds to stay top tier, otherwise you will descend. But on the other hand you don't need the lower tier performers to stay top tier except for scaling reasons because the supply for top tier performers is a very small pool...

What management thinks is good and what employees, especially engineering type employees, think is good are usually counter.

The execs want to run the most profit to cost they can squeeze out, usually short term. The employees see the value in the senior and knowledge rich staff with higher costs long term.

That is a rule for a good project manager. When work is simple, you don't need bright people. You just need average guys. But when work is cutting edge, you need very talented people.

I think the efforts on cutting edge works has been reduced and redirected to more market-dominating trends like LLM optimizations. This is a bet. Cut off the finger for a stronger arm. And I think this bet will fail. But I thought the same about this new Gemini after Bard, and boy I was wrong.

Companies want to get rid of the bottom 25% of the employees at all times. These offers often get taken advantage by half of those and half of others who are more capable & find it opportunistic to do something better. If that latter half had stayed, they would have outperformed their pay. If the company needs to re-hire that lost output in employees, it's a net negative. If they can guarantee that the ones who stayed plus AI outweighs the time to onboard and institutional knowledge lost, sure seems reasonable but high risk for a large company that is allowed to play it safer.

> The truth of the matter I think is that you do not actually need the best.

That is true for monopolies. Once you get a monopoly, you do not need to compete anymore. Lower the salaries. Make products worse. Increase prices. Monopolies do not need to care. We used to break them because that. Nowadays, bots just will tell you that they are monopolies because they are "so good". So, here we are.

This is true if you are running a car wash. Even the mid tier employees satisfactorily do the job and customers can be given what they paid for. You are competing on geographic location and ability to do a very easy task repeatedly over and over. You get another chance to sell your product every single day, and you can adjust your prices up and down to find the sweet spot because the sales cycle repeats every day.

It is not true if you are determining the correct feature to add to microsoft's money making products. That requires deep knowledge of users and the industry and the existing product. It requires understanding the industry and users far in advance, the turnaround time for a feature in Windows or Azure is likely 6 months or longer, sometimes years. It requires acumen and an ability to think about customers and the market and sales. Microsoft doesn't have 5000 people who can do this. They probably don't have 1000. These people can go start their own business or consulting firm today. There are lots of people they worked with in the past who know how good they are so they can get another job.

The same is true for engineering. Out of 500 engineers, there are 10-20 that are doing the really important work that you can't just find someone else to do. They know everything about the system and everyone comes to them for advice or to get explanations about how things are put together and why. You can't just find some average engineer and put them in the same desk as these 10-20 and magically things are fine, the mid tier person doesn't have the years of experience nor the potential to fill this role even if they did have the experience.

It didn't seem that obvious a term as you described it here, but a bit of googling gave the background:

It's effectively that the more desirable elements leave, the less desirable parts stay behind and get more concentrated... So the bad employees are the salt in the dead sea

It was coined by this chap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Webster#Career

MS did a round of layoffs that was specifically targeting low performance last year: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/08/microsoft-confirms-performan... and there's no reason to believe they wouldn't do it again. I doubt that anyone there is unaware that hanging on isn't a realistic option if they're not delivering.

You get the same with government jobs. Anyone smart leaves and gets a better job, so you’re left with the dregs.

I termed it "Sh*t floats" when I was in the Navy.

In theory that's a manager's responsibility, but managers get (effectively) punished for firing people so that never happens in practice.

They're also the ones that create the most money.

Ultimately, you can only take equity away from people like that for so long. We're taking the people who actually create the value and firing them so that we can satisfy the hangers-on, meaning shareholders who often 1) don't know they even own MS and 2) are often diversified as to make a real problem with Microsoft not a dealbreaker for their financial goals.

Not true, the market is exceptional for the best in tech. The problem arises when some employees think they are the best - despite the facts not lining up.

Yes and No. If you are a citizen and have “AI” experience there’s plenty of startups offering base salaries in excess of the average Microsoft total comp.

9 figure signing bonuses are a horrible problem to have

Definitely not. We are no better at finding good employees than we ever were. It's the human biases that make it bad, not the technology.