How it should happen not like DOGE is doing it

[ochotona]

For the record, I am 110% in favor of budget cutting. But not the way it has been done.

Department heads and managers, supervisors should do a forced ranking of their people and yank the bottom 10% or whatever... much like all of us in corporation have done since forever-ago. And you really have to pay attention to age demographics, so you don't have "lumps" in your age histogram, where everyone of a certain older age who knows how to do things gets kept, youngies fired, then the old ones are gone eventually, and no one knows how to do Scheisse, and there are no mentors left. Firing young people in order to "starve" the future as the old people retire... it sounds like a terrible idea, especially since these days the young people are bringing in Data Science and AI skillsets that we old folks didn't have available to us (obviously) and they can re-cast government into a hyper-lean, hyper-efficient model. Or... it can just be left in a broken, steaming Boomer-conceived pile which consumes marginally less money but is just Scheisse broken. DOGE is pursuing the latter. They are idiots.

IRS agents are revenue generators. Firing them is the greatest corruption of all. It just makes it easier to evade lawfully owed taxes. There is a positive ROI on IRS agents!

[yankees60]

For the record, I am 110% in favor of budget cutting. But not the way it has been done.

Department heads and managers, supervisors should do a forced ranking of their people and yank the bottom 10% or whatever... much like all of us in corporation have done since forever-ago. And you really have to pay attention to age demographics, so you don't have "lumps" in your age histogram, where everyone of a certain older age who knows how to do things gets kept, youngies fired, then the old ones are gone eventually, and no one knows how to do Scheisse, and there are no mentors left. Firing young people in order to "starve" the future as the old people retire... it sounds like a terrible idea, especially since these days the young people are bringing in Data Science and AI skillsets that we old folks didn't have available to us (obviously) and they can re-cast government into a hyper-lean, hyper-efficient model. Or... it can just be left in a broken, steaming Boomer-conceived pile which consumes marginally less money but is just Scheisse broken. DOGE is pursuing the latter. They are idiots.

IRS agents are revenue generators. Firing them is the greatest corruption of all. It just makes it easier to evade lawfully owed taxes. There is a positive ROI on IRS agents!

As usual ... quite well stated!

[coasting]

Department heads and managers, supervisors should do a forced ranking of their people and yank the bottom 10% or whatever... much like all of us in corporation have done since forever-ago.

Indeed most of us have endured this in our careers. This is the infamous Jack Welch 20/70/10 practice as described in his book "Jack: Straight from the Gut" - cull the bottom 10% on a regular basis. Similar to decimation (to reduce by one-tenth) as practiced by the Romans: "a form of military discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed by members of his cohort" (see Wikipedia), though the Romans selected at random and not by ranking.

Welch's 20/70/10 practice might sound reasonable at first, but if performed too religiously/frequently, you eventually cull all the bottom 10% and start to eat into the 70% who are doing an okay job. And as the Romans found, it isn't great for morale.

[yankees60]

Department heads and managers, supervisors should do a forced ranking of their people and yank the bottom 10% or whatever... much like all of us in corporation have done since forever-ago.

Indeed most of us have endured this in our careers. This is the infamous Jack Welch 20/70/10 practice as described in his book "Jack: Straight from the Gut" - cull the bottom 10% on a regular basis. Similar to decimation (to reduce by one-tenth) as practiced by the Romans: "a form of military discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed by members of his cohort" (see Wikipedia), though the Romans selected at random and not by ranking.

Welch's 20/70/10 practice might sound reasonable at first, but if performed too religiously/frequently, you eventually cull all the bottom 10% and start to eat into the 70% who are doing an okay job. And as the Romans found, it isn't great for morale.

"And as the Romans found, it isn't great for morale."

Of course. But as you pointed out .. not comparable since Romans did it at random while other was by ranking.

Also, didn't Dalio practice something like this at Bridgewater?

[ochotona]

ExxonMobil has always done it... though it came from Exxon, not Mobil. Mobil was a GREAT organization. They used to be my client, they had fun, they were some smart, smart, people.