My anecdote is that it's all employee #1: the fish rots from the head.
The gist of it is that one guy founded a company, company A, bootstrapped it, then disappeared to found another company (company B) and was busy with it for about a decade. In the meantime, company A had a non-owner CEO and went from 10ish people to 60ish and grew revenues many, many times over.
Meanwhile company B got huge (though never really got anywhere close to the $-per-headcount that company A did), got a real board, went public, and eventually the board forced the owner out of the company completely. He then came back to company A.
Mind you, we didn't know he was forced out of B. He came back complaining that he was tired of board meetings and corporate stuff. Fair enough, we thought. But a few people were still left from that original 10-ish and went: "uh oh".
Turns out the owner is a grandiose narcissist, and highly racist and sexist. Just an amazing mix. Over the next two years, he managed to turn over 70% of the existing staff and YoY turnover went from exactly 10% (they would do a stack-rank 10% cut to reach the target turnover each year) to 30-50% depending on the year. Incoming hires were suddenly a revolving door (2 batches of 20 were hired twice, of those 40 roughly 5 stuck around longer than one year). He mentioned at lunch one day that he wouldn't hire a non-white, non-male programmer (as the only Asian programmer had just quit recently). Some of us noticed that the only woman who was hired who wasn't blonde was the one who was a family friend.
On a technical level, suddenly nobody was allowed to work on anything that wasn't his idea. And his ideas weren't good. Our tech lead did a good job of shielding the developers from this, and lots of cool ideas were kept out of the owner's line of sight.
Anyway, I ended up leaving because of ^^^ once I got enough experience to switch without a large pay cut. (This job paid unusually well for the geography). The company I switched to has problems too, obviously, as do all companies. But they're much more fixable. Company A's primary problem is fundamentally unfixable: the person who owns 100% of the shares and commands the puppets on the board is honestly one of the worst people I've ever had the displeasure of knowing.
> they would do a stack-rank 10% cut to reach the target turnover each year
Does this mean leadership would rank all employees once a year and fire the bottom 10%, so they could hit a statistic? And that was before the owner came back? Obviously your story is insane and I'm sorry you had to go through that, but I can't get over this part. I think the concept of a terrible person owning a business is less shocking to me than the idea of someone giving themselves a minimum quota of people to fire every year.
It is an idea based on you have some method of determining the best employees and you select the most productive which sounds fair.
What happens is people make choices that put them in that 10%. Some by increasing odds by hiring awful in purpose. Some will target others work. Selecting the right group becomes more important than doing good work.
I believe you should hire or fire based in objective numbers. If 50% are bad fire them now. If none are bad keep them and give them a raise.
It was the owner's idea, and yeah as a sibling comment pointed out, it was something he copied from Microsoft.
In the owner's words, it was his way of basically taking people who were "doing fine" in that there wasn't an active reason to fire them, but who had plateau'd or something and "re-roll" to potentially get someone with a higher ceiling. This is, obviously, a completely sociopathic view of employees and people in general.
In between the lines, it was just a fear tactic to keep people "working harder".
> He mentioned at lunch one day that he wouldn't hire a non-white, non-male programmer
Holy crap! I'd like to think I'd notice that someone is that terrible before I start a job, but if I heard that from a boss, I'd quit on the spot. And I'm a white male programmer.
Agreed, funnily (not necessarily ha-ha funny, but you know) enough this happened the day prior to me taking a PTO day to interview at my now-current employer.
