Still Lying After All These Years!

Do you recall “Still Crazy After All These Years”, as sung by Paul Simon? Lyrics at https://www.paulsimon.com/track/still-crazy-after-all-these-years/ FYI…

Well now Emperor Nero Antonio and His HR flunkies have (figuratively) sang us a song that should be called “Still Lying After All These Years”! Emperor Nero was giving us a pep talk in, what was it, Singapore, and some young manager had the brazen nerve to ask The Question That Dare Not Be Asked, about “forced distribution performance reviews”, and that fact that all his workers are gung-ho hard workers as inspired by the Awesome Words of Emperor Nero and His Awesome Pep Talks, NONE of his workers were slacking, ALL of them were brilliant and creative geniuses working 23.5-hour days, yada-yeahda-yeah-verily-da… AND STILL one or two of them MUST get a “D” or an “F” to grease the skids for layoffs!!! (I sure hope this brave speaker-of-the-truth doesn’t get fired for being brave and honest).

Well Emperor Nero called up an HR flunky, who promptly and apparently sincerely denied that there were any such things as “forced distribution performance reviews”… Which anyone with a pulse knows is a bald-faced lie! The media knows it, the business analysists know it, and the vast majority of HPE employees know it. Anti-discrimination lawyers know it as well. And this lie has been told for AT LEAST two decades! WHO do they think they’re fooling?!? Do they have ANY idea what this does to their (by now almost non-existent) credibility? Do they care?

So I think that we should have a re-write contest for re-writing the lyrics to “Still Crazy – (Lying) - After All These Years”, as sung originally by Paul Simon, with Lyrics, again, at https://www.paulsimon.com/track/still-crazy-after-all-these-years/ … Re-write competition winner will be honored by being allowed to ask “Weird Al Yankovic” to sing our song for us, and MAYBE Emperor Nero will invite Al Yankovic to sing it for us all at the next HPE celebration! (Don’t hold your breath on the latter part of it though, unless the lyrics toe the HPE official lie).

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3 replies (most recent on top)

My guess is that forced performance distributions no longer exist. But perhaps organizations cannot directly let it go because ranking impact salaries and salary buckets are limited so they play the ranking game.

However, forced performance distributions did exist before and there is documentation that HR sent to managers during the Hurd era regarding how to discuss it with employees.

As for hiring only rank 5 employees? What the heck does that mean? I prefer to hire people who's a good fit the team can work with, can learn, and can do the job. It's a team effort, not a rank 5 effort.

I had a manager (some years back) that said our group would only hire level 5 employees (1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest ranking.)

Yeah, so 80% will immediately have their ranking dropped from 5 to 1 - 4. Yep, that will go over real well.

Forced ranking has been around forever.

@Vhw6qxH,

Amen to your post.

There will not be any real change in this company. Forced distribution will continue in a different packaging. Good workers will be trashed to 'grease the wheels for next layoff". Old wine in a new bottle as the saying goes.

Thread regarding Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) layoffs

Still Lying After All These Years!

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