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Or externally! I posted an idea here a while ago, where I thought I'd start a staffing company called "Scapegoat Consultants" and we would offer your team a "low performer" that you could hire and then fire after a year, to protect the rest of your team from stack-ranking. Our consultant will join your team and do as little as you want, or even nothing at all! We'd guarantee that they will at least not actively make your code base worse, but that's it. After a year of this, you can easily make the case that our recruit was a low-performer and manage them out. Don't worry, he won't mind--his job was to be the low performer, and we'll hire him out to the next BigTech company who struggles with stack ranking.

It used to be tongue in cheek, but maybe the industry actually needs something like this.




Cynical, but probably the most humane take I’ve seen here so far.




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