> If you’re used to such sprawl, you’d be surprised how effective sleepy HR practices are at preventing it. Suppose you always get a standard, shitty raise at the end of the year by default, unless you bargain loudly, which works rarely and only if you’ve really made an impression throughout the year. There is no defined budget for raises; every significant raise is hard to get, and you never get it proactively without bargaining, but there’s no formal system to avoid spending too much on raises except for the reluctant, reactive approach to giving them. There’s also no system for firing low performers, and it’s only very rarely that you see anyone fired - like that crazy fuck who went on and on about how your source control sucked and should be completely different, and then used a single dot character, “.”, as the commit message when he finally committed something.

I am interested in the rest of this thought… “suppose you only get a standard raise unless you speak loudly”. Then do what?