If they wanted to fire the "bad performers" then they'd be firing the CEOs and higher ranked people, not those actually making the products work.

Nothing, if that’s genuinely what you’re doing.

But it’s dangerous to incentivize it, because you get short-term gains by firing anyone, whether or not it’s the right long-term call.

It’s also just difficult to identify bad performers. Fundamental attribution error is a bitch. And because we’re really bad at seeing the entire system surrounding someone’s productivity, we tend to blame operator error only to find that the next operator we hire has the exact same problem.