It really is amazing how much mileage we're getting out of the same story repackaged with different headlines. First, the extra 6% in the second to bottom tier were sure to be fired. Then someone did math and concluded that Google had decided to lay off 10,000 employees. Now, Google is telling it's employees that they're at risk of lower ratings. All because they moved to a new performance management system eight months ago that preserved the bottom 2% lowest rating, consolidated the next lowest rating from 30% to 6% as a way to focus more resources on low performers, and made the middle rating the default for 60% of employees.