Actually, pretty good advice in the opposite direction, too. If I had known at 18 that I could have easily and successfully walked away from teams, bosses, companies, partners, and investors who gave 'bad vibes', I would easily have (at least!) an extra couple million in the bank.
I wasted countless opportunities waiting for things to get better, when I probably intuitively knew that they wouldn't. Partly, it was because I didn't want to be considered inconsiderate or rude. But, also, it was because I latched on to other things: the mission, the market, the tech, the product, the teams, etc.
It's odd, because my first two dev jobs I had to be let go. First time was due to them needing someone of senior skill yet paying for a junior salary and let me go after just 3 weeks, and the other due to money running low and let me go after a year of working for them.
This taught me that businesses are out for themselves no matter how nice the people are. It then taught me that if I don't like somewhere, I will just outright look elsewhere and bail.
After being let go from my second workplace, I left my next one due to him promising me more money and then going back on it with another deal which sounded great, but actually sucked when I thought about it. He is a really nice guy, but such a shady businessman, so I looked elsewhere and then handed in my notice.
The workplace after that one wasn't any better, they wouldn't use GIT, worked on each site whilst live (no dev environment). I hated it, so I took a week off to search elsewhere, found something better and handed my notice in.
Also, I tried to push for better practices which the other devs loved, but my manager and boss just wouldn't listen and refused any of my input.
There's actually a guy in that workplace who is super nice, but has never been let down like I have so he feels he owes the company everything and won't leave. Whenever he tries, the boss will offer him more pay and then he stays. It's sad, because he deserves so much better. :(
yup, basically kept getting increases in pay (but not promotions or authority to change the situation I was in for the better) to stay.
Don't take the bait.
it's an admission that they know you are more valuable than you are being treated, and an acknowledgement that your misery in the situation is not going to change, which is exactly why they are hoping you will be ok with continued frustration in lieu of more money.
However, if a company has gimpy organization and technical APIs for many complex pieces of software and or processes in which making mistakes is costly and expensive, it is economical to raise someones salary $15k than have to invest in a newb to spend the next 7 months being able to operate as quickly as you do. It took me about 7months to be up and running efficiently with everything and be able to train other people. I still had to perform at full capacity on day one, but I was less efficient and because mistakes were so costly, I would have to wait 30-45minutes to find someone else to confirm an operation before making one, instead of making a mistake in production, until I knew how to do it myself.
In the manufactoring line, bottlenecks for tools being down was calculated by the millions per hour, because linear bottlenecks in product production actually cascade down a 4 months timeline for meeting product deadlines, which have payment associated with them, and significant penalties for being late.
Additionally, metrology tools to check errors sometimes cannot, based on chemistry and physics, detect errors in production until multiple steps down the line. So if there is a mistake in a base design, it won't get picked up for 3 weeks, and the entire line has to be restarted, so it really helps to have people know how to not screw up even if there isn't an official process for it.
They kept me on because I worked hard, and because I knew how to use over 18 different independent horrible pieces of software with no APIs, and run them simultaneously in realtime in production while operating a team of 15 people.
Never be afraid to fire a bad job. If you don't it will potentially screw your life up the same as bad management can a company.
The key for both ends I think though is "Sparingly" and make sure you have other options first. (Unless the situation is just so bad it outweighs lack of options.)
Point being, if you are company who is firing a lot of people, or an employee who is firing a lot of jobs, the problem may just be you!
Thank you for saying this. Honestly, probably could have cut a total of four years of waste out of my life by just knowing the company was not a good fit for me.
I used to stay at a place and say "Ok, maybe its me, what can I do to put the most effort in, and maybe that will change how upper level toxic management trickles down and fundamentally changes how politics over rule technology and data based decisions, or hard workers over letting the old boys club stay comfortable"
I actually used to believe something I could do would change that or, if I worked hard enough or tip toed around management to make them feel comfortable about their culture and still find time to do the work I felt was important in my own time without offending people who felt comfortable consistently underperforming and had positions of superiority over me, that I would be recognized for my work, work ethic etc.
no, that's not the case. Leave and leave fast because while I was the one who eventually chose to leave those companies, those companies are never going to acknowledge how much you are worth, or that they don't deserve you. They care about self preservation and staying there no matter how well you perform is not going to help you get a better job elsewhere.
if it's short enough of a time then you don't even have to put it on your resume you worked there.
A lesson I wish I knew fresh out of college.
of course, all of these things about me are true. There is something you can always do to improve yourself, or change your mindset to help yourself change how you approach frustrating situations to change how a team might respond to a solution or a challenge, and foster a more positive environment.
The biggest red flag?
When you are constantly challenging yourself to grow and change to meet the needs of the company and find novel ways to contribute in your spare time, and basically having the "how can I rise to the challenge. How can I challenge myself? How can I grow?" mindset when management does not have a "how can we stay open minded and rise to meet the challenge" mindset. It's not just not a good fit for you, but it will be damaging to your career to be at odds with superiors who will feel threatened by this mentality and approach you have. It will be obvious to your peers this is the case, and it will make them look bad. When your authority is based on optics and politics, people like you are a threat to the company.
the other and only red flag you need is when the company doesnt see people as its most valuable asset, it sees large amounts of funding, and pretty buildings and initial investment as it's most valuable asset. Stay away.
and as a last note on this big red flag, again, all the things the companies I worked for did, was cool, fit my skills and interests, experience in school and previous jobs. If I tell you "hey I worked here developing cutting edge technology and heres some metrics of our stats in the market" people would say wow thats cool.
And it was cool, and it could have been cool, but people ruined it. It's really about the people, no matter what you are working on. If you don't have high quality people, then you can't have high quality products or services. Period.
As a senior programmer with a bit more life experience, I quit somewhere after only 2 months. They valued me, the pay was great, the tech challenges were interesting, but their processes drove me potty.
I have never regretted it and only feel relief whenever I think about it. I walked straight into another job.
If I were to stop freelancing and get a job again, I would just leave it off my CV.
> As a senior programmer with a bit more life experience, I quit somewhere after only 2 months. They valued me, the pay was great, the tech challenges were interesting, but their processes drove me potty.
I've done something similar twice, except there were no interesting technical challenges. Both were government jobs where I was lured in to do all this cool work and then get told to sit there and do nothing. The pay and hours were awesome, but for my 20 something self it was a terrible fit.
I was hired into my current position (as a contractor at a government facility) to be a 'software architect and software engineering subject matter expert.' The way the position was sold to me, it sounded like a good step-up in responsibility and an opportunity to grow.
What I'm actually doing could be considered a cross between 'IT guy' and 'generic office staff' (I go to tons of meetings, write lots of system-engineering-esque documents no one will read, and because I am 'a computer guy', I'm bombarded with annoying IT technician-level questions all the time). I'm extremely overpaid for what I'm doing (I'm bored out of my skull most of the time), but the local job market is such that I'd probably spend several months unemployed if I were to just up and quit.
... but the local job market is such that I'd probably spend several months unemployed if I were to just up and quit.
Just keep looking for something else. It's easiest to find a job when you already have one. That's because there is no financial pressure to take whatever comes along. You can take a little time to find a good fit. Don't feel that this reflects in any way on your attitude toward your current job. Do your best at that, but when you go home spend at least a few hours a week looking for something else. If you stay in your present job for too long (years) it will stunt your professional (and possibly personal) growth.
Then take advantage of it! Pay off as many debts as you can and bank the rest.
A few years ago, the single most powerful thing I did was knock out all our non-mortgage debt. It's freeing to know that if something happened, I could take a pay hit of $Xk/month and still have the same lifestyle.
Being unemployed for several months is way less scary if your monthly expenses are lower and you have cash in the bank.
> Being unemployed for several months is way less scary if your monthly expenses are lower and you have cash in the bank.
I call this being "Dave Ramsey Debt-Free" - and everything you say is true. There's a lot more to it than that (how to properly pay down debt, how to properly use credit cards, buying vs leasing automobiles, plus buy used only, etc) - but the "debt free" part of it is spot on.
The money in the bank? That's f-u money, meaning you get tired of things, tell yer boss to take the job and shove and walk out the door. I've done this a couple of times, and both times it was ultimately worth it, and wasn't scary because I knew I had enough saved that I could keep going at my expenses level for a couple years or more if I had to.
In a way I suppose I am. My side project is getting a lot more love than it used to, given that my day job is pretty much a straight 40-hour gig that just isn't all that mentally taxing. I'm also taking some MOOC courses, etc.
I see this happening alot. Basically government needs smart people like this to step in and rescue things when things go wrong, but they don't by any means want people like this changing the company culture or inconveniencing other people with doing more work or better work. You are there to be that smart computer guy who fixes things when things they don't understand go wrong.
They pay you alot of money to be there to do stuff they don't understand, but outside of that, they don't really want you interfering with their day to day life with all that "tech stuff".
Definitely find a better job, and don't underestimate the value increase in you quality of life by being around better people who challenge you. Nothing is worth more than that. So outside of minimum financial obligations, make plans to move elsewhere even if it will take a while. If you are the breadwinner in your situation for yourself and or other people, they will have to deal with it.
It may take even 3-4 years to move if you have long term commitments and get ready to go and do it without being risky financially, but honestly its worth it. If you are the one providing for people and you are the one donating half of your waking life and you are the one smart enough to be dissatsified with the lack of mental stimulation then you deserve to have a job you enjoy.
Being around people at work who challenge you and being on a good team will without a doubt increase your personal joy in life as well. Being emotionally isolated in a company who designates you as the computer guy and wants to drain your brain more by asking to create documentation to make the integration of technology in the company appear more valid than it really is, or save them if you don't show up work one day, is an abuse to your mental situation as much as you allow it to happen.
If you are already that smart, rising to the challenges you wish you could will only result in more income later, so don't let the current financial benefits/perceived location limitations stop you from pursuing a more rewarding career.
A couple years may seem like a long time but...what are you going to do, rot in a n IT office for the next 40 + years of your life? Make the difficult decisions/sacrifices now and even if you are in your 30s or even more, still youll get decades of happiness and challenges you won't if you throw your hands up in the air now.
I never just quit the other jobs outright. I simply started looking once I figured out what was going to happen.
The rest of the time at work, I spend inventing projects to helped me learn some interesting technology. My bosses were happy because I stopped bugging them for work to do.
(Also in the process-driving-me-round-the-bend camp, but concerned that a lot of alternatives might be a case of "out if the frying pan, into the scrum"...)
Bad agile, bad tools, bad QA, dysfunctional ops. Their sql ops said they'd get me a backup within 2 days and then 3 weeks later still no sign of it and we had to go live without testing.
The agile bits were standups before we'd even got anything to do, card votes on how long features would take and I was saying months and everyone saying days, but I was the only one with any significant experience. Lo and behold 4 weeks later when I left it still wasn't done. There was some nonsense around the kanban board when they'd move things when nothing happened, tasks were really poorly split up so some bits would just get stuck, etc.
Its so true, if you have skills and high standards for your work environment, you can walk straight out of these jobs in to other ones. I don't have issues getting jobs, I've just become understandably picky about new prospects for the right reasons. Ultimately it ends with career moves to last longer and higher quality experiences.
Oh, I understand. I'm just wondering how choices were made which left many millions on the table. I didn't face any choices like that when I was younger so I'm curious.
Opportunity costs and the missed investment returns
I am now in my mid 40s. I started working in tech in the mid-90s. I was ambitious and mainly only worked for or led tech startups. (I did well for myself, so can't complain too much)
When I look back on my career, had I went with my intuition at critical times, instead of what I felt was 'my duty' (or whatever justification I made to deny my intuitive senses), I would clearly be further ahead. In total, I probably wasted several years waiting for people or situations to change for the better, passing up several ultimately better opportunities.
No offense, but you don't understand. Opportunity cost means specifically you aren't leaving money on the table. It means you are grabbing the pennies when you could be pursuing a more lucrative options. When you are 20 those options don't mean a million dollar deal, they mean not taking the better job that pays about the same but lets you earn 20k more in 2-3 years because you are doing something you love and thriving in it with fewer restarts. That over 20-40 years adds up to "millions in the bank", which is what the original poster said, not millions on the table.
A few times not seeing bad management in a startup where you took options rather than a decent wage would do it too.
OP wrote "an extra couple million in the bank"; since he didn't allude to opportunity costs himself I think there are at least a couple people reading the thread that would want to know what exactly that means.
I never heard the phrase used to represent opportunity cost and it's not clear that OP intended it in that way.
> If you are hiring and then firing junior people fast, you are the problem.
I'm going to challenge this point of view. It is absolutely, and obviously, expected that junior people have a ton to learn, and they should be given leeway for that learning process. So yes, if you fire a junior person because you're not willing to put in the mentorship necessary, then I agree, you are the problem.
However, junior people really shouldn't have any problem with motivation and drive, and in those cases where I've had to fire people, I've always wished I had done it sooner. More importantly, their peers wished I had fired them sooner, too. A bad or lax attitude can be an absolute killer for team morale if the person in question isn't dealt with quickly and fairly.
You're pointing out an important difference: firing because of experience/performance vs firing because of behavior.
Being a bit naive, making mistakes, and needing ramp-up time is to be expected, especially from a junior hire. You absolutely need to give time to correct that sort of thing, and firing fast is not a good move. Some of the best devs I've worked with needed a few months to ramp upbefore they hit full stride.
On the other hand if someone is dicking around instead of working, being insubordinate, refusing to try to improve, upsetting coworkers, etc., then you've got behavioral problems on your hands. And those are absolutely good reasons to fire if they persist beyond an initial stern warning.
I just want you to know that I'm a beginner in management (having hired two juniors for my startup), and I'll use this advice (The junior is not productive, but him being reasonably motivated is the reason why I'll keep him).
I'm somewhat playing devil's advocate here, but how is your startup's documentation?
Sometimes juniors have a hell of a lot of trouble admitting that they don't understand something. Consequently, they won't be productive because they not only don't understand what they're doing, but they don't want to demonstrate their ignorance.
If I were in your shoes, I would do a couple of things:
1.) Make improving documentation a big part of their improvement plan.
2.) Make it very clear that you value clarity above all else and actively encourage them to tell you they don't understand something.
Conversely, ramp-up time should not be infinite. A junior employee should not be limping along after a year at the company. Either that person just isn't a fit, or there is something terribly wrong at your company.
As a step before firing for a junior employee that shows any sign of promise, a 3-6 month performance improvement plan with regular check-ins and measurable progress points could make a world of difference. I currently have multiple juniors on PIP's and they are taking them very seriously and improving less than acceptable behaviors.
The keyword here is that GP never said "if you do fire junior people", but "if you are firing junior people". The later implies a recurrent pattern of behavior and, unless you want to argue that an unknown factor beyond your control has been sending a disproportionate amount of bad apples your way, it is ultimately your problem.
Most common causes I can think for this problem are: an indiscriminate hiring process that fails to keep out poor candidates, either defective operations or hostile work environment that results in excesive burn out rates for employees, irrational expectations from management teams (specially founders who struggle to make the transition to later stage startups).
>However, junior people really shouldn't have any problem with motivation and drive
How are you going to determine if that really was the problem?
Every time I've heard a colleague say something like this, (s)he is just utilizing a model in his/her mind to explain the behavior, and pretty much never attempts to validate/falsify. Pretty much always post hoc justifications.
It's really not that hard. When I have multiple peers of the person coming to me saying that someone is not putting in effort, and they aren't dependable, and they don't follow through, that's a pretty clear signal.
My first job as an intern, I was afraid and shy and just complete garbage, but the people I worked with were strict yet forgiving. My second internship, I had no clue what I was doing, and probably did not deserve to stay there, but my boss/mentor was a jerk (something I realized later on) and I was fired/laid off.
That termination taught me a lesson to:
* Only bite what I can chew.
* If I am not confident in doing the job, I should not take it.
*If I can chew very little, then I focus on expanding to take on more.
Someone I look up to once said during an interview debrief: "If we make a mistake and hire a bad developer, I can back out their patches. There's only so much damage they can do. But if we hire a bad manager, there's almost no limit to the damage they can do."
A minor point. I recently had to let a junior level person go after "giving them a chance" for around 5 months. I did everything I could, extra mentoring, warnings, gentle pressure, lighter work and finally, an opportunity to shift into a simpler projects so that they'd get more comfortable. This was, as the article mentions, emotionally draining for me and unfortunately, the dislike split over from professional to personal. I let the person go and that's that.
Now, the relevant part of this comment, I hired someone else and because of the baggage from the previous person, I very quickly started getting dissatisfied with the new hire. This would have ended in a disaster if one of my other employees didn't tell me that this new person has only been on for less than a month and was doing okay.
Prompted me to re evaluate myself. So yes, hiring and firing junior people is a problem usually with the hirer but it might be due to things that you have to watch out for.
I agree with everything you said but I think you place to much blame on yourself as a hirer. There will also be people who put on a good front but just want to coast once they get in. This is especially true in big companies that are loathe to fire.
I know people say to keep ramping up the testing and difficulties of interviews but we've started to create a culture where all you end up with is people who are good at that, not creating value for the company. I once had to fire someone because they absolutely refused to fill out an annual self review that would have taken 10 minutes. (There were other similar events that lead up to this). Technically they could do the work just fine but didn't want to live in the real world. I had many conversations about attitude and working with the team. I don't know how an interview process would capture this. Incidentally, I see him at local meetups and he recently told me his is thinking about quitting his current job because their office moved 5 miles away and he didn't want another 5 minutes of commuting.
I can see how your observations about these people are different manifestations of the problem I saw in my employee. My impression was that he was drunk on the whole "cool startup" attitude that's so rife these days. Things like a bean bag in the office were so important to him and he wasn't willing to deliver any work.
> If you are hiring and then firing junior people fast, you are the problem.
Firing for typical junior mistakes? Yeah, that's a problem. But, junior people are usually not just technically raw, but also employee raw. Not showing up to work or lying about causing issues will get someone fired.
To all the juniors out there, when you screw something up (and you will), be quick to raise your hand and say it was you. Then, shift gears to fixing and mitigating for the future. It's a lot like politics in that it is the cover up that almost always gets a person.
"No one should ever be surprised when fired." I have unfortunately fired several people and I have always asked if they were surprised.
One time someone said "Yes, I am surprised you fired me." I can't even tell you how destructive that was to my team. To be honest that person should never had been surprised nor my leadership team, but it happened and it caused havoc. It took years to fully repair the damage. I think he just really liked the job and didn't want to leave. Also the person ended up going to jail for unethical practices just 18 months later. I actually fired him due to being full of excuses or on the line of disaster and never asking for help.
Same goes for the review process. Nobody should ever go into a review not knowing what the results will be. The reviewer should be telling you things they've already covered with you throughout the year on a consistent basis.
Your right. I could never tell someone in a quick way what a good review looked like and yes Reviews and Firing should never be a surprise. I feel like my wife was 100% surprised by her's and her immediate response is I am leaving.
Also for reviews: no subjective remarks without concrete examples in writing.
> If you are hiring and then firing junior people fast, you are the problem.
Yeah? How so? What is fast?
If I hire a junior dev, and I say "Hey, I do expect you to know how to program. Not well, I'll teach you, but you need to know how to code. Do you know how to code?"
And they have problems for the first 1-2 months, it's not my job to teach them something I expected them to know.
They shouldn't get through the interview, but they do, sometimes.
If that happens once in a great while, then like you said, it happens. But if it's constantly happening, then the problem is you, not the people you're hiring.
A senior exec should by all accounts hit the ground running, you have very little top management and are really only bound, by law, contracts and culture Other than those items you are the person that sets the tone for your division. Sure there are existing processes but if they suck you are the person that has authority to change them, if they are good, you should have the expertise to broadcast the results of said good process.
I wholeheartedly agree with this article, when it comes to execs you cannot get rid of one that does not fit fast enough. But that is the funny thing, you can take a person with proven results, stick them in a different company culture and they just don't produce. They can leave that company, go to another with a different culture and succeed all over again. With senior executives it really is all about fit.
I also agree with you, if you are burning and churning thru the bottom you have a serious culture problem and probably have some bad mid/senior management.
In the first company I confounded, we recruited a friend of my cofounder to a senior job. He looked like the right guy for the job but he actually really wasn't. He was completely underperforming and junior employees looked at him and lost respect for both and my cofounder for keeping him on.
Because he was a friend who had left his job to work for us, we didn't fire him and he continued undermining the company with his poor performance for a year. I think this was the worst mistake I did. In the end, he left the company and screwed us over on some account.
So, I've learned from this:
- do not hire friends as senior executive
- if you insist on hiring friend, have a clear backup plan if things don't work out so that you can both end the relationship. Be prepared to lose your friendship in doing that.
- never let an underperforming senior employee fester in your company. It's like rot, it will drag down the entire company by devaluating the work your other employees do
Alternatively, don't recruit friends that already have jobs or need to relocate. If someones out of work to start then letting them go is arguably less traumatic.
Also, if you hire a friend, keep him at a distance, say one or two tiers. This way, feedback will still be there, and you won't be making the decision of firing all by yourself. And of course, work won't come in the way of friendship.
This may well be true but how do you know? The only way I can think of is if the employee went on to become such a rock star at some other place that you actually hear about it. But that's not the only situation where they might have been valuable to you after a while.
Everyone has potential to turn it around and get awesome at their job. This leads to the hand wringing and delays he is taking about. But if you are hiring senior leadership with experience ... You probably expect they have figured out a lot of their work practices already. Other commenters are pointing out that juniors typically take time to flourish and that's normal.
Lars is focused on the fact that keeping a senior employee who gives you a bad feeling that things are not working out is actively harmful to your company. Whether they turn into a rockstar later in a different context that big of a deal if you replace them with somebody who is at lest not causing good employees to leave.
isn't it always "too late"? The fired employee would have to have a long pattern of problems. With the benefit of hindsight you'd know that you should have fired them after the first 5 or 10 problems.
Weirdly, I think we would all benefit quite a lot from a normalization of fast firing. Part of the reason it's hard to get a job is that companies are afraid to fire you, so they jump through all kinds of strange hoops to try to predict how good an employee you'll be based on, really, no information.
This also forces companies to filter out "possibly good" candidates and only hire "probably good" candidates.
If it were normal to get fired after a day or a week, you could get hired at 10 different companies over a span of two months and likely find a really great position, where you're a great fit.
My next company will have explicit rubrics for what it takes to get fired, and your status will be tracked daily. You'll know at all times exactly how close you are to getting fired with how much severance. It will never be a surprise, unless it's a reaction to an acute event (sexual harassment, etc). We'll hire pretty much everyone who walks through the door with a plausible story for how they add value. Anyone we fire we'll sit down in the exit interview and write a plan for how they can get re-hired in a few weeks or months if they're interested. We'll also try to spin off a separate business with the fired person at the head, instead of just firing, whenever possible.
>My next company will have explicit rubrics for what it takes to get fired, and your status will be tracked daily
>You'll know at all times exactly how close you are to getting fired with how much severance
Good luck getting anyone to stick around! People want job security, they don't want to feel like they're walking on eggshells every day. You seem to think the only thing people want out of a job is money.
>Anyone we fire we'll sit down in the exit interview and write a plan for how they can get re-hired in a few weeks or months if they're interested.
I don't think you know what firing means. It's not a mutual decision and you really don't want that employee working for you at that point. It's a serious legal risk to re-hire fired employees.
People don't perform at 100% all the time either. No slack == lots of stress. Lots stress == high turnover rate. High turnover rate == loss of institutional knowledge, loss of ability to respond to changing market conditions or even normal customer needs, and also lower ability to innovate.
I'm not sure if this is common knowledge outside the US (it wasn't for me): "Fired" and "let go/laid off" don't mean the same thing. Fired means they were laid off for some gross reason, e.g. incompetence, stealing from the company, etc. Laid off means they were just let go because of reasons not very related to their performance.
I don't know if there are precise definitions, but I've always used (in the US):
* Fired with cause - gross reason: sexual harassment, illegal activities, etc.
* Fired - incompetence, laziness, other ineptitude related specifically to the employee, but nothing illegal
* Laid off - financial reasons or business direction reasons for the company. (Some people who are borderline performers get swept up into lay offs, which helps the employee save face.)
In the latter 2 cases, people generally get severance arrangements. In the last case, people are generally eligible for re-hire should conditions or direction change.
You are wrong, but in the right general direction. "Laid off" means involuntarily terminated because of a reduction-in-force / elimination of positions. "Fired" means involuntarily terminated for any other reason. Except in the case of positions with special protections, either contractual (personal or union) or legal protections of the type that apply to career civil service positions, you cannot assume firing is about either misconduct or performance; it can just be because the boss decided his nephew needed a job.
And "let go" subsumes all forms of involuntary termination, both layoff and firing.
> Fired means they were laid off for some gross reason
You're correct in spirit, but no one ever uses the phrase "laid off" to mean "fired". "Laid off" usually means you were let go because of say, financial problems in the company, no need for your position, etc. "Fired" implies cause.
Surprising as it may seem, I am going to have to disagree with you here.
If someone is performing poorly, the most likely explanation is that they are unhappy with their job, for whatever reason.
And the best way to handle the situation is to figure out what is making the employee unhappy.
And sometimes the problem might not even be solvable for your company. And in that situation, the best outcome for both of you is to end the business relationship.
A much more reasonable approach is to provide performance reviews whenever someone wants one along with things they can improve. That allows for transparency without making people feel like they're working towards metric improvements rather than actual performance improvements
I believe this article is talking about senior execs and you might be talking about general employees.
And your comments feel noble but a bit unrealistic to me as far as general employees go.
First, there's a cost to bringing people into an organization. Letting everyone in and then having some or most of them flame out seems like a huge drain on resources -- including emotional resources.
Second, the idea of being tracked daily against some firing metric sounds a bit hellish for employees. It seems like it'd breed a lot of negative reactions ranging from gaming the system all the way to nasty politics and back-stabbing along the lines of what apparently happened because of Microsoft's stack-ranking system.
So, again: I respect the ideas. But I'd be concerned about how they'd play out in real life.
>My next company will have explicit rubrics for what it takes to get fired, and your status will be tracked daily. You'll know at all times exactly how close you are to getting fired with how much severance.
Is this something out of Dilbert? Sounds like a quantification-obsessed culture -- the very opposite of ensuring qualitative assessment. Will probably just run to the ground as people flee the hell-hole as soon as they can find better pastures.
>My next company will have explicit rubrics for what it takes to get fired, and your status will be tracked daily.
Hi, I'm whatshisface, and unscrupulous team lead from the 1970s, when metering code seemed pretty workable. I can write 100kloc of code a day (my editor is set to convert spaces into line breaks) and commit once per typed character. Also, I'm a great team player who can work with QA to file and fix thousands of trivial tickets every week. If those numbers aren't what you're looking for, I'm also a social butterfly who can ace any peer ranking on charisma alone.
>If it were normal to get fired after a day or a week, you could get hired at 10 different companies over a span of two months and likely find a really great position, where you're a great fit.
That might work well for people that are unemployed, but it'll be hard to attract anyone that has a secure job with such flimsy offers.
The difficult thing with hiring is, most of the best people are already employed - and most of their employers are keeping them happy. If you are focusing on unhappy employees or the unemployed, then you are focusing on a comparatively poor pool of prospective hires.
>Anyone we fire we'll sit down in the exit interview and write a plan for how they can get re-hired in a few weeks or months if they're interested. We'll also try to spin off a separate business with the fired person at the head, instead of just firing, whenever possible.
"So hey, listen, this isn't working out, so for the next few months you're going to have to worry about feeding and clothing your child unless you find a new job real quick. Please sit down and write a plan with us about how we can rehire you in a few months if you dedicate all your energy on providing free work for us instead of getting a job!
Oh, by the way, would you want to start a business instead? We value your work low enough that we'd like to fire you, but if you can pay a few of the people we deem low performers out of your own pocket and provide that work for us for free? Even better."
If someone is so bad you need to fire then after a day or a week then the is something wrong with your interview process. Especially considering the first day is mostly about learning what is going on at the company. But if you think a person should be fired after one day on the job, you should be able to discover that after a full day of interviews... By the same token of something came across in the interview that you liked, you should give the person a benefit of a doubt and give them more than one week. Even if you weaken your k interview process because of the easy firing
I believe people that would thrive in that environment would already be working as contractors or founders or at least in an industry where compensation is strongly tied to recent KPI's like sales or finance.
Things might be different if everyone was doing it like you say, but as it is right now there's a lot of work and friction involved with changing jobs. Getting hired is an ordeal during which you're not getting paid. If someone receives an offer from A with which they can be 90% sure that they'll have the position in a year or two if they want it still, or from B where they will most likely have no job again next week, why the hell would they ever choose B? Let alone common scenarios that come with job change such as moving a family, buying a house in a different city, intentionally leaving a specific position elsewhere to gamble on this one, etc.
I'm almost certain you'd be signing yourself up to employ the worst the labour pool has to offer, which is going to suck no matter how quickly you fire because you're still going to have to be on boarding them.
As others have said, this sounds a lot more like contracting than employment. I consult, and there's always a contract with (relatively) clear deliverables, timelines and costs. If it doesn't work out (it always has for me, so far) then the outcome is no more contracts in the future.
I can't imagine wanting to be an employee with the level of risk you're proposing.
> My next company will have explicit rubrics for what it takes to get fired, and your status will be tracked daily
So, you have solved the "how do I track a developers usefulness to the company"-problem? Without that I don't see how that plan could work (and that ignores all the other problems others have already pointed out).
Note: The problem exists for other positions too, developers are just an example.
It's an interesting thought, but there are a lot of practical reasons why you want to keep your hiring process selective. If people take a job with you and then get fired after a few weeks, now they are unemployed. If they choose to sue you for unlawful termination, it's going to be pretty hard to show that you made a good faith effort to help them stay employed if you just hired them. There's also a tremendous amount of overhead in bringing on and terminating employees - training, paperwork, IT setup. And, if you terminate a lot of people, it's going to end up on Glassdoor, and you'll have a hard time hiring the next round of people to fire.
That said, I applaud your proposal to have a very high level of transparency with employees about their performance and their future prospects with your company.
>Anyone we fire we'll sit down in the exit interview and write a plan for how they can get re-hired in a few weeks or months if they're interested.
Maybe firing means something different in your company/mindset, but I understand it as as an instantaneous cessation of reciprocal obbligations, or (allowed by the Law of course) one-sided termination of a contract, the one in which you give me money in exchange for my work, i.e. for my time.
Maybe it is just me, but I won't be sitting anywhere for no [insert strong word here] "exit interview" nor write down any "plan" the second after you have fired me, or you'll have to pay me really good money to have me sitting down for the time needed to hear your re-hiring plans and write my own ...
Firing people is a failure on both parties part. If you're seriously thinking that firing new hires within a week is a good idea, and you're not talking fast food or day labor, you're a menace.
I've had hundreds of employees under my direct or indirect supervision. Other than pre-career fast food type gigs, I've had to fire 2 for cause. Even in the fast food/retail gigs, I think we canned like 5-6, for attendance problems or pilferage... most problem people there came down to needing a frank discussion about showing up on time and could be addressed without termination.
People aren't robots. Your supervisors, managers and leaders need to know how to hire and manage people effectively.
or... everyone would spend half their lives running around in job interviews, training/onboarding, exit interviews and so on. Because tech jobs are fundamentally tough and most fits are at least somewhat awkward.
The valley has enough volatility - we don't need more.
i am sure you have the right intentions but programmers tend to need some time to get up to speed. besides, nobody really wants to work at a shop like that. every employee will think you don't care. meaning you will have to deal with people leaving you for a more dependable company. recruiters won't like you as they are unlikely to get their money and need to find new people all the time.
it is possible if you offer employees a lot of money. some financial companies do things like this (fire 5% every year) and manage quite well but i doubt it works in sectors where personnel costs are significant.
If you have been fired in a week or so then you know the psychological impact of these practices.
> If it were normal to get fired after a day or a week, you could get hired at 10 different companies over a span of two months and likely find a really great position, where you're a great fit.
Contract to hire at temp agencies doesn't afford this level of flexibility (at times)? Maybe not 10 companies in two months, but I can think of multiple cases of contractors brought on for one-off jobs lasting two-ish sprints being retained beyond that.
In private industry, very easy. Employment is at will. Except for senior people who may have custom contracts and classes of people protected by anti-discrimination law, the employer, not employee, owns the position.
True, but in fairness, the US is also a rather litigious society, and improper termination is one of the things people are inclined to sue over. That's why mature companies tend to put some procedural obstacles in place to keep managers from firing people at the drop of a hat. Typically the manager has to show a long series of specific deficiencies in the employee's work and attempts at counselling and remediation before they are allowed to fire someone.
Things are sometimes done more quickly at smaller places, but even then it's fairly common for employers to offer termination agreements, typically for a few months salary, to avoid even the possibility of litigation.
This post left a bad taste in my mouth. Firing can be hard on all parties involved. Your dumb startup is not that important. If you can't figure out how to utilize an employee, that's on you.
Its just an advice article for C-suite wanna-be's. They love, love, LOVE stories about leaders who make "snap" decisions and win. The guy even quoted Jack Welch.
You're right that firing is hard for everyone. It creates an environment of chaos and uncertainty, which if it is not properly managed, may precipitate scores of top employees to shift to job-search-mode.
FWIW, however, I do think a lot more high-level execs (which is what the article is _really_ about rather than juniors) need to on the chopping block earlier and more often. At the very least it may help to promote more empathy about hiring people that have been laid-off as these people climb their way back into leadership positions.
It takes time to build trust, at least several months, maybe even years. If you fire everyone before you even get a chance to build up trust with them, you'll never get a great team.
I think it comes down to supply and demand too. If you have 10 qualified applicants, I'd be more apt to fire quick and reach back out to the pool to find a better fit. If it takes 3 months to find a qualified applicant then I'd be more likely to be patient in building trust and working through challenging times. That said, I've fired people after a day on the job. If the hiring process failed, no sense in wasting my time or theirs on trying to create a fit that doesn't exist. Better to move on and fix the hiring process. But don't fire quick and keep your same hiring process, that's just repeating mistakes, rather than being agile.
This is why signing bonuses are so nice, firing someone on day 1 is just awful. If I was an employee at a company who did this to someone I would start looking for another job.
If it takes you years to build trust, maybe you're just not very good at your job. Why should the business take the risk - for years - that you might be trustworthy?
> Of course I’m being a bit provocative to open this post with, “I have never fired anyone too early.” I have almost always given people a chance to correct course, and suggest you do too.
Hell if I know. I worked for a company which burned through people like there was no tomorrow at my last job. Every time I went into the main office (every other month, there was always a sea of new faces in the Solutions Architect team; first three months they fired the COO, senior network engineer, and a solutions architect for my team in Austin. It's incredibly shitty to think you're going to be fired every time you're called into your bosses office.
Because I want to work in a place with fewer toxic employees. Also, since interviews are not that accurate at predicting future employee success, having a way to correct hiring mistakes means that a business doesn't have to be super-defensive about hiring folks who just don't work out.
Because I like working with people I can count on and trust. Anytime I have fired or seen someone else fired every other person on the team said something along the lines of 'about time'. Looking back, it means those people were probably not fired quickly enough.
the big thing here is the struggle between companies like amazon google apple who have tons of applicants, and a startup who has less applicants, and less experience from hiring false positives and identifying false negatives. They acknowledge that they turn down many good people, but also most if not all of the people not qualified. They arent worried about false negatives, they are worried about false positives. So they are willing to filter out a good portion of qualified people they aren't quite sure about who might have some overlapping results as people who are not qualified, knowing they are filtering out most if not all unqualified people.
Startups do not have the same level of people experiences to draw conclusions based on interviewing thousands and thousands of applicants and tracking the success of accepted applicants based on a large portfolio of information.
Probably the best thing you can do in a situation like this is GET someone from a company like that who has had years of experience interviewing candidates, and they will be able to bring along that experience of identifying potential false positives from the get go. That is honestly the biggest asset to these companies, their ability to hire and maintain high quality people.
in addition to the countless benefits and opportunities for varied career trajectories in multiple and evolving technologies for smart people once getting into these places, is the fact that they highly value the social network of these work places, and they cannot be duplicated in many places elsewhere, further incentivizing them to stay and internally recommending other high quality friends from elsewhere to interview.
There is no real evidence that companies like Amazon / Google / Apple are actually better than other organizations at filtering out false positives, or that they have struck the optimal balance between false positives and false negatives. These are simply unsupported subjective assertions.
mm, perhaps but I'm echoing documented hiring philosophies of the companies. They are aware they make mistakes. But they feel confident they filter out a majority of false positives along with many false negatives. They have their own metrics for determining this in relation to how many people they hire are able to complete a minimum satisfactory work.
They have documented people who can do this in relation to the people they hire, and even have internal portfolios tracking employees by age, experience, major, and schools, as well as how they performed on interviews. This is a fact.
Everything is subjective. But ultimately a company decides based on its own subjective priorities how an employee meets up to their subjectively defined needs for the position that person fills, and they can pretty onjectively within that context evaluate whether the person can do the work or not, and even track commitments, errors, time to cdoe to completion, amount of bugs, amount of time team has to spend fixing their bugs, etc, and parse out a pretty good idea of performance.
Thats why theres multiple books written by these companies designed to help you pass their interviews, as they have identified indicators of low performance in interviews....
All companies can do this, but many don't, and many arent based in software and therefore do not have embedded ability to track performance metrics the way code commits can.
small companies can do it too, but big companies who also have this system in place can take advantage of larger sets of data for more accurate indicators that seem to correlate with low performance.
Although there are lots of these career "advices" that are perceived as "universal truth", I hardly believe they are the only truth. Life is more complicated than that sometimes, so are your workplace. Use your best judgement(s), rather than follow the dogma. Long enough you will have your own believes, perhaps from a different angle to the same dilima.
This is a similar logic to folks that "settle" with marriage. It's not a long term win, and if you're not building for the long term, why do it at all?
On the countrary, there is a lot of evidence that people who "settle down" have lower levels of stress and overall live a better life.
It might not be causation but correlation, but nonetheless, you are wrong. Marriage is definitely a long-term win. For the short term, there is Tinder.
This might be an issue of idiom - "settle down" and "settle" do not mean the same thing. The latter refers to disregarding reasonable qualms and known issues with a potential life partner and going ahead anyway, more or less on the theory of "oh well, where am I going to do better?"
Doing so can work out in the long run, I suppose. But it very often doesn't.
>Don’t trigger the decay model of trust — why is management tolerating this shit?!
I can't reiterate this enough. Once company I worked for fired the COO that had built the operations when he had serious personal issues that bled into the working environment. I knew it was a serious company after that, I could imagine how difficult it was and he created a great operational culture and working environment before his issues.
Fast forward a few years after an acquisition. The new owners have so many Bozo's in executive positions the place is toxic.
>> After a while of trying and challenging them directly to step up you’ve realized that what sounded like their “experience” in the interview and even confirmed in reference checks, turns out to be things they observed but they didn’t really drive (or truly understood from within) and therefore can’t replicate.
That is a sign of a poor hiring process. It's a common mistake but it's the number one thing I try to figure out when hiring. I'll have to write a blog about it some time.
Is intuition infallible? I want to hear stories about people who followed their intuition on staying or going (or keeping or firing) and it ended up being the wrong decision long-term. Falsifiability is IMHO an important element of arguing for "intuition"
And yet, I look back and I can't think of a single example in my own life where "listening to my gut" seemed to lead me astray. But I also don't trust my own brain to remember such instances...
if you fired someone too early, how would you ever know? They're at a different company. You'd have to somehow hear from a separate, trusted source that they were actually doing way better. Incredibly rare.
the whole thesis of this article ("you can never fire someone too soon") reeks of selection bias
I like this sort of mentality in companies that think they are some sort of hot start ups that can fire anyone they feel like. I dunno how it is with management types, but this sort of approach is extremely amusing to me in niche skill areas.
For example, this happened to me a few times,
but as I am 1 in 25 people in the country that can do what I do,
it takes that company 12-18 month to find a replacement, if at all.
The way the job market works is the larger problem. It usually forces both employers and employees to make a big commitment based on deeply imperfect information. It's like asking someone to marry after the second date, usually when they're already married and can't survive long without being married.
From the last couple paragraphs this reads like a16z is still mad over getting fired years ago. They should know that being fired is a traumatic experience, and not use this as justification for their future carelessness. Two wrongs don't make a right.
From the book 'Peak: Secrets of the new science of expertise', Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool state that to be an expert you must be successful at something more than once.
Which means that just because someone was successful doesn't mean they were directly responsible for it. Like being on a team where you may have even been the manager but the team players were what made it truly successful. If you were successful on two different teams then the odds of you being a key player in that success are much higher.
Even more important is to take the blame yourself and fix your hiring process. In the example below, detect the exaggeration during the interview not after they start.
> you’ve realized that what sounded like their “experience” in the interview and even confirmed in reference checks, turns out to be things they observed but they didn’t really drive (or truly understood from within) and therefore can’t replicate
This is probably the worst advice for a young founder.
Had a client who was a 24-year-old startup founder, one of his investors got me involved to help him hire some folks and help define project process.
We hired a great developer, who freaked when he saw how sloppy the code was. Rightfully said, "We can't maintain this..."
Anyway, the founder had written a lot of it, so it wasn't a shock to him that the code was bad and needed to be re-done. Hew knew it was all quick and dirty and hacked together. By the time I got inovlved, we had issues doing deployments (deployments would take half a day and a lot of stress around testing once code went live), we had issues around infrastructure being unstable (lost 2 days worth of customer data once after a bug caused the DB to crash), and of course, nothing would have scaled. No code review, not much of a QA process, just a million things that needed to be done better -- you can cut some corners as a startup, you can't cut every corner.
There were a handful of paying clients, but most had been sold a promise of feature A-through-Z, and really the tools did like A-through-C... the moment one of them complained the young CEO lost it because he hated criticism, especially from customers, and he didn't want people to think he had lied to them... even though he had pretty clearly over-promised.
The dev I brought on wanted to re-do a lot of things, write unit tests, set up a CI / CD process, proper backups, basically do all the stuff that should have been done day one to ensure we could work fast and have confidence the wheels wouldn't come off. The founder had been on board with trying to reduce outages and crashes, but about a week into it, when one of the customers complained about something, the young CEO freaked when he couldn't simultaneously have new features and a re-done core codebase on the schedule he wanted.
So even though a week before he had said that he liked the idea of reducing a lot of our technical debt, and giving the new dev a chance to work on clean good code... since he was young (not sure if that's the best excuse) he flip-flopped. And three weeks into the overhaul (that was supposed to take 5 weeks), he was furious. "This dev is costing us time and just doesn't get our culture and isn't aligned with our goals and just isn't working out!"
I got called in, looked over what the dev had done. Nothing short of a miracle he had accomplished so much so fast. I said as much. Later that day I get an email from the founder, "I had to let [the dev] go, he just wasn't working out." I left the project shortly after, and the founder burned through another $300k in seed money (his parents') before shutting down.
Anyway this whole "trust your gut" thing... and "don't ask around before firing" -- that's only good advice if you've got some experience and a cool temperament.
If you're a new CEO, ask around. Figure out what's going on, and if you tell people to zig, and they zig, don't get mad at them for not zagging -- they aren't mind-readers. Flipping on decisions like that are extremely demotivating to everyone who works for you, and flipping on a hire (firing someone) is the potentially most demotivating thing you can do if it's not done correctly. You hire smart people, if you can't trust their expertise, don't hire them. Since you trust their expertise, don't micromanage them, or expect the impossible from them.
In fairness, the article is about executives, not employees, but everything you said is right.
One of the biggest and hardest jobs a startup exec/founder/whatever has is having a steady hand in the face of serious fucking freakouts.
It's a natural tendency to blame juniors for shit being all fucked up, even though a) shit being fucked up is your natural state of existence and b) shit being fucked up is all your fault. You fucked shit up.
My cofounder and I have talked each other down from the ledge many times. I'm maybe less patient with junior cats naturally than I should be, but I know my tendencies towards Jobsian ass-chewing and I am mostly successful in suppressing my bloodlust when things go wrong and I have to fix them.
That's crazy; Extra Credits posted a video about this exact same topic a couple days ago, (with an extra focus on indie game development): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnhlDwCRwkU
I like the article, and it has some really good ideas.
And it is not about making firing people easier or cheaper. It is about on how to decide when to fire someone.
About firing fast and easy, it is a bad idea.
I work in Sweden. I don't think I have seen ever anyone fired. What I have seen is some of the best hiring processes. The process looks at the candidate values, and skills. And there is a discussion about what we expect from her, and what she expects from the job.
I worked previously in Spain, I saw a lot of people fired for no good reason. And they were also hired without too much attention. Shorts interviews, no real testing, are part of a process that ends consuming a lot of effort from everyone after hiring someone that is not the correct person. Other times that people is good, and leaves, because was not the job for them.
Both seem related. Cheap and easy firing produces careless recruiting. And that is more expensive that people realizes.
I have worked in Sweden, and I would like to offer a counter point.
I don't think we disagree that the reason the hiring process is so involved in Sweden is because it's so hard to fire someone. This results in a situation where the company does everything they can to minimise the risk of hiring the wrong person.
The downside of this is that companies will not take any chances when it comes to hiring people. I believe this is the reason why I have seem some really bad diversity (both cultural and gender) in the Swedish tech industry, compared to other countries where I have worked.
If it's easier to fire someone, it's also easier to take a chance on someone that might night be the "perfect candidate" at first glance, but perhaps he or she will shine if given the opportunity.
I work in the UK and it's similar. Except we have a lot of diversity due to a vibrant contractor (at-will) market. Which the Tories are trying desperately to destroy, for some reason.
Permanent employees are basically impossible to fire. It's a mixed bag I think. On the one hand, there is a large social benefit to having such gov enforced job security. On the other hand, it drives down wages, and hurts companies that get stuck with a really bad employee. At least as workers we can choose to earn more money and take the riskier route via contracting.
Total bollocks in the UK you can let a fulltime employee go at any time in the first 2 years and its fairly easy to fire after that you just have to follow a simple procedure.
I would disagree that the UK is exactly the same as Scandinavia (having worked in both). Maybe for general companies around the country but definitely not for startups. I have seen many get fired for no particular good reason. They might be arranged via some theater of made up performance reviews then fired, but job security in the startup scene in London at least is a lie. But also those startups get a reputation and suffers for it.
Which is why I am now a contractor in London. No theater. They can let me go on short notice ethically and legally, and I am fine with that. Mostly as I am financially fine with it.
Contractors are especially needed in unionized permanent companies - where contractors/3rd party companies are needed just to get things moving in the direction management wants.
Not in a strike scenario. Its just that I've been in a unionized environment and while it has many benefits, if the employee doesnt feel like doing something management wants - they simply wont do it.
Dont agree with the direction, not something they are familiar with.... they like things just the way they have been used to these last few decades.
To be completely honest, the legal and cultural landscape in Europe is nothing at all like the US when it comes to letting employees go. Being US based, I would be extremely hesitant taking your advice if you haven't spent time in the US.
Which is when US managers work for European based companies this causes issues if they don't adapt.(And I am sure is the case also in the other direction).
I have come across American managers move straight from Silicon Valley to Europe and not understanding that firing people in Europe (well in the parts I know, UK & Scandinavia) is rare, and not expected. Not understanding that there is a limited pool of potential new employees, with a busy grapevine, and you do not want a reputation as a hire and fire company. Not understanding that internally people no longer want to move to that team etc.
My naïve Scandinavian background balked when seeing the behavior of these managers over and over again. And made me very wary of ever working for a US company even if located in Europe. The culture clash from senior management would be too much.
Though to be fair I have met several very good American colleagues and managers as well. Obviously it is not ubiquitous.
> Which is when US managers work for European based companies this causes issues if they don't adapt.
This is such an important idea that Ireland advertises it as a perk of doing business there. In addition to tax breaks and all their other incentives, the government works hard to promote Ireland as a "stepping stone" to European business. EU rules, Eurozone finances, with an intermediate, English-speaking culture to help get past the pain points of leaving the US.
It sounded a bit silly to me at first, but on reflection I'll bet it's a pretty good move. Picking up a bad reputation in a new market is hard to recover from, and I expect a successful move to Europe would require either careful planning or a totally autonomous branch.
> I work in Sweden. I don't think I have seen ever anyone fired. What I have seen is some of the best hiring processes. The process looks at the candidate values, and skills. And there is a discussion about what we expect from her, and what she expects from the job.
I have worked for a few years in a company that is based in Sweden but also has a very large U.S. presence. Couple of points:
1. The recruiting process is involved in Sweden is more involved than in the U.S, agreed. However it is not perfect. False positives do enter the system. Folks there have started getting junior candidates intern/contract as a way of evaluating them. This unfortunately has its own bias.
2. Yes, I think it is impossible to fire people in Sweden. What is typically done in those rare situations is to shuffle you in such a way that you don't do any work. Imagine a head of a team suddenly head in title but with no reports.
3. On the U.S. side, interviews are way easier but then at will employment takes care of that in those rare situations.
I worked for a while in Norway, so quite similar to Sweden, and I only really encountered one person whom had been fired. And that was for being a total dickhead and breaking the law. Mostly the incompetent or unmotivated people I met get moved around to harmless projects until they leave from boredom, but that might take a few years or they retire.
And the hire process can be more elaborate, my father's company used 7 rounds of interviews before anyone was hired... But in "our sector", developer roles etc it was mostly just 1 max 2 face to face interviews and no different than the UK and elsewhere I have worked.
And in Norway (at least in Oslo) there is no hesitance in hiring people due to the severe drought of qualified people and near 0% unemployment in cities means companies are desperate even if letting them go will be difficult.
But there is a proliferance of contractors via consultancies everywhere as they are easy to fire.
People should be hired upon need, not because there is money and the founder feels like inflating his ego by hiring people just because he can.
If there is a clear need, the hiring process should come about naturally, as in tests to see if people have a certain set of skills and if they are a cultural fit.
I suspect the race to adopting whatever is hyped at the moment (known as "let's rewrite in...") is partially due to this hastened hiring process.
It's never too early to remember that in a startup the decision to get fired depends mostly on the emotional state of a founder. That there is no process in place. It's random. If you do get fired, you have a good chance of ruining your carrier, not being able to get a good reference from your last place of work, wasting opportunities.
>To be provocative: No one ever fired someone too soon.
how about when the board fired Steve Jobs? (Specifically, stripped him from all responsibilities, removed him from the head of the mac division, gave him an office with nothing to do). No?
After all, he didn't code, was kind of a weirdo, and the board had every reason to have some doubts.
It's really hard to imagine an early-90s Apple that Jobs wouldn't have left anyway - probably with high drama - if he hadn't been fired.
But the Apple story makes the point - most CEOs are mediocre. Sculley and Amelio (and Spindler, whom almost everyone has forgotten) were all competent in their previous jobs, and usually also in subsequent jobs.
But you don't want to settle for competence in the C-suite. You want outstanding - a genuine 10X CEO.
There aren't many of those around. But there are plenty of 0.1X pretenders, and you'd better hope you don't end up hiring one, because no one will do more damage to a company.
I wasted countless opportunities waiting for things to get better, when I probably intuitively knew that they wouldn't. Partly, it was because I didn't want to be considered inconsiderate or rude. But, also, it was because I latched on to other things: the mission, the market, the tech, the product, the teams, etc.