
Firing and being fired - hk__2
http://philosophically.com/firing-and-being-fired
======
typpo
The last paragraph suggests that it is ideal to fire within the first two
weeks or even the first day. I understand the importance of culture in a
startup, but I'd be wary of a company that fires in such a short timespan.
This may maximize efficiency, but hurts people who relocate families, give up
other opportunities, etc. I don't see how an employee could pass interviews
but be such a terrible fit that you'd fire on day one. It suggests that there
is something wrong with the hiring process or the culture of the company.

~~~
outside1234
Exactly. I don't know why more companies don't do moonlighting to confirm that
the person is a cultural fit first.

~~~
aetherson
Well, probably because it doesn't work.

In our experience, the overwhelming majority of potential employees either
have jobs already (and so don't have time to work on contact for you while you
determine fit), are getting a job soon (and understandably don't want to turn
down a full time position so they can contact for you and maybe get a job
later (or not)), or just are offended that you won't commit to them and wasn't
too try before you buy (which may be silly, but I admit I felt exactly that
way when someone wanted me to do contract to hire).

------
neilk
Maybe this is a tangent, but isn't it strange that programmers accept that a
competent person could, and _should_ , be fired, if their personality doesn't
gel with whoever happened to join the company earlier than they did?

If we were digging ditches, how likely would it be that you would fire an
above-average ditch-digger, for "cultural fit"? I mean, maybe it does happen
(I've never worked that sort of job) but it seems to me there's a cleaner
separation there between work product and the contents of one's mind or one's
personal associations.

It seems to me this is an unacknowledged downside of software jobs; despite
our apparent autonomy, our minds have to be very open to being molded and
harnessed.

~~~
jamesaguilar
Cultural fit tends to be code for the firee (or firer, one or the other) being
an asshole. Nobody wants to work with assholes, no matter how above average
they might be. I have never heard of a kind, well-liked person being fired for
cultural fit issues. (Which is not to say it never happens. But it's pretty
rare, I guess, that that is the actual reason a nice person is fired.)

~~~
ahk
It can also nicely hide ageism, racism, sexism, conservatism, liberalism etc.
Basically any reason to not like a person.

~~~
ansgri
Whatever the people think of these -isms being bad, I am convinced that a
person has a sort of right to not having to deal with people he doesn't like.

~~~
jamesaguilar
Not in the us, not as an employee of a corporation. If you don't like someone
because they are in a protected class, you just have to deal with it.

------
Jare
Culture fit can be a perfectly valid explanation for low performance, for
example:

\- You are cautious and methodical but the company needs to experiment and
swing wildly.

\- You excel at focusing on a project but the position requires you to
multitask frequently.

\- Your understanding of the company's goals has become more complete and it
turns you don't find them as motivating as you expected.

\- You don't adapt to some general work practices re: hours, remoting,
scheduling & tracking, deployment, meetings.

\- Personality clash with other team members due to age, personality,
lifestyle or (dare I say) some demographic factor.

However, 'culture fit' is a reason for low performance, but low performance
should still be the reason why the employee is getting fired. If the company
has not identified the problem and tried a recovery plan before actually
firing the employee, that company has a serious HR problem.

~~~
RougeFemme
And if performance is the issue, why even mention cultural fit during the
firing? Items 1,2 and 4 are perfectly justifiable reasons for firing without
invoking the "cultural fit" clause. Why not simply stick with the observations
of (non-)performance rather than offering your judgements of the cause(s) of
the non-performance? I can understand _quitting_ because of reason #3, but not
being fired because of it, _unless_ it leads to poor performance. So again,
fire me for poor performance, not because you believe - rightly or wrongly -
that I'm not as motivated by your goals as I used to be. As long as my
performance does not taper off _one iota_ , it should not matter to you. And
yes, for some people, loss of passion for company goals would lead to
decreased performance. But other people might have additional motivating
factors that allow them to maintain enthusiasm and _continue_ to perform at a
high level. Why should that be a problem?

Yes, I recognize that my refusal to accept that we must all have the identical
motivating factors is a prime example of why I would be a poor cultural fit
with many start-ups.

~~~
Jare
Exactly, that's what I mean when I say that "cultural fit" should never be
considered or offered as the cause of firing. However,

> Why not simply stick with the observations of (non-)performance rather than
> offering your judgements of the cause(s) of the non-performance?

Because I expect any decent manager & company to at least try to (a) identify
the reasons for low performance, and (b) discuss possible correction plans
together with the employee. Actively identifying and correcting causes for low
performance is in my opinion essential to maintain perspective on how and why
your company works. This perspective is necessary to understand and strengthen
the practices and pillars that increase your team's performance.

------
j_baker
> From the start, it wasn’t a good cultural fit. It’s not that you aren’t a
> good programmer.

"Not a good cultural fit" is such a passive-aggressive way to justify firing
someone. It's basically saying "You can do the job, but we're stopping you
from being able to do that job, and we're going to justify it to ourselves by
invoking 'cultural fit'".

> When you’re in a job that you’re not a good fit for, you’ll start feeling
> things like “nobody listens to me,” or you’ll notice that your manager
> doesn’t seem to appreciate your work or your work ethic. Sometimes your
> manager seems to be acting weird around you. Sometimes your manager asks you
> to change your attitude, and you do change, but it’s like they can’t see it.

In such a situation, I have to question whether it's the employee who's doing
something wrong or whether it's the company that's doing something wrong. I
mean, if your manager gives you feedback, you take their feedback, and they
don't notice the difference, it certainly sounds to me like the manager
_wants_ you to fail.

I'd recommend the OP read about "Set Up to Fail syndrome":
[http://hbr.org/1998/03/the-set-up-to-fail-
syndrome](http://hbr.org/1998/03/the-set-up-to-fail-syndrome)

> We’ve let go of half a dozen employees and kept only as many, and in every
> case where we let someone go, that person has gone on to work on things that
> they are more passionate about and where they have excelled and been happier
> at.

Wait, so you fire half of your staff and they're happier afterwords? Again, I
have to question whether it's the employees' fault or the company's fault. If
half of your staff is leaving to places where they're happier, what does that
say about the company?

> Sometimes you can detect a cultural mismatch within the first two months,
> sometimes in the first two weeks, and perhaps even on the first real day of
> work. It can be so easy to justify keeping the wrong employee on staff that
> a decision to fire an employee can drag on unresolved for months or years.

It can be so easy to justify firing someone when all you have to do is throw
around the words "bad cultural fit". How about giving concrete reasons why the
employee wasn't working out? That way, you don't have to sit around and guess
when you're actually going to "detect" a "bad cultural fit".

~~~
WalterBright
> Wait, so you fire half of your staff and they're happier afterwords?

I've known people who were laid off or fired, and of course they were pretty
unhappy about it at the time. But I know some who took it as the kick-in-the-
pants they needed to fix their lives for the better, and find a better job,
start the business they'd been talking about, etc.

A year or two later, and they'll freely agree that being laid off was good for
them.

~~~
nilkn
> A year or two later, and they'll freely agree that being laid off was good
> for them.

It strikes me as dangerous to conclude too much from this. In fact, I worry
that this particular sort of statistic could be completely meaningless. People
often try to find positive interpretations of events which are too painful for
them to accept. It's a very powerful form of cognitive dissonance. Being fired
from a job you enjoy can be a nearly traumatic hit to your perception of
yourself, and it is necessary to reconstruct your self-image in some way. Most
likely the person will exercise some creative freedom in this reconstruction
process.

~~~
tkellogg
You won't necessarily find yourself happier - it's a choice. If you go right
back and make the same mistakes at a new job, you'll hate that one too.

I got fired a few months ago and it was the best thing that could have
happened to me. Until then, I'd changed jobs every so often because I never
liked where I worked. But when I got fired, I thought long and hard about what
I _needed_ in a job. Only after acting on some well thought-out conclusions
did I find an excellent job that's absolutely a perfect fit for me. I probably
wouldn't have thought that hard about my next step if I wasn't fired.

So while that comment is true for me, I can't imagine that it's always true.
If I was a dumbass and took a job exactly like the previous one, I'd hate that
one too. I might not get fired - I might quit before they fired me. Honestly
it doesn't matter which happens first. If you don't put in the introspection
to find a place that fits you and vice versa, you'll hate it in no time.

Figure out what you need, figure out what you can do well, and find a job that
matches that.

------
nilkn
There's an angle to this which never seems to be addressed in articles like
this. If someone is fired purely for reasons of cultural fit, i.e., "we didn't
like hanging out with him" as another poster puts it here, then surely the
person being fired would have felt the lack of fit and would have themselves
been looking for another job. It just seems to me that if an employer finds
the cultural fit to be bad enough to let someone go, then surely the person
being let go would find the cultural fit bad enough to be looking for another
job in the background. But in the anecdotes that accompany these articles, the
person is always caught completely off guard, as if they didn't see it coming
at all.

This poster even laments the great friendships with his coworkers which he
felt were wasted upon his firing; how did he have such great friendships if
his cultural fit were evidently so terrible as to be fired over it? It's for
reasons like this that I always feel these articles are fishy and are leaving
out important details.

~~~
asdfologist
Not everyone is self-aware.

~~~
RougeFemme
Or the individual is self-aware and feels that it is a good fit, but is
unaware that others don't. Or they define cultural fit differently. Or they
define it the same way but have different tolerances for a "good" fit. For
example, the individual may be comfortable with say, an 80% cultural fit,
while the team requires a 99% cultural fit.

~~~
eitally
Or, they're in a comfort zone and trying to fly under the radar as long as the
paychecks keep coming. Not everyone is self-aware... neither is everyone
passionate about putting their employer first.

------
YuriNiyazov
To paraphrase Hanns Johst, "whenever I hear 'culture fit', I remove the safety
from my Browning."

Whenever I hear that someone has been fired due to culture fit issues, when I
really try to question the motivations behind it, it almost always comes down
to a politically correct version of "we didn't like hanging out with him/her".
It is _such_ BS.

~~~
Swizec
It could also be that they were simply difficult to work with. Not because
they were lazy or incompetent, but just because their style didn't fit with
the team.

For instance, somebody who is only productive in absolute silence and prefers
working from 6am to 2pm, will have a very difficult time working with somebody
who needs to listen to heavy metal at full blast and likes working from 1pm to
9pm.

Especially if they have to work on the same team and need to closely
collaborate to get their work done.

~~~
YuriNiyazov
So then which one gets fired?

~~~
Swizec
Depends. Which one fits better with the rest of the company? Is either of them
_so_ good you are willing to make everyone else put up with them?

------
001sky
_We’ve let go of half a dozen employees and kept only as many_

Wowzers. Firing every-other person you hire? Leaders should be ok to break
big-problems down into simple ones, with the purpose of expanding the funnel
of people who can be effective at solving the problems. This is the basis of
leveraging resources. While it's legitimate to require a threshold tests of
quality for building a team, a failure rate is this high with onboarding staff
indicates something else is a problem. Imagine any sports team who mistakes
talent at this percentage? While the players may get traded, the coach would
be likely getting fired. There has to be more to the story?

 _A true artist never complains about his tools._

~~~
sfjailbird
Just the latest trend me-too startup founders are chasing, so they can be seen
as 'elite' ("fire fast!"). I'm glad I don't have to work for some 20-something
nerd without social graces or empathy.

------
richforrester
Personal anecdote;

At one of my previous jobs, where I had worked for a year or so, my employer
had to let me go due to cutbacks. I was the first in a wave of about 20 that
were made redundant in the following two months. This equaled about half the
company.

It was a pretty intense 30 minutes.

He called me into his office, and told me he would have to let me go; today,
without severance or pay for this month. By the time I got back to my desk 5
minutes later, my work email account had already been blocked, which rendered
me unable to say goodbye to about half of my colleagues, since they weren't in
that day. I was stumped. After cleaning up my computer I made a round in the
office, saying goodbyes and telling everyone I was made redundant.

As my employer showed me into the photo-studio next door, where I wanted to
say goodbyes to the rest of our team, I told him I'd be having a long hard
look at my contract, because I didn't believe he could just let me go without
pay. 15 minutes later, still in the photo-studio talking to my
colleagues/friends, I got a phone call. My employer had looked at my contract
and found that he: \- had to give me a months notice; \- had to pay me my
severance (a month's wage); \- owed me my un-used leave; \- already revoked
all my access to all internal/external processes.

That last one meant that I didn't have to come back in again.

The other employers that were made redundant, were told they had the choice of
leaving that day (and get paid for a month), or finishing the month of work,
all receiving their severance normally.

My bet, is that it was the first time he ever had to make someone redundant.
He seemed genuinely upset too. I never blamed him on a personal level, even
though I disagreed with many of his executive decisions.

He did end up giving me a glowing recommendation when I applied for a new job,
so there's that.

------
dxhdr
In theory firing fast is the way to go. Sometimes you really can tell within a
few weeks that a person is just not working out. However, at least in my
industry, doing this repeatedly will likely earn your company a bad
reputation. Fired employees who don't agree with your decision will spread
rumors and it'll earn you a black mark, reducing the flow of qualified
candidates.

The ideal situation is for both employer and employee to come to an agreement
that it's not working out. An employee that understands why they are leaving
and why it's a bad fit will often remain a vocal supporter. Unfortunately, in
my experience, this takes time and energy far beyond the point of noticing the
issue... I wish I knew of a solution!

~~~
eropple
_> In theory firing fast is the way to go._

Why? Why is this more "the way to go" than "hire with deliberation so you
don't have to fire half your employees"? 'Cause from where I stand that hurts
less people. Your "fire fast" hurts them inequitably, it hurts them much more
than it does you or Your Important Business--it deprives them of their
previous job, it magnifies the opportunity costs they incurred to _trust you_
to come work for you.

Firing for "culture fit" means _you fucked up_. Your judgment failed. It's on
you and the hurt and pain you cause is your responsibility. So it strikes me
that it's being a minimum-level human being to hire carefully and with
deliberation to minimize the times you fuck up and the people you hurt.
Because they're _people_ , and in every case--even the asshole ones--they
deserve better than to be hurt because of your poor judgment.

~~~
monkeyspaw
It seems to me that it is because the hiring process is a short-term one. The
rationale for firing someone can happen over hundreds of hours. Sometimes you
don't know that someone will be a bad coworker until they've been a bad
coworker.

Hiring processes optimize for people who are good at getting hired. Working
with someone (if you're willing to prune the bad coworkers) optimizes for
people who are good colleagues.

~~~
dxhdr
This is really the meat of the issue. Nothing short of actually working
alongside a person for a week or two will tell you what it's like to... well,
actually work with them. People are nervous, friendly, energetic, and all
manner of things at heightened states during the interview process. Most of
the time this provides a good indication for who this person is but rarely it
does not.

In those circumstances, when yes a fundamental mistake has been made, I
believe that in theory it's best to end the relationship quickly, for both
parties involved. In practice it's obviously not that easy or simple.

I've heard of companies instituting mandatory work days or even work weeks for
prospective hires to vet how they will fit into the workplace. That sort of
thing is attempting to solve the issue but how on earth do you convince
anyone, especially someone already gainfully employed, to go through with that
process? I suppose I'd do it for a company I absolutely, positively, had to go
work for (very few if any)... realistically it seems hard to accomplish if not
rude to request.

Ultimately I think the hiring process is one in which mistakes can happen.
What's the most equitable way to resolve them when they do?

------
bluedino
I almost quit my last job because of culture fit. The other programmers were
almost impossible to work with. Being new to all their products, business
model, and source code, there are a lot of questions to be asked when things
aren't document and done in very strange ways.

The office had all the stereotypical 'bad' co-workers: the guy who turns every
discussion into an hour-long argument, the guy who's never in the office, the
guy who doesn't check or reply to emails, all backed by the boss who doesn't
make anyone accountable.

I got along with the rest of the staff great. Graphics, sales, customer
service... But the developers were just un-socialble, bad at communicating,
and full of bad habits.

I felt so frustrated, there were a few times I almost walked out the door.
It'd take me 2 days of chasing something around a product (that could have
been answered by myself, a year later) to find a fix or answer a 'why?'

But I stuck it out. When we hired our next developer, I was put in charge of
getting him up to speed. The boss was impressed with how much information I
had prepared from him and that he knew I started with 'nothing'.

It may have backfired because he never really go to the point where he didn't
need handholding, but at least he didn't feel as frustrated as I did for the
first 6 months.

------
computerhead
I agree with some of the points in this. However, many are just a matter of
poor management not selecting the right candidate. I have been on both sides
of the fence many times over the past 20+ years. I can tell you if you are
firing someone its because either "they" did not perform to expectations
repeatedly or "they" are no longer engaged in the project or projects they are
on.

As for the "strange" boss behavior. That is "always going to happen" in
smaller companies or companies where managers where promoted from within. This
is mainly because those managers tend to have little to no experiencing
managing people. Managers that have years of experience and have worked at a
few companies should not have these behaviors. They tend to "curve" the ball a
bit early in the process. Meaning, if they see a problem they address it
immediately.

It is on "you" the manager to make sure the person does a great job and
succeed. If they fail, you failed to identify the person you need to complete
the task at hand.

On the otherhand, people who do not show for work, do not do what they are
told repeatedly, are candidates that I believe fall in the "fired" category.

Currently I have a boss that pretty much fits the description that would give
me red-flags that maybe im not a good fit. However, I am very engaged in the
projects, hitting all milestones, and well liked by all the people I interact
with including my boss. Yet he is still "strange". And I believe this to be
because he has no experience prior to being promoted within to be a manager.

------
superails
> in every case where we let someone go, that person has gone on to work on
> things that they are more passionate about and where they have excelled and
> been happier at.

Ok, I believed it until then. B.S. No way he knows that. Plenty of unmotivated
developers out there. It is not all roses when you get fired, even for a boss
that "understands your pain and wants what's best for you". The fact is- if
you fire someone, you want to feel like you are doing them a favor. Well, you
aren't. You likely made a hiring mistake, and your mistake as a manager is
going on that person's permanent record. It may be 80-90% their fault, but the
employer shares in the blame for failure. Admit you fucked up, and try to help
the person if you can. Then improve your hiring and early evaluation process.

------
moron4hire
"Good cultural fit" is code for "white, male, and willing to take a smaller
salary than they would get anywhere else, and willing to work copious overtime
without pay."

------
danbmil99
"Culture Fit" is just code for "You don't seem to care about what we care
about, and you don't work as hard as us, and we're not sure but you may just
not be as intelligent/creative/inspired/ambitious as us, or whatever, but we
think your salary and the overhead of dealing with you could be spent more
productively on someone else."

~~~
eropple
"You don't _seem to_ work as hard as us."

Agree with the overall point, but I think that's important to stress. My
experience with people who embrace this "fire fast" thing has generally been
people who don't understand the difference between their perceptions and
objective reality; likewise I don't think that all (or most) understand the
ramifications of their actions upon other people.

------
jbapple
I found this sentence surprising:

> We’ve let go of half a dozen employees and kept only as many

Of all the departures I know of from software companies, much fewer than half
are firings. That is to say, the vast majority are employee-initiated.

------
freework
Culture is not a function of an individual, it is a function of the group. It
is not valid for someone to say "you are not a cultural fit" ("you" referring
to a human being).

On the other hand, it is valid for a person to say a group is not a "cultural
fit". For instance a company that is full of greasy nerds who work 10 houra a
day and play video games the other 14. Thats not my bag so I'm not going to
work at that company because its not my culture.

For the company to say to me "you're not a cultural fit", is like Germany
telling me I can't visit their country because I'm not "german enough".

------
lifeisstillgood
I wish I had learnt long ago that sometimes it's not me, it's not them,
sometimes it is just us - sometimes people do not gel and all the HR friendly
"no such thing as a bad student" is only so much horsecrap. if it is not
working and cannot be fixed easily, quit trying and find other people to work
with.

in large companies which are really lots of small companies in same buildings
this did not look like firing / hiring on the cv but generally was the same
thing..

~~~
cpayne
I've always thought it odd that a CS Degree doesn't address this...

~~~
jaredsohn
As an undergrad, we'd often do programming projects as groups and a part of
the value of such an exercise was to gain experience in working within teams.

Although technically, CS degrees are for learning about computation rather
than how to use a particular language or how to develop software.

------
ballard
Knowing myself, I have my finger on the trapdoor button in my office.

That said, it's better to find out if there's a fit based on casual (usually
paid) work, contracts and eventually FTE. The goal being giving everyone an
out, because the world's a small place.

------
sans-serif
Maybe startups find it more difficult to fire okay-but-not-great employees
just because they don't have that much resource to focus on hiring in this
super competitive job market.

------
thenerdfiles
What do you think the rationalizations' content were in Morocco before all
those Acamdemics hit the streets ?

------
a3voices
> We’ve let go of half a dozen employees and kept only as many

This sounds like the worst employer I've ever heard of. A 50% chance of being
fired? There's no way I'd take an offer if I knew that statistic.

~~~
pcwalton
Yeah, this set off alarm bells for me as well. That's far too much career risk
for me, and I imagine for many others.

IMHO firing, especially early on, should be viewed as a failure of the
recruiting process; it's expensive and time-consuming to hire an employee and
then fire them compared to just saying no before an offer is made. I find it
strange that the author seems to think that a high firing rate is something to
be proud of.

