

Three Types of People to Fire Immediately - progga
http://www.businessweek.com/printer/management/three-types-of-people-to-fire-immediately-11082011.html

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anjc
"""I wanted a happy culture. So I fired all the unhappy people."""

Very good for morale, there. Maybe companies could put some sort of
electrocution-collar onto employees, and the moment they exhibit any sort of
behavior that may or may not hinder the company, regardless of their life
situation (they _do_ have lives outside of work, but...should they?!?), they
could simply be exterminated.

Discard those useless people, living their emotional human lives.
Moneymoneymoney.

(a good boss will be able deal and work with all the behaviors listed in the
article.)

~~~
bowled
"Beatings will continue until morale improves."

~~~
anjc
Bender: Wow, your kid is great. How hard you say you had to hit him? Lady:
Fairly hard.

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wisty
Extremely polar article. Not every project goes up in smoke because someone
thought they were doing it wrong. In fact, quite a few go up in smoke because
nobody listened to the nay-sayers.

You need experience to know the difference between a naysayer, and someone
who's spotted an upcoming train wreck. You also have to know that there _is_ a
difference, and that it's hard to spot.

~~~
bowled
The difference is whether it is based in reality, and it is hard because it
can be hard to stay in touch with reality when your ego is invested.

So much nicer when you just fire everyone who doesn't stroke your ego.

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notahacker
Firing those sort of people certainly seems to be the best way of ending up
with an organisation full of yes men.

Unlike the article author, I think getting rid of the people that incessantly
moan about rigid company policies, bluntly tell management their strategy
sucks and god forbid actually claim to know things about their market is the
perfect recipe for failing to spot the next Netflix/Google/telephone because
nobody wanted to upset morale by raising it at the company's Praise Our
Strategy session.

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jbapple
If you fire the "nonbelievers", you punish those who speak truth to power.
This is a recipe for managerial pet projects that end up unprofitable because
any insufficiently enthusiastic employee input was punished.

That whole section reads like it was written by a cult leader or a "The
Secret" author.

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joezydeco
_“Can you believe what they want us to do now? And of course we have no time
to do it. I don’t get paid enough for this. The boss is clueless."_

I hear this around the bullpen a lot lately. I don't think we have a group of
victims whining around and complaining all day. These are competent senior
engineers that want to do the best work possible given our resources and
schedules.

Problem is, they're constantly interrupted by management asking for a sales
demo for this customer, or a feature change for that customer. It's the lack
of clarity and direction and project management that is frustrating the
employees. And who owns _that_ issue?

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mr_luc
This is good advice, but it's dangerous for leaders who aren't themselves deep
experts on their issues that divide their people. It hinges pretty strongly on
a boss being the most discerning person at the table.

As all of the comments point out:

For 'victims', 'nonbelievers' and 'knowitalls', read 'defenders of the
unpopular', 'visionaries' and 'pragmatists.'

How do you know which is which?

Easy: the boss should be a technical expert, as well as the most demanding
user of the product. Such a boss will know when technical decisions are being
made rationally and when they are being made for political reasons -- and thus
evaluate whether a complaint comes from someone who sees themselves as a
victim, or someone who sees something beneficial getting axed.

Such a boss will be able to recognize an earnest and appropriate expression of
a compelling, competing vision, and differentiate it from a lack of buy-in.
Why? Because he knows the technologies in question, and because he knows that
"buy-in" always risks turning into a mindless "lock-in", and so it's useful to
have contrarians on your team.

But, hey -- I'm preaching to the choir on HN. And I'd say there is some
evidence that leadership is increasingly technical and expert in companies
that are winning.

These kinds of decisions are always hard.

For non-technical people, making decisions about technical people, I have a
suspicion that they'd do as well throwing darts at a board for all but the
most blatant cases of personality misfit.

I've been in situations where the person who created the most value for his
company was all three of those things: 'victim', 'non-believer' and
'knowitall'. All they cared about was the product, and it turns out that's the
thing you want them to care about.

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chrismealy
The three types of people to hire:

1) People who never think anything is wrong. 2) People who will believe
anything. 3) People who don't care about facts.

... success!

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ja2ke
Sometimes these attitudes start cropping up in large numbers because you're a
shitty boss, so I guess watch out for that too.

~~~
anjc
Yeah, in my limited experience, that's always been the case.

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abscondment
These definitely sound like attitudes you'd want to watch out for and combat,
but I'd be really hesitant to treat them as grounds for dismissal.

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pandaman
I would not criticize the authors of the article on the basis that they are
most likely to fail. They want to make "a more innovative company" not a
successful or even profitable company. Making people do things they don't know
how to do is the making innovation by definition (i.e. discovering something
new, even on the personal level). For example if you give chef's job to a
programmer and programmer's job to a chef both will have to innovate to make
the most trivial stuff. If your investors and or customers are happy with the
innovation by itself and don't mind programmer's food and chef's code - knock
yourself out I say.

Even better idea - fire everyone who is working now because they might have
some clue what is that you are doing. Get some fresh people off the street
without telling them anything, take innovation to the max (note to HR: hiring
this way you might end up wit hiring somebody who actually knows how to do the
job so you need to do background checks to ensure that the new hire has no
previous knowledge of his or her future responsibilities).

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fortesque
"In our experience, we’ve found the link between believing and succeeding
incredibly powerful and real."

The_Secret.txt

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Rodrigo_Thauby
Wow. I read the article before and comments, and boy am I happy at the general
sentiment. I too agree that this is an over-simplification of a much more
complex dynamic, which in any case would be more alarming in terms of crappy
management, than bad employees. Such a polarized view on firing people could
only come from a ruthless self-centered suit.

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scottmcleod
I'm all for this-I got rid of negatives in my professional world and
productivity went up tremendously. Teams work better when there isnt a toxic
person holding everyone down.

Not only are those people on that list negative, but they suck other people
into their black holes.

Now to get rid of these people in our personal lives, is much harder....

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tryitnow
This article, like most business articles, is just too full of generalizations
and the trivially obvious to be of any value.

