

Rapid Hiring & Firing to Build the Best Teams - Bruce Eckel - gozzoo
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=281754

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hga
While you _must_ be able to fire a new hire ASAP if they aren't working out,
hiring and firing "hundreds" to assemble a team of 30 sounds positively insane
to me.

One boss I had---who had a _lot_ of experience and also coded right along with
us---had a rule of never hiring anyone if he had a doubt about them. That
wouldn't work for everyone, perhaps not most, but the emotional cost of the
above sort of churn just can't be ultimately productive.

Hmmm, another example would be someone who hired me despite his taking a
strong dislike to me by the end of the interview. Turned out I was the only
programmer he interviewed who could solve his whiteboard problems, which I
found to be so trivial I couldn't really remember them (C/C++ syntax and
something like reversing a doublely linked list (you'll be surprised how many
"programmers" can't program their way out of a paper bag ... and this was for
a multi-threaded C++ program so his formal tests were minimal at best)).

Well, I helped him save his company (he was the only other techie), and was
fired as soon as they could convince the programmer they really wanted to move
back from Silicon Valley. Ultimately not a fun experience, although I sure
learned a lot of stuff.

