
It's Never Too Early to Fire - jbyers
https://a16z.com/2017/05/24/on-firing-why-when-how/
======
afpx
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.

~~~
michaelbrooks
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. :(

~~~
usmeteora
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.

~~~
nsxwolf
That's still a pretty good deal though. Plenty of companies will never budge
on money. They'd rather you quit and just find another sucker.

~~~
usmeteora
sometimes.

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.

Losing me was uneconomical for them.

------
wtvanhest
Just a note, this isnt about firing junior people fast. That is absolutely
scummy.

This is about hiring/firing very senior, well paid people with lots of prior
experience.

If you are hiring and then firing junior people fast, you are the problem.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
> 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.

~~~
ewjordan
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.

~~~
tajen
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).

~~~
noxToken
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.

~~~
j2bax
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.

------
gommm
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

~~~
Retric
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.

------
kristiandupont
>I have never fired anyone too early.

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.

~~~
raoulr
You'll probably never know if you fired too soon. Confirmation bias Will
confirm the decision. You'll always know if it was too late.

~~~
pillowkusis
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.

------
erikpukinskis
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.

~~~
forgotpw1123
>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.

~~~
im3w1l
>It's a serious legal risk to re-hire fired employees.

That's interesting to hear. Could you explain in what way?

~~~
arethuza
Maybe its a US thing - here in the UK I've seen multiple people re-hired and
in each case it worked out pretty well.

~~~
StavrosK
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.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

~~~
sokoloff
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.

~~~
StavrosK
I see, thank you. That's pretty clear.

------
pbreit
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.

~~~
crispyambulance
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.

------
pascalxus
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.

~~~
everdev
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.

~~~
throw_away_777
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.

------
mbfg
"You can never fire someone too soon" is a ridiculous statement as it is non-
falsifiable.

~~~
woof
"You can never comment to early", on the other hand...

He clarifies the provocative title in the section titled "How long should you
give people a chance?"

------
scandox
> 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.

For anyone that didn't reach the end.

------
_pmf_
It's necessary to fire early, but investors should keep pushing money into
unicorns without any business model because ...

~~~
wyclif
Right. It's like putting a band-aid on cancer. Or perhaps tearing off the
band-aid.

------
horsecaptin
Why would anyone work in a person or company that is known to fire quickly?

~~~
usmeteora
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.

~~~
nradov
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.

~~~
usmeteora
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.

------
devy
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.

------
strin
Given a shortage of supply for a job, firing early might not be a good idea.
It takes months or even years to find an appropriate good fit for a job.

Sometimes it's easier to just give the person another chance, than to fire him
and have no one to do the work.

~~~
traskjd
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?

~~~
dullgiulio
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.

~~~
throwanem
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.

------
Clubber
>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.

~~~
phkahler
>> Fast forward a few years after an acquisition. The new owners have so many
Bozo's in executive positions the place is toxic.

Someone once summarized that as "The fish rots from the head".

------
phkahler
>> 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.

------
pmarreck
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...

~~~
pillowkusis
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

~~~
pmarreck
Exactly!

------
tkyjonathan
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.

------
vonnik
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.

------
nilved
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.

------
ElijahLynn
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.

------
paulsutter
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

------
dbg31415
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.

~~~
warcher
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.

------
Ajedi32
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnhlDwCRwkU)

------
kartan
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.

~~~
lokedhs
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.

~~~
nvarsj
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.

~~~
arethuza
"Permanent employees are basically impossible to fire."

That really isn't true at all - you can be fired for pretty much anything in
the first two years and after that the process is pretty straightforward.

I've never seen a company fail to get rid of someone they didn't want working
there - one way or another.

~~~
wyclif
It's harder to do in Europe, but it's still possible. Especially, as you say,
if there's management determination that the person has to go.

~~~
philjr
You really can't generalize across Europe

------
grogenaut
"No one was ever fired too soon"

Steve Jobs may have been but then again maybe he did need time to cook in Next
before coming back.

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startupempl0ye
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.

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johan_larson
Jeepers. That text needs to be a lot darker or a lot thicker.

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tiatia
I have a different take. Never forget that you can get fired but also never
forget you can fire!

You can fire jobs.

You can fire friends.

You can fire customers.

Makes life so much easier!

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logicallee
>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.

Was that a "wrong" decision?

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
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.

