> I've been at several places which would have been improved by higher levels of management-directed firings.
If management hire the wrong people they will likely fire the wrong people too. In my opinion it is better to keep apparent low performers around since it is so hard to rate programmers in a fair non game-able way. Especially from the managers' viewpoint where they don't work side by side with someone.
Hiring is often based on around 4 hours of interviews, which seems like it necessarily creates an incredibly noisy signal even for the best interviewers and management chain.
If management hire the wrong people they will likely fire the wrong people too. In my opinion it is better to keep apparent low performers around since it is so hard to rate programmers in a fair non game-able way. Especially from the managers' viewpoint where they don't work side by side with someone.