In that situation, they are still "substandard". Ideally there would be some mentoring process that happens to try and get the employee on the right track. And a good recruiting process should minimize the number of employees who are a bad fit for whatever reason so this doesn't happen often. But at the end of the day, it really isn't good for the employee or employer to continue a relationship which isn't fruitful.
Indeed I would agree with this, I just thought the comment I replied to was disingenuous to only mention substandard engineers getting fired, when it really is engineers who are underperforming getting fired.
It just makes it seem as though getting fired implies you are a bad engineer, and not getting fired means you are somehow better than those who got fired.
