You absolutely need to consider how the rest of the team will interpret you actions. Most probably know this individual is underperforming already. Teammates usually have a sense before the manager does.
But the way you handle it will also be observed. Others need to know you won’t just fire someone on the spot if performance doesn’t match expectations. Life happens, people have personal life issues that may occasionally require attention, and you don’t want everyone else assuming they are one bad sprint away from unemployment.
In most of the US at least, start with a performance improvement plan. Ideally one crafted with HR’s help. It should lay out specific expectations for a Senior Engineer, and call for immediate and sustained improvement. Use that to initiate a conversation and clearly lay out that they are not meeting expectations for the level at which they were hired. Present meeting those goals as a requirement for continued employment. You may also present a severance option here if you want them to have an out.
This makes it clear to everyone that you treat all employees with respect, offer a clear warning, and then so long as you expectations in the PIP are clear, it’s a lot cleaner if you end up needing to part ways a week or four weeks later.
As a counter point to this, I’ve witnessed the practice of designing these processes to terminate someone creates a ton of burnout for the manager. Expect to spend at least 20% of your time managing the PIP. Documentation, one on ones, babying tickets being assigned, etc.
On top of that I’ve never seen anyone get through a PIP successfully (n=6).
Furthermore, it can also create a culture of just dismissing any candidates who don’t come from the right pedigree because the risk of a mishire is way too high.
Its worth asking if it’s worth your time to do this for the sake of following process. Larger companies that need to standardize management for hundreds of managers have a greater need than startups do.
> I’ve never seen anyone get through a PIP successfully (n=6).
I don’t think they’re meant to succeed. If you want to keep an employee, you give them feedback and coach them. A PIP is used to document evidence that an employee is incompetent and is incapable of improving despite your best efforts, as a precursor to firing them.
It’s definitely not zero effort. But every time I’ve seen it draw out the timeline, it’s been because the expectations weren’t clear at hire time, nor in the PIP. You’re looking for a specific number of “significant PRs/week”, or story points, or something with subjectivity where you the manager still get to decide.
It’s a warning shot, and sometimes it only lasts a week.
BigCo HR can definitely make it take months, but the practice in general doesn’t have to be that way. We did this at startup size as small as 20 people, and I never regretted it.
Do you have thoughts on offering PIP vs demotion and salary adjustment?
If the individual doesn't have the skills (or seemingly temperament) for a senior role, I'm not sure PIP is setting them up for success.
Versus demotion with possibility of promotion allows them to perform at their level of competence, leaving open the possibility for them to chose (or not) to aim for promotion.
I haven’t personally seen that work in practice. I’ve been in situations where we considered it, but people usually have picked a role with salary considerations in mind, and often can’t really walk that back, and if they do it’s demotivating. And they may be able to perform elsewhere in a way that meets the need at your senior comp level.
I think it’s easiest to cut the relationship and let them start clean somewhere else.
This varies from US state to US state, but at least in Georgia the answer is no. We have to register ahead of time (usually when obtaining a driver's license for our current address), and voter registrations are cross-checked against other records of residency. On election day, we have to vote at an assigned location, and that location has a list of the people who are allowed to vote there that day. When you check in, they check you off of that list. People who vote early or have requested a mail-in ballot are scrubbed from that list ahead of time.
A fake ID, let alone a photo of a fake ID, is not going to get you past the registration step nor the in-person verification step. At best a truly good physical fake ID might get you through to vote in another person's name, if you know where they were registered and beat them to it. But that is not what this tool enables.
This system is not without its flaws. Plenty of people are disenfranchised because they either failed to properly register ahead of time, or failed to show up at the correct polling location with proper ID on election day. But AI-generated photos of fake IDs is not one of this system's weaknesses.
This is really frustrating, and sorry you're on the receiving end of this. I don't work for Twilio, but we spend a lot with them (and some other telecoms) so I see a bit further up the chain than most.
The retail wireless carriers are really driving a lot of this with recent 10DLC A2P changes. In particular, T-Mobile is waving around threats of $10k fines per message for messages they deem to be in violation of their content rules. (Which obviously prohibit fraud and such, but also somewhat-arbitrarily anything relating to marijuana.) The way it's written T-Mobile will fine Twilio, who is supposed to pass it on, but knows they'll struggle to collect that.
Meanwhile, on my personal cell phone AT&T can't even seem to figure out that when they get a message from a Nexmo number that starts with "ATT Free Msg" that they didn't send, maybe they shouldn't deliver it. As a consumer I'm glad someone is trying to squash these scams, but they're breaking more than a few eggs in the process.
I'd echo the advice to get off the SMS channel for notifications if at all possible, unless you're sending enough and spending enough to have named support contacts. The rules are being written for people sending thousands of messages per day. We serve small businesses who send maybe 100 messages per month, and it's been a mess trying to get carriers to recognize that these businesses exist and need a solution that works for them too.
Spam texts like that basically destroyed my phone number that I've had for 15 years :(
"You package (#US853121) containing the following products: 1. iPhone 13. Cannot be delivered until outstanding duties have been paid. Current outstanding balance: $1.68. More info <sketchiest website ever>"
I get about 20 of these a day. I've lodged multiple complaints. Like, why can't AT&T solve this problem that AOL solved in 1994?
Besides what others have pointed out, there's also the economic angle. It may be worth the estimated $X (for whatever value of $X you believe) to predict a collision, forge a cert, and MITM all of a website's traffic. It may not be worth nearly as much if the prize is only the ability to MITM 2% of that website's traffic. Maybe it's 6% under oppressive regimes, but it's still the same amount of work for a much smaller prize.
Of course we'd like to protect all 100%, but this is about tradeoffs. Assuming downgrade attacks are as preventable as they claim, I think it's respectable that they're making this kind of effort to reduce the impact.
We build call tracking analytics software for small and medium sized businesses and the digital marketing agencies that serve them. The company is profitable, with a paying customer base of 18,000 companies, and recently raised a small series A round. The current product team consists of 8 people, all Atlanta-based. We're looking to add two or three more to help us build out the platform faster. Current tech stack is Ruby, Rails, AngularJS, Postgres, and Redis.
Senior Software Engineer - Looking for full-stack engineers who can help us expand the platform. Upcoming projects include refactoring key components into services, building out automated call scoring using machine classifiers, deeper integrations with other services, and improving our analytics tools.
Senior Mobile Engineer - We have aspirations of building native mobile applications, but nobody to do it. Looking for someone with experience building apps from the ground up, part of which will be scoping what features the app should include. No strong opinions on pure native vs hybrid vs Cordova vs Xamarin, but regardless there will eventually be some WebRTC components. Prefer to start with iOS, as that's where most of our customers are.
Atlanta, GA - CallRail - On-Site - www.callrail.com
We build call tracking analytics software for small and medium sized businesses and the digital marketing agencies that serve them. The company is profitable, with a paying customer base of 18,000 companies, and recently raised a small series A round. The current product team consists of 8 people, all Atlanta-based. We're looking to add two or three more to help us build out the platform faster. Current tech stack is Ruby, Rails, AngularJS, Postgres, and Redis.
Senior Software Engineer - Looking for full-stack engineers who can help us expand the platform. Upcoming projects include refactoring key components into services, building out automated call scoring using machine classifiers, deeper integrations with other services, and improving our analytics tools.
Senior Mobile Engineer - We have aspirations of building native mobile applications, but nobody to do it. Looking for someone with experience building apps from the ground up, part of which will be scoping what features the app should include. No strong opinions on pure native vs hybrid vs Cordova vs Xamarin, but regardless there will eventually be some WebRTC components. Prefer to start with iOS, as that's where most of our customers are.
I worked at Oracle up until last year. At Oracle HQ in Redwood City, yes, many developers have private offices. But our office and the other offices I visited elsewhere that had been built-out more recently were open-plan environments.
That was probably editorialized by TC. I work at Vitrue, and Reggie regularly corrects people around the office who refer to the company as a "startup".
Besides fire/flood/theft/etc, is the garage clean and climate controlled? I used to run a server in a basement during college, and burned through 2 disks and one motherboard before I finally figured out that warm, damp, and dusty basements with dirty power supplied by 1920's wiring weren't a great place to run servers.
For me, it's a peace of mind thing. I have better things to worry about than hardware.
Also, read the fine print on that Comcast plan. Their residential service is now capped at 250GB (not sure about business-class). In my experience, Comcast is the last company I would want involved anyways. Our service goes out frequently enough that I now have a backup WiMAX modem for my laptop.
I found the SitePoint book "The Principles of Beautiful Web Design" (http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Beautiful-Web-Design/dp/097...) to be very informative as well. It's a great introduction to a lot of different aspects of design that programmers generally don't think about when trying to mimic more professionally-designed sites. I read it two years ago, and it was a bit easier to digest at the time because most of the designs presented still felt current.
However, keep in mind that while the designs presented in many of these resources may look outdated, the principles behind them are solid. Tastes and trends may change, but running through a few Photoshop tutorials will get you up to speed on the execution of the latest styles. More importantly though, design basics such as readability, whitespace, proximity, alignment, proportion, color, texture, etc are timeless. If you can distill those important aspects from the materials you're reading, you'll be much better off in the long run than if you just try to copy techniques from whatever the most modern resource currently is.
But the way you handle it will also be observed. Others need to know you won’t just fire someone on the spot if performance doesn’t match expectations. Life happens, people have personal life issues that may occasionally require attention, and you don’t want everyone else assuming they are one bad sprint away from unemployment.
In most of the US at least, start with a performance improvement plan. Ideally one crafted with HR’s help. It should lay out specific expectations for a Senior Engineer, and call for immediate and sustained improvement. Use that to initiate a conversation and clearly lay out that they are not meeting expectations for the level at which they were hired. Present meeting those goals as a requirement for continued employment. You may also present a severance option here if you want them to have an out.
This makes it clear to everyone that you treat all employees with respect, offer a clear warning, and then so long as you expectations in the PIP are clear, it’s a lot cleaner if you end up needing to part ways a week or four weeks later.