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A great overview on everything that happened, with the exception of the reasoning behind "Fire fast." It isn't about churning and burning through people. This

by tyre 11y ago

A great overview on everything that happened, with the exception of the reasoning behind "Fire fast." It isn't about churning and burning through people. This isn't about "move fast and break people." As a CEO that has had to fire employees, there is literally nothing more difficult. I'm not asking for sympathy, just communicating that nothing is more important in terms of a company's health and success than the people. I agree that managers don't deserve sympathy. They asked for or accepted the responsibility to manage people and now it's time to put up or shut up. Firing quickly is partly about the company, but it is also respectful to the employee. If you know it isn't going to work out, don't waste their time. How many people do you know how have been in romantic relationships that dragged out for too long? Where they knew it wouldn't work out but kept the hope alive? Everyone loses. It sucks. People are both immensely rewarding and Really Fucking Hard. The reason people say Fire Fast is that new managers (in my experience and that of close mentors to me) almost never fire too quickly. Very often, they either make excuses for the employee or are afraid that firing is their fault. A lot of times it is. Look, if you hire someone for a role and have to fire them, that is your fault. 100%. And it is gut-wrenching to think you built someone up, got them to quit another job, had them tell their friends and family how excited they were, then forcing them to go back and say "oh yeah, I got fired and now you think I'm a failure." But if you are the manager and you know it isn't going to work, you owe it to the employee, to yourself, and (especially) to everyone at the company to not drag things out. ## On Zach Github is changing and he didn't fit in with its future. They took a tone of investment and needed to be a different company. Whether that is the right or wrong strategy isn't the point (and I have no idea.) They needed people who were on board with that and believed (probably correctly) that he wouldn't be. It's not an easy decision, and everyone involved knows it could have gone down better, but it also could have been much worse.

cldellow 11y ago
> Firing quickly is partly about the company, but it is also respectful to the employee. This a thousand times. Under Microsoft's brutal stack rank system, I chatted with a peer who saw me as a good source of career advice. This fellow was not performing very well in his current team. His management had given up on him and IMO his peers didn't see him as a leader. Whether it was his skills or his environment that led to this situation, the environment was definitely no longer there for him to improve or gain responsibility. His read of the situation was totally different. He was seeking increased responsibility in the team and had a promotion goal he was targeting. This was lunacy. His past 3 annual reviews had been the lowest score possible. If his manager was following policy, he would have been fired a long time ago, not kept on as a sacrificial lamb for the stack rank gods. There's a lot of gray area, obviously, but I shared your feeling that "fire fast" was misrepresented here.

by tyre 11y ago

cldellow 11y ago

> Firing quickly is partly about the company, but it is also respectful to the employee. This a thousand times. Under Microsoft's brutal stack rank system, I chatted with a peer who saw me as a good source of career advice. This fellow was not performing very well in his current team. His management had given up on him and IMO his peers didn't see him as a leader. Whether it was his skills or his environment that led to this situation, the environment was definitely no longer there for him to improve or gain responsibility. His read of the situation was totally different. He was seeking increased responsibility in the team and had a promotion goal he was targeting. This was lunacy. His past 3 annual reviews had been the lowest score possible. If his manager was following policy, he would have been fired a long time ago, not kept on as a sacrificial lamb for the stack rank gods. There's a lot of gray area, obviously, but I shared your feeling that "fire fast" was misrepresented here.