> 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 c

> 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.