8 ms·

There is no such thing as good hiring, only good firing

59 points by mmt 17y ago

Kilimanjaro 17y ago
I've had so many spineless bosses it's not even funny.
- Tichy 17y ago
  I remember reading that bosses are most likely to have a heart attack while firing people. It's not easy.
  - Kilimanjaro 17y ago
    A pink email and a guard escorting you out of the building do a great job reducing heart attacks or a bullet between your eyes. You still have to park your mercedes out of sight that day tho.
  - pw0ncakes 17y ago
    In a way, it's an admission of impotence. When you fire someone, you're saying that you don't have the resources or power to turn that person into a success at your company. The "resources" angle is crucial. Large companies can afford to have a non-producer for 6 months and train him up to being able to contribute, and they generally should. Startups usually can't afford this. Of course, this excludes the cases where a person is fired for doing something seriously wrong or unethical. But I imagine it's much easier to fire in those cases.
    - hga 17y ago
      I don't think it's within my power or anyone else's to turn many people into a success if they can't grok pointers, recursion and/or abstraction and one or more of those is necessary for the job (I'm assuming a small enough startup they can't be put someplace "safe"). I'm pretty sure the abstraction bit is innate (I'm assuming they've passed high school math), and very sure I can't teach it nor is it my duty to. Pointers and recursion are not so bad (but again, in these sorts of situations I'm probably not in a position to get them up to speed on something so basic and so far reaching in effects (especially unsafe pointers)).
      - pw0ncakes 17y ago
        If you fire someone who can't understand basic programming concepts, the mistake you made was hiring that person.
        hga 17y ago
        Indeed, which is why I test for each of those necessary concepts, as detailed elsewhere.
autarch 17y ago
This actually makes me want to work there. At past jobs I've often been frustrated by management's inability to let go of problem employees. If the team isn't gelling or someone just isn't contributing, changes need to happen. Note: someone might say that I was the problem, which may be true, but I wasn't let go either, so my point still stands ;)
- exit 17y ago
  what kind of problems did these "problem employees" introduce?
jason_tko 17y ago
This guy is brilliant. He's got a number of similar excellent posts on a variety of business and tech related subjects. Straight, direct, clear and refreshing communication. I recommend you go through the other posts at http://www.fonality.com/blog/ http://www.fonality.com/blog/
- gaius 17y ago
  He's wrong, tho'. The #1 reason that managers don't fire poor performers is that firing is a huge, huge pain at most companies. Everyone might "know" they're a chump, but HR will want proof in writing, over a period of time, and god help you if the person is any sort of minority. Which is why in most companies poor performers get "promoted" to where hopefully they can't do too much damage. If you're lucky, they can be contained to writing reports that no-one reads. If you're not and someone forgets why they were promoted, then they might actually end up in charge of something, and no-one wins. Except for the HR department. They always win.
  - hkarthik 16y ago
    The corporate job where I'm at right now has this exact problem. HR has made termination require a LONG process that starts with a 6 month "performance initiative plan" before enough data can be collected to fire someone. And even then it requires a tremendous amount of executive level approval. We've had lots of incidents in the past where older employees would play the "I have a health issue" card to avoid being fired. Just to avoid getting sued, the company would capitulate and "promote or move" them away from the manager who didn't want them. Part of the problem is that as companies get bigger and their pockets get deeper, an entirely new class of employee enters which is low skill, highly cunning, and completely untrustworthy. Unfortunately, in my experience, most of these individuals always fit a certain profile: Middle Aged Men (50+) Low level of education Most of these people are hired for two reasons: 1) Need someone for grunt work (support/maintenance) 2) Need someone that will accept a very low salary Once a few incidents happen, HR and legal issues take over and begin the stranglehold on operational efficiency that infects large organizations.
dkasper 17y ago
A great book that espouses this principle is Fire Someone Today: http://www.firesomeonetoday.com/ http://www.firesomeonetoday.com/ There's a lot of other practical entrepreneurial advice in there too!
geoffc 17y ago
This works incredibly well. At my last company I fired about a third of the engineers I hired after 3 to 6 months and ended up with a great technical team. I never know how good an engineer is going to be during the interview process but after 6 months it is blindingly clear. I am upfront about the winnowing process during the interview, it scares some candidates away but I often get a very positive reaction to this "meritocracy by proof" approach. Another advantage is you can take some flyers on people with nontraditional backgrounds and find the occasionally diamond in the rough.
- DavidMcLaughlin 17y ago
  > This works incredibly well. At my last company I fired about a third of the engineers I hired after 3 to 6 months Wow. I wonder, have you and this smug author ever considered that you are the problem? Interviewing is a two-way process, it's the candidate's job to back up everything that's on their resume and make sure they present an honest view of their ability but it's also your job to decide if someone is a good fit for your team before making them quit their comfortable job and move to your start-up. By firing a THIRD of all people you convince to join your company, you are both incompetent and irresponsible. Precisely the kind of harmful deadwood people enjoy see getting fired.
  - j_baker 17y ago
    If you are convinced that someone is the perfect fit for you based on a few interviews, then you've either discovered a bullshit artist or haven't dug deep enough. Interviewing is a terrible way to make a hiring decision. We just haven't discovered a better way to do it.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      Interviewing can definitely give you an idea about a person, bull shit artists exist (in vast numbers), but they're not that hard to ferret out at the interview stage, presuming the interviewer knows his stuff and is not some HR flunky. The trick is that during an interview you can choose to concentrate on the person or you can concentrate on their technical skills. If you manage to concentrate on the person instead then you'll find out soon enough whether they'll be 'good' for your company. The technical stuff is the easy part. I've never had to resort to 'trick questions' or 'test assignemnts' to find out whether or not someone is capable. Discussing their past has been much more fruitful in spotting trouble early on. Interviewing is an art, not a science. There has been a whole lot of fuss about google and other companies getting on the 'metrics' bandwagon. I think that only works because they can datamine tens of thousands of applications and spot interesting trends. If you're in charge of a start-up or a mid-sized company with maybe 10 to 50 employees the number of people you will be hiring will be much lower and the hiring process itself will consume a disproportionate amount of time. Keeping your turnover low (as in: hire the right people right away) has an immediate pay-off both in time spent as well as in keeping the peace within your organization, and not investing months of time in to the wrong people only to fire them.
devinj 17y ago
Huh, whatever CMS he's using didn't enter in his HTML comment as, well, a comment. Up near the top of the article: ""
j_baker 17y ago
This is a refreshing alternative to the "better to turn away a superstar than to hire a dud" approach that seems so common. I've always felt that it was caused by risk aversion anyway.
- pw0ncakes 17y ago
  What's missed here is that being fired, for a lot of people, has real consequences. I don't think I'd take a job where I thought there was a 1/3 chance I'd be fired in the next 6 months. If you're a startup, you're hiring people who understand the lack of job security. If you're a large company, there's no excuse for firing 1/3 within 6 months: you can move people around until they fit. If you're getting rid of more than 10% in the first 6 months, you're doing something wrong. My thought: we should have a real safety net (including universal healthcare and a basic income that everyone gets, even the gainfully employed millionaires) and then allow companies to hire and fire whomever they want, because no one's life gets ruined by the loss of a job. But this would be a radical departure from the society we currently have.
  - hga 17y ago
    Is there any hire at will (which as a term of art includes firing and leaving at will) European country with socialized medicine and the dole? I told that plenty that make it so difficult to fire a person that they have high youth unemployment rates (e.g. France), but the above three with a strong "Protestant work ethic" might work out well. Or the incentive structure, if a lifestyle on the dole is too good for too many people, might be disastrous in the long term. I'm inclined to think the latter will be the outcome but wonder if we have any tests of the proposition.
    - pw0ncakes 17y ago
      Or the incentive structure, if a lifestyle on the dole is too good for too many people, might be disastrous in the long term. Within about 50 years, due to technological advancements, we'll have 20-40% paid employment (not unemployment) and there'll need to be some sort of dole. Personally, I think it would be great to have a society where people don't need to work. The people who only work because they have to wouldn't be working, which means that the people who are working are those with ambition and talent, and only those.
hga 17y ago
Very interesting. And it agrees with the one unique piece of advice I give people who are considering whether to go to work at a new firm, "Try to determine if they can fire people." One quibble: "It takes time to glean an employee's pithy attributes: work ethic, intelligence, attention to detail, enthusiasm, even personal hygiene." You should be able to judge at least initial enthusiasm in your interviewing process or you're not doing a good job of selling your company or it's an impossible sales proposition. Either of which you should do something about at a high priority. But I'll admit that sustained enthusiasm is what really counts and of course only time will tell WRT to that. And I'm not sure what you'd do with people who take some time to warm up to a situation (ADDED: well, make sure they've been enthusiastic about at least one prior job; if they're too young to have any/many and are already cynical you'd probably best pass on them :-). For programmers you should be able to get a reading of intelligence and attention to detail in the interview as long as you do minimal testing (perhaps Fizzbuzz, my preferred 3 tests of reverse a linked list (pointers), recursive factorial and find error in this block of code, etc.). Having them work out loud with you a relevant design problem is also good, although recognize that only 1/5 of programmers "get" abstraction (according to the Antipatterns book and my personal experience); if you need/can afford having programmers who don't get it, you'll want to gauge their ability to follow orders and "do it this way" "just because" the architect says so. (There are potentially lots of slots in an organization including a startup for all sorts of competent people, e.g. look at the 2nd Coders at Work interview Brad Fitzpatrick, the Live Journal Founder. They had an older employee who produced awful code, but they loved him since his forte was quickly figuring out difficult integration problems which no one else liked to do or was good at. He handed them messy solutions filled with duct tape and bailing wire and they mined the interfaces from them and made clean versions that fit with their system.) Anyway, my advice is to pay close attention to what this author says, just don't let it cause you to significantly relax your hiring system since hiring, working with and then firing duds is always debilitating for all concerned.
- pw0ncakes 17y ago
  What if they reverse a linked list using a language like ML or Haskell where pointers aren't required?
wheaties 17y ago
This was great, however, it also rests on the premise that management and those above them has the knowledge and ability to recognize what constitutes a bad employee. Sometimes, through their own ignorance, what is "bad" really is good. It's so sad that that type of problem permeates the software industry. Firing "bad" people fast should be a good thing but only if you can judge bad from good.
jacquesm 17y ago
As an employer you will find yourself with the quality of employees that you deserve. Treat your employees right and they'll be loyal and hopefully will treat you right in return. Treat them bad or whimsically and it will come back to you just the same. Employer-employee relationships differ from country to country but the above is I think a universal truth. Be a 'bad boss', hire and fire at will and you'll find that your employees will continuously be on the look-out to see if they can do better before you have a bad (pointy) hair day. Treat them well and they just might amaze you in what they can do for you. Managing people always was the part of the job that I dreaded the most, as the ceo of a relatively small company. The biggest reason for that was that it took time away from my 'first love', computer programming. But I hope that I never treated the employees of my company as cold and heartless as the article suggests, I'd be interested to hear his employees side of the story. Different strokes for different folks, it is very well possible that this strategy will work for a certain style of CEO, in a given job-market and location, but I'm fairly sure that it would not have worked for me. I'd rather spend a bit more time on the hiring side of things and get the right people on board than to go for a 'trial-and-error' approach like this and to have to go through the painful (for all parties) process of getting rid of a third of the new hires every six months. I have a particular problem with the sentence: > Your team thinks you suck if you don't have the chutzpah to fire. That speaks to me of a CEO that is at heart a very insecure person. You don't fire people to show you've got balls.
- tptacek 17y ago
  He wasn't saying that you fire people to show you've got balls. He was saying that teams will think less of you as a manager if you don't fire bad people. And he's right about that.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    He doesn't mention bad people in the bit I'm referring to, he literally says: "Your team thinks you suck if you don't have the chutzpah to fire." And that just makes no sense. Firing bad people is in the other bit above, where it says: "No, firing bad people improves the culture because it sets standards, and proves consequences. One bad apple does ruin the bunch." Hiring bad people is what ruins the culture, firing them improves it back to what it was before you hired them, if you're lucky. Most times will never go back to what it was before.
gonepostal 17y ago
Is it just me or is ignoring the interview process in favour of the firing process as poor as the opposite? The best method is to weight them about equal. Have a rigorous interview process where you try to hire only the best fit. If the new employee is a failure, have the ability to admit you made a mistake a correct it. Best of both worlds. Firing a new hire is not a cheap process and it does affect your reputation/company morale.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Absolutely true. I'm really surprised at the attitude of the article, it almost seems as though firing is seen as a replacement for a good interview process, and to shore up a lack of authority by instilling fear or showing 'guts'.
- pw0ncakes 17y ago
  I think you need both. You need to detect, and rectify, problems as soon as they occur. It's much better to catch potentially badly-fit employees (which doesn't mean they're necessarily bad, but just not right for the position you're trying to fill) in the interview process. However, there are subtle problems (people who can't handle large projects, or who don't document code, or who interview well but are actually unethical) that can't be caught in the interview process at all. This is oddly similar to the compile/run time distinction in bugs. You want to push as many of your bugs to compile time as possible (not-so-subtle plug for static typing) but it's impossible to have catch all of them in compilation; such is the nature of bugs. Similarly, you want to catch as many problems as possible in the interview process, but can't get all of them.
rnugent 17y ago
Just looked up this company on Glassdoor. As I suspected this jerk has created a company culture of suspicion and hate. He himself is not respected by his team as is proved by his abysmal rating. As a potential employee I'd take one look at this review and head for the hills. An example - "“Lord of The Flies Meet Corporate America.” Pros Product works well and is fully supported by a highly skilled team. Some positions offer work from home. Cons Management plays favorites for their friends and plays immature games. Nothing you shouldn't expect from a company that had a fight club. Overall the upper management doesn't seem to care about their employees rather tech support or sales. Constant turn over in the sales department lead by myopic management team. You will love the atmosphere with your coworkers but despise the management for their lack of respect and unethical conduct. Advice to Senior Management Treat your employees with respect. You can not expect your customers and channel to respect you when you constantly cut good people from your team. I would advise the executive team to seriously look at their management who has regular turnover. Sometimes its the process not the person."

59 points by mmt 17y ago

Kilimanjaro 17y ago

I've had so many spineless bosses it's not even funny.

Tichy 17y ago
I remember reading that bosses are most likely to have a heart attack while firing people. It's not easy.
- Kilimanjaro 17y ago
  A pink email and a guard escorting you out of the building do a great job reducing heart attacks or a bullet between your eyes. You still have to park your mercedes out of sight that day tho.
- pw0ncakes 17y ago
  In a way, it's an admission of impotence. When you fire someone, you're saying that you don't have the resources or power to turn that person into a success at your company. The "resources" angle is crucial. Large companies can afford to have a non-producer for 6 months and train him up to being able to contribute, and they generally should. Startups usually can't afford this. Of course, this excludes the cases where a person is fired for doing something seriously wrong or unethical. But I imagine it's much easier to fire in those cases.
  - hga 17y ago
    I don't think it's within my power or anyone else's to turn many people into a success if they can't grok pointers, recursion and/or abstraction and one or more of those is necessary for the job (I'm assuming a small enough startup they can't be put someplace "safe"). I'm pretty sure the abstraction bit is innate (I'm assuming they've passed high school math), and very sure I can't teach it nor is it my duty to. Pointers and recursion are not so bad (but again, in these sorts of situations I'm probably not in a position to get them up to speed on something so basic and so far reaching in effects (especially unsafe pointers)).
    - pw0ncakes 17y ago
      If you fire someone who can't understand basic programming concepts, the mistake you made was hiring that person.
      - hga 17y ago
        Indeed, which is why I test for each of those necessary concepts, as detailed elsewhere.

autarch 17y ago

This actually makes me want to work there. At past jobs I've often been frustrated by management's inability to let go of problem employees. If the team isn't gelling or someone just isn't contributing, changes need to happen. Note: someone might say that I was the problem, which may be true, but I wasn't let go either, so my point still stands ;)

exit 17y ago
what kind of problems did these "problem employees" introduce?

jason_tko 17y ago

This guy is brilliant. He's got a number of similar excellent posts on a variety of business and tech related subjects. Straight, direct, clear and refreshing communication. I recommend you go through the other posts at http://www.fonality.com/blog/ http://www.fonality.com/blog/

gaius 17y ago
He's wrong, tho'. The #1 reason that managers don't fire poor performers is that firing is a huge, huge pain at most companies. Everyone might "know" they're a chump, but HR will want proof in writing, over a period of time, and god help you if the person is any sort of minority. Which is why in most companies poor performers get "promoted" to where hopefully they can't do too much damage. If you're lucky, they can be contained to writing reports that no-one reads. If you're not and someone forgets why they were promoted, then they might actually end up in charge of something, and no-one wins. Except for the HR department. They always win.
- hkarthik 16y ago
  The corporate job where I'm at right now has this exact problem. HR has made termination require a LONG process that starts with a 6 month "performance initiative plan" before enough data can be collected to fire someone. And even then it requires a tremendous amount of executive level approval. We've had lots of incidents in the past where older employees would play the "I have a health issue" card to avoid being fired. Just to avoid getting sued, the company would capitulate and "promote or move" them away from the manager who didn't want them. Part of the problem is that as companies get bigger and their pockets get deeper, an entirely new class of employee enters which is low skill, highly cunning, and completely untrustworthy. Unfortunately, in my experience, most of these individuals always fit a certain profile: Middle Aged Men (50+) Low level of education Most of these people are hired for two reasons: 1) Need someone for grunt work (support/maintenance) 2) Need someone that will accept a very low salary Once a few incidents happen, HR and legal issues take over and begin the stranglehold on operational efficiency that infects large organizations.

dkasper 17y ago

A great book that espouses this principle is Fire Someone Today: http://www.firesomeonetoday.com/ http://www.firesomeonetoday.com/ There's a lot of other practical entrepreneurial advice in there too!

geoffc 17y ago

This works incredibly well. At my last company I fired about a third of the engineers I hired after 3 to 6 months and ended up with a great technical team. I never know how good an engineer is going to be during the interview process but after 6 months it is blindingly clear. I am upfront about the winnowing process during the interview, it scares some candidates away but I often get a very positive reaction to this "meritocracy by proof" approach. Another advantage is you can take some flyers on people with nontraditional backgrounds and find the occasionally diamond in the rough.

DavidMcLaughlin 17y ago
> This works incredibly well. At my last company I fired about a third of the engineers I hired after 3 to 6 months Wow. I wonder, have you and this smug author ever considered that you are the problem? Interviewing is a two-way process, it's the candidate's job to back up everything that's on their resume and make sure they present an honest view of their ability but it's also your job to decide if someone is a good fit for your team before making them quit their comfortable job and move to your start-up. By firing a THIRD of all people you convince to join your company, you are both incompetent and irresponsible. Precisely the kind of harmful deadwood people enjoy see getting fired.
- j_baker 17y ago
  If you are convinced that someone is the perfect fit for you based on a few interviews, then you've either discovered a bullshit artist or haven't dug deep enough. Interviewing is a terrible way to make a hiring decision. We just haven't discovered a better way to do it.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Interviewing can definitely give you an idea about a person, bull shit artists exist (in vast numbers), but they're not that hard to ferret out at the interview stage, presuming the interviewer knows his stuff and is not some HR flunky. The trick is that during an interview you can choose to concentrate on the person or you can concentrate on their technical skills. If you manage to concentrate on the person instead then you'll find out soon enough whether they'll be 'good' for your company. The technical stuff is the easy part. I've never had to resort to 'trick questions' or 'test assignemnts' to find out whether or not someone is capable. Discussing their past has been much more fruitful in spotting trouble early on. Interviewing is an art, not a science. There has been a whole lot of fuss about google and other companies getting on the 'metrics' bandwagon. I think that only works because they can datamine tens of thousands of applications and spot interesting trends. If you're in charge of a start-up or a mid-sized company with maybe 10 to 50 employees the number of people you will be hiring will be much lower and the hiring process itself will consume a disproportionate amount of time. Keeping your turnover low (as in: hire the right people right away) has an immediate pay-off both in time spent as well as in keeping the peace within your organization, and not investing months of time in to the wrong people only to fire them.

devinj 17y ago

Huh, whatever CMS he's using didn't enter in his HTML comment as, well, a comment. Up near the top of the article: ""

j_baker 17y ago

This is a refreshing alternative to the "better to turn away a superstar than to hire a dud" approach that seems so common. I've always felt that it was caused by risk aversion anyway.

pw0ncakes 17y ago
What's missed here is that being fired, for a lot of people, has real consequences. I don't think I'd take a job where I thought there was a 1/3 chance I'd be fired in the next 6 months. If you're a startup, you're hiring people who understand the lack of job security. If you're a large company, there's no excuse for firing 1/3 within 6 months: you can move people around until they fit. If you're getting rid of more than 10% in the first 6 months, you're doing something wrong. My thought: we should have a real safety net (including universal healthcare and a basic income that everyone gets, even the gainfully employed millionaires) and then allow companies to hire and fire whomever they want, because no one's life gets ruined by the loss of a job. But this would be a radical departure from the society we currently have.
- hga 17y ago
  Is there any hire at will (which as a term of art includes firing and leaving at will) European country with socialized medicine and the dole? I told that plenty that make it so difficult to fire a person that they have high youth unemployment rates (e.g. France), but the above three with a strong "Protestant work ethic" might work out well. Or the incentive structure, if a lifestyle on the dole is too good for too many people, might be disastrous in the long term. I'm inclined to think the latter will be the outcome but wonder if we have any tests of the proposition.
  - pw0ncakes 17y ago
    Or the incentive structure, if a lifestyle on the dole is too good for too many people, might be disastrous in the long term. Within about 50 years, due to technological advancements, we'll have 20-40% paid employment (not unemployment) and there'll need to be some sort of dole. Personally, I think it would be great to have a society where people don't need to work. The people who only work because they have to wouldn't be working, which means that the people who are working are those with ambition and talent, and only those.

hga 17y ago

Very interesting. And it agrees with the one unique piece of advice I give people who are considering whether to go to work at a new firm, "Try to determine if they can fire people." One quibble: "It takes time to glean an employee's pithy attributes: work ethic, intelligence, attention to detail, enthusiasm, even personal hygiene." You should be able to judge at least initial enthusiasm in your interviewing process or you're not doing a good job of selling your company or it's an impossible sales proposition. Either of which you should do something about at a high priority. But I'll admit that sustained enthusiasm is what really counts and of course only time will tell WRT to that. And I'm not sure what you'd do with people who take some time to warm up to a situation (ADDED: well, make sure they've been enthusiastic about at least one prior job; if they're too young to have any/many and are already cynical you'd probably best pass on them :-). For programmers you should be able to get a reading of intelligence and attention to detail in the interview as long as you do minimal testing (perhaps Fizzbuzz, my preferred 3 tests of reverse a linked list (pointers), recursive factorial and find error in this block of code, etc.). Having them work out loud with you a relevant design problem is also good, although recognize that only 1/5 of programmers "get" abstraction (according to the Antipatterns book and my personal experience); if you need/can afford having programmers who don't get it, you'll want to gauge their ability to follow orders and "do it this way" "just because" the architect says so. (There are potentially lots of slots in an organization including a startup for all sorts of competent people, e.g. look at the 2nd Coders at Work interview Brad Fitzpatrick, the Live Journal Founder. They had an older employee who produced awful code, but they loved him since his forte was quickly figuring out difficult integration problems which no one else liked to do or was good at. He handed them messy solutions filled with duct tape and bailing wire and they mined the interfaces from them and made clean versions that fit with their system.) Anyway, my advice is to pay close attention to what this author says, just don't let it cause you to significantly relax your hiring system since hiring, working with and then firing duds is always debilitating for all concerned.

pw0ncakes 17y ago
What if they reverse a linked list using a language like ML or Haskell where pointers aren't required?

wheaties 17y ago

This was great, however, it also rests on the premise that management and those above them has the knowledge and ability to recognize what constitutes a bad employee. Sometimes, through their own ignorance, what is "bad" really is good. It's so sad that that type of problem permeates the software industry. Firing "bad" people fast should be a good thing but only if you can judge bad from good.

jacquesm 17y ago

As an employer you will find yourself with the quality of employees that you deserve. Treat your employees right and they'll be loyal and hopefully will treat you right in return. Treat them bad or whimsically and it will come back to you just the same. Employer-employee relationships differ from country to country but the above is I think a universal truth. Be a 'bad boss', hire and fire at will and you'll find that your employees will continuously be on the look-out to see if they can do better before you have a bad (pointy) hair day. Treat them well and they just might amaze you in what they can do for you. Managing people always was the part of the job that I dreaded the most, as the ceo of a relatively small company. The biggest reason for that was that it took time away from my 'first love', computer programming. But I hope that I never treated the employees of my company as cold and heartless as the article suggests, I'd be interested to hear his employees side of the story. Different strokes for different folks, it is very well possible that this strategy will work for a certain style of CEO, in a given job-market and location, but I'm fairly sure that it would not have worked for me. I'd rather spend a bit more time on the hiring side of things and get the right people on board than to go for a 'trial-and-error' approach like this and to have to go through the painful (for all parties) process of getting rid of a third of the new hires every six months. I have a particular problem with the sentence: > Your team thinks you suck if you don't have the chutzpah to fire. That speaks to me of a CEO that is at heart a very insecure person. You don't fire people to show you've got balls.

tptacek 17y ago
He wasn't saying that you fire people to show you've got balls. He was saying that teams will think less of you as a manager if you don't fire bad people. And he's right about that.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  He doesn't mention bad people in the bit I'm referring to, he literally says: "Your team thinks you suck if you don't have the chutzpah to fire." And that just makes no sense. Firing bad people is in the other bit above, where it says: "No, firing bad people improves the culture because it sets standards, and proves consequences. One bad apple does ruin the bunch." Hiring bad people is what ruins the culture, firing them improves it back to what it was before you hired them, if you're lucky. Most times will never go back to what it was before.

gonepostal 17y ago

Is it just me or is ignoring the interview process in favour of the firing process as poor as the opposite? The best method is to weight them about equal. Have a rigorous interview process where you try to hire only the best fit. If the new employee is a failure, have the ability to admit you made a mistake a correct it. Best of both worlds. Firing a new hire is not a cheap process and it does affect your reputation/company morale.

jacquesm 17y ago
Absolutely true. I'm really surprised at the attitude of the article, it almost seems as though firing is seen as a replacement for a good interview process, and to shore up a lack of authority by instilling fear or showing 'guts'.
pw0ncakes 17y ago
I think you need both. You need to detect, and rectify, problems as soon as they occur. It's much better to catch potentially badly-fit employees (which doesn't mean they're necessarily bad, but just not right for the position you're trying to fill) in the interview process. However, there are subtle problems (people who can't handle large projects, or who don't document code, or who interview well but are actually unethical) that can't be caught in the interview process at all. This is oddly similar to the compile/run time distinction in bugs. You want to push as many of your bugs to compile time as possible (not-so-subtle plug for static typing) but it's impossible to have catch all of them in compilation; such is the nature of bugs. Similarly, you want to catch as many problems as possible in the interview process, but can't get all of them.

rnugent 17y ago

Just looked up this company on Glassdoor. As I suspected this jerk has created a company culture of suspicion and hate. He himself is not respected by his team as is proved by his abysmal rating. As a potential employee I'd take one look at this review and head for the hills. An example - "“Lord of The Flies Meet Corporate America.” Pros Product works well and is fully supported by a highly skilled team. Some positions offer work from home. Cons Management plays favorites for their friends and plays immature games. Nothing you shouldn't expect from a company that had a fight club. Overall the upper management doesn't seem to care about their employees rather tech support or sales. Constant turn over in the sales department lead by myopic management team. You will love the atmosphere with your coworkers but despise the management for their lack of respect and unethical conduct. Advice to Senior Management Treat your employees with respect. You can not expect your customers and channel to respect you when you constantly cut good people from your team. I would advise the executive team to seriously look at their management who has regular turnover. Sometimes its the process not the person."