11 ms·

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 ne

by geoffc 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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.
    - kls 16y ago
      You hit the nail in the head, in my career I have fired 3 people (managed thousands). In the interview game to many people focus on the how long have you used X technology instead of the person themselves. It is real easy people, interview the person and look for passion, seriously it overcomes all else. As long as the person has no obvious glaring personality flaws and passion, the rest will fall into place. People in tech careers are for the most part self driven and want to do what they do. If you (anyone in general) have had a problem with more than 5% of the people who have worked for you, then you may be the problem. Trust me I have meet far more incompetent tech managers than I ever have tech employees. Who by the way are generally skeptical people who don't follow leaders that they do not respect. Given the grandparents cavalier attitude about firing tech people and the authors I would suspect that they are failing to position themselves as a leader in their technical talents eyes, and loosing their trust with every termination. Seriously firing people does psychological damage to those that remain, it shows a lack of investment in people that resounds in their mind, it should be reserved for those that refuse to work for whatever reason.
      - hga 16y ago
        How do you figure out if purported programmers can "program their way out of a paper bag"? As long as you have a good (enough) method for doing that I agree with everything you say above.
        jacquesm 16y ago
        My way of addressing that part was to simply ask what the most complicated thing was they ever programmed, and then to ask one or two follow up questions about that. I've got enough field experience that just by asking that one question I'd be able to come up with a follow up question that would nail a 'poser' in one go, if the answer was satisfactory I'd let it go at that and assume they're telling the truth, if not then I would ask one or two more follow up questions and by then I'd usually know for sure if someone is fibbing or just nervous (people can be very nervous during interviews, the bigger problem to me always was to not discard 'good' people that are simply nervous and botch answers to questions rather than the fear of hiring the wrong person because they manage to bamboozle me). Another thing I did was to take as much time as I wanted during an interview, I would schedule at most one interview per half day just to make sure that I didn't have to cut an interview short. This made the interview process more relaxed and on the whole gave me enough time to figure out what made someone tick. Most interviews were over very quickly anyway, but every now and then it took a long time to get a feeling for whether or not someone would fit. One of my biggest discoveries was that when hiring someone good that they would refer their friends, and they would be pretty critical about who they'd refer, screening out a lot of potential duds for me without any effort on my part. In the Toronto office we ended up hiring four guys that already knew each other previous to joining the company. This can also work against you, another 'group of friends' applied and I would have been happy to hire just one of them, he stuck with his friends instead. I once hired a guy that just wanted to learn how to program but did not yet have the ability. This was a risky move, because as a startup you don't really have the time to invest a lot of it in to a person that is not yet proven. But it worked out very well, and Jeffrey actually was one of our most reliably productive people, in part because we gave him a chance that probably nobody else would have. Sometimes having a will and a drive trumps technical ability.
- philk 16y ago
  I'm not sure it's possible to make the right choice every time when hiring - and even if he's firing a third of his hires it means that he's getting it right two thirds of the time. Given how lousy interviewing is as a method for discerning quality employees, I'm not sure that's a bad result.
  - hga 16y ago
    While I agree with the essay (will write on that next), firing a full 1/3 of those you've hired is going to be very debilitating for the organization. And not something I think most startups will be able to afford. And if you report or have to answer to anyone, they're not likely to be impressed that you hired that many duds/people who just didn't work out.
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      > firing a fill 1/3 of those you've hired is going to be very debilitating for the organization. Exactly, hiring the right people is good for the employees (they have steady jobs in an environment where not all the faces are new all the time) and for the company because of the high cost associated with new hires. The cost of bringing a new employee up to speed is usually taken as anwywhere from 6 to 12 months of their gross pay, assuming they're engineering positions (and that's what we're talking about). For other work the cost can be lower or higher depending on how much time and effort needs to be invested by the company to get a new hire up to speed on the company procedures, code base (in case of software), work out team issues and any in-house training programs.
    - mmt 16y ago
      And if you report or have to answer to anyone, they're not likely to be impressed that you hired that many duds/people who just didn't work out. I think it's important to note that the author is writing from the viewpoint of a serial entrepreneur, which means the context is small startup environments. Presumably he still might answer to a board, but those may all be co-founders. Regardless, I don't think they would need to be impressed by his management style so much as his end results.
- geoffc 16y ago
  >Wow. I wonder, have you and this smug author ever considered that you are the problem? I'm positive I am part of the problem but I haven't found a better way for me to build a top notch team given my skill set and inclinations. As we grew I hired a good engineering manager who was able to reduce that ratio significantly. To reiterate, in the interview process I explicitly lay out the methodology and all the risks involved as I understand the pain, stress and cost that a failed hiring causes. The end result of all of this was a very talented and efficient team that produced a great product which dominates it's vertical.
- rnugent 16y ago
  Exactly! This concept of "firing" is the purview of assclowns. People that have no management skill yet who lust after director or VP titles after a year in the industry. These people are doomed to building small things. Small companies, small product, small careers. You better wake up and realize the world is made up of people not code.
jacquesm 16y ago
I'd fire you and find someone that is better at judging fit beforehand. A full third is really very high. Consider apprenticing yourself to someone more experienced for a while to figure out what it is that you are missing while hiring, especially if the absolute numbers are high. If you've hired six people in all your time and fired 2 of them then we'll take it as a statistical anomaly. Out of 25 people hired I've had to fire exactly 1, but I rejected almost 95% of all applicants to open positions, not limited to the engineering department. I think one big difference in the way we look at this is that if you hire someone you also have a responsibility to them, evaluating fit is something that is your responsibility, and failure is up to you to correct, through teaching, training and mentoring. It seems you think that you have no responsibility for them other than to fire them when you've decided your 'extended interview' is over. In most countries there is an agreed upon 'trial period', which allows an employer to terminate a contract without any penalties, depending on the country these periods last from 30 days to 6 months. But it is actually pretty rare to have to fire someone within that period, even if there does not have to be 'cause' a high firing rate during the trial period reflects bad on the hiring manager. The reason for that is simple economy, hiring people and firing them within 6 months is a very bad investment for the company, that person cost almost as much in time spent getting them up to speed as a person that is productive for multiple years. If you're hiring someone that is out-of-work and down on their luck then you could argue that something is better than nothing and you gave them a chance, if you entice people to leave a job where they've worked for years and you then end up firing because of a mis-judgment them you've caused a real problem.
- hga 16y ago
  Urk, I had forgotten about the problem of enticing people from good jobs. Many of them will be your best employees, but if you have this sort of "fire 1/3rds" process and are up front about it you'll lose this entire talent pool. And it won't do anything good for you company's reputation. Read Death by Lethal Reputation http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/halethalrep.htm http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/halethalrep.htm; I'll also note that failed startup Thinking Machines (the Connection Machine company) had absolutely the worst hiring practices of any Cambridge, MA area company in the '80s (details upon request).
tristan_juricek 16y ago
A third seems like an awfully high ratio; as someone else has pointed out, there are real (and immediate) repercussions from firing. I've fired someone before, and I'd do it again. But it was a horrible experience; and I would want to avoid that kind of experience, especially for 3-6 months. One thing that gave me a lot of confidence was to set up a peer review system. Once I saw that the group had the same instincts I had, it was a no brainer. (Peer reviews are so much more interesting on many levels, actually. I don't know why this never occurred to any of my bosses.) Other than this, the "one week trial period" proposed in Rework (http://37signals.com/rework/ http://37signals.com/rework/) seems like a good way to avoid a "several month realization of uh-oh". Has anyone ever tried this out?
- jbellis 16y ago
  Marc Andreesson wrote (about hiring suits, not engineers): "if you know what you're doing, the odds of a given executive hire working out will be about 50/50. That is, about 50% of the time you'll screw up and ultimately have to replace the person. (If you don't know what you're doing, your failure rate will be closer to 100%.)" http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-startups-part-8-hiring-ma http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-star... From my own experience, the best team I ever worked on was one where we had a rigorous interview process... and fired 2 of the first 6 engineers, i.e., one third.
elblanco 16y ago
A company I know puts all new hires on 90 day probation. If, within 90 days you can't show you can begin the process of integrating, out you go. Their ratio is about 1:5, though typically they let the people resign since it's far less damaging to their future careers. I say 1:5, which I feel is high, this number despite a rigorous technical interview process. On a different note, another company that somehow started in small-town U.S. needed to expand their engineering staff. They looked in the Bay Area but the salary reqs were far too high so they settled on Portland. Got a team of engineers stood up in a satellite office. And then because of some minor personality conflicts and a lack of management skill failed to use them. This gave that team a bad reputation as "the team that sucks". Now to be fair, they weren't the hottest rock-star coders in the world. But they could take a detailed spec and put out some reasonably solid work -- in other words, the absolutely normal, run of the mill developer. The problem was with the front office, not the engineers, they simply didn't know how to put together technical requirements that a remote site could follow. They conducted all of their engineering task assignments with daily, in-person staff meetings, verbally assigning tasks to engineers and writing down the task name in a development tracker (usually with lots of white board time). A year later, the Portland team, unable to ever attend any of the daily, in-person, task assignments, and the front office unable to put together a decent set of specifications to send to a remote office, had no assignments, and a bad rep. The whole team was ultimately let go.

by geoffc 16y ago

DavidMcLaughlin 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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.
  - kls 16y ago
    You hit the nail in the head, in my career I have fired 3 people (managed thousands). In the interview game to many people focus on the how long have you used X technology instead of the person themselves. It is real easy people, interview the person and look for passion, seriously it overcomes all else. As long as the person has no obvious glaring personality flaws and passion, the rest will fall into place. People in tech careers are for the most part self driven and want to do what they do. If you (anyone in general) have had a problem with more than 5% of the people who have worked for you, then you may be the problem. Trust me I have meet far more incompetent tech managers than I ever have tech employees. Who by the way are generally skeptical people who don't follow leaders that they do not respect. Given the grandparents cavalier attitude about firing tech people and the authors I would suspect that they are failing to position themselves as a leader in their technical talents eyes, and loosing their trust with every termination. Seriously firing people does psychological damage to those that remain, it shows a lack of investment in people that resounds in their mind, it should be reserved for those that refuse to work for whatever reason.
    - hga 16y ago
      How do you figure out if purported programmers can "program their way out of a paper bag"? As long as you have a good (enough) method for doing that I agree with everything you say above.
      - jacquesm 16y ago
        My way of addressing that part was to simply ask what the most complicated thing was they ever programmed, and then to ask one or two follow up questions about that. I've got enough field experience that just by asking that one question I'd be able to come up with a follow up question that would nail a 'poser' in one go, if the answer was satisfactory I'd let it go at that and assume they're telling the truth, if not then I would ask one or two more follow up questions and by then I'd usually know for sure if someone is fibbing or just nervous (people can be very nervous during interviews, the bigger problem to me always was to not discard 'good' people that are simply nervous and botch answers to questions rather than the fear of hiring the wrong person because they manage to bamboozle me). Another thing I did was to take as much time as I wanted during an interview, I would schedule at most one interview per half day just to make sure that I didn't have to cut an interview short. This made the interview process more relaxed and on the whole gave me enough time to figure out what made someone tick. Most interviews were over very quickly anyway, but every now and then it took a long time to get a feeling for whether or not someone would fit. One of my biggest discoveries was that when hiring someone good that they would refer their friends, and they would be pretty critical about who they'd refer, screening out a lot of potential duds for me without any effort on my part. In the Toronto office we ended up hiring four guys that already knew each other previous to joining the company. This can also work against you, another 'group of friends' applied and I would have been happy to hire just one of them, he stuck with his friends instead. I once hired a guy that just wanted to learn how to program but did not yet have the ability. This was a risky move, because as a startup you don't really have the time to invest a lot of it in to a person that is not yet proven. But it worked out very well, and Jeffrey actually was one of our most reliably productive people, in part because we gave him a chance that probably nobody else would have. Sometimes having a will and a drive trumps technical ability.
philk 16y ago
I'm not sure it's possible to make the right choice every time when hiring - and even if he's firing a third of his hires it means that he's getting it right two thirds of the time. Given how lousy interviewing is as a method for discerning quality employees, I'm not sure that's a bad result.
- hga 16y ago
  While I agree with the essay (will write on that next), firing a full 1/3 of those you've hired is going to be very debilitating for the organization. And not something I think most startups will be able to afford. And if you report or have to answer to anyone, they're not likely to be impressed that you hired that many duds/people who just didn't work out.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    > firing a fill 1/3 of those you've hired is going to be very debilitating for the organization. Exactly, hiring the right people is good for the employees (they have steady jobs in an environment where not all the faces are new all the time) and for the company because of the high cost associated with new hires. The cost of bringing a new employee up to speed is usually taken as anwywhere from 6 to 12 months of their gross pay, assuming they're engineering positions (and that's what we're talking about). For other work the cost can be lower or higher depending on how much time and effort needs to be invested by the company to get a new hire up to speed on the company procedures, code base (in case of software), work out team issues and any in-house training programs.
  - mmt 16y ago
    And if you report or have to answer to anyone, they're not likely to be impressed that you hired that many duds/people who just didn't work out. I think it's important to note that the author is writing from the viewpoint of a serial entrepreneur, which means the context is small startup environments. Presumably he still might answer to a board, but those may all be co-founders. Regardless, I don't think they would need to be impressed by his management style so much as his end results.
geoffc 16y ago
>Wow. I wonder, have you and this smug author ever considered that you are the problem? I'm positive I am part of the problem but I haven't found a better way for me to build a top notch team given my skill set and inclinations. As we grew I hired a good engineering manager who was able to reduce that ratio significantly. To reiterate, in the interview process I explicitly lay out the methodology and all the risks involved as I understand the pain, stress and cost that a failed hiring causes. The end result of all of this was a very talented and efficient team that produced a great product which dominates it's vertical.
rnugent 16y ago
Exactly! This concept of "firing" is the purview of assclowns. People that have no management skill yet who lust after director or VP titles after a year in the industry. These people are doomed to building small things. Small companies, small product, small careers. You better wake up and realize the world is made up of people not code.

jacquesm 16y ago

I'd fire you and find someone that is better at judging fit beforehand. A full third is really very high. Consider apprenticing yourself to someone more experienced for a while to figure out what it is that you are missing while hiring, especially if the absolute numbers are high. If you've hired six people in all your time and fired 2 of them then we'll take it as a statistical anomaly. Out of 25 people hired I've had to fire exactly 1, but I rejected almost 95% of all applicants to open positions, not limited to the engineering department. I think one big difference in the way we look at this is that if you hire someone you also have a responsibility to them, evaluating fit is something that is your responsibility, and failure is up to you to correct, through teaching, training and mentoring. It seems you think that you have no responsibility for them other than to fire them when you've decided your 'extended interview' is over. In most countries there is an agreed upon 'trial period', which allows an employer to terminate a contract without any penalties, depending on the country these periods last from 30 days to 6 months. But it is actually pretty rare to have to fire someone within that period, even if there does not have to be 'cause' a high firing rate during the trial period reflects bad on the hiring manager. The reason for that is simple economy, hiring people and firing them within 6 months is a very bad investment for the company, that person cost almost as much in time spent getting them up to speed as a person that is productive for multiple years. If you're hiring someone that is out-of-work and down on their luck then you could argue that something is better than nothing and you gave them a chance, if you entice people to leave a job where they've worked for years and you then end up firing because of a mis-judgment them you've caused a real problem.

hga 16y ago
Urk, I had forgotten about the problem of enticing people from good jobs. Many of them will be your best employees, but if you have this sort of "fire 1/3rds" process and are up front about it you'll lose this entire talent pool. And it won't do anything good for you company's reputation. Read Death by Lethal Reputation http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/halethalrep.htm http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/halethalrep.htm; I'll also note that failed startup Thinking Machines (the Connection Machine company) had absolutely the worst hiring practices of any Cambridge, MA area company in the '80s (details upon request).

tristan_juricek 16y ago

A third seems like an awfully high ratio; as someone else has pointed out, there are real (and immediate) repercussions from firing. I've fired someone before, and I'd do it again. But it was a horrible experience; and I would want to avoid that kind of experience, especially for 3-6 months. One thing that gave me a lot of confidence was to set up a peer review system. Once I saw that the group had the same instincts I had, it was a no brainer. (Peer reviews are so much more interesting on many levels, actually. I don't know why this never occurred to any of my bosses.) Other than this, the "one week trial period" proposed in Rework (http://37signals.com/rework/ http://37signals.com/rework/) seems like a good way to avoid a "several month realization of uh-oh". Has anyone ever tried this out?

jbellis 16y ago
Marc Andreesson wrote (about hiring suits, not engineers): "if you know what you're doing, the odds of a given executive hire working out will be about 50/50. That is, about 50% of the time you'll screw up and ultimately have to replace the person. (If you don't know what you're doing, your failure rate will be closer to 100%.)" http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-startups-part-8-hiring-ma http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-star... From my own experience, the best team I ever worked on was one where we had a rigorous interview process... and fired 2 of the first 6 engineers, i.e., one third.

elblanco 16y ago

A company I know puts all new hires on 90 day probation. If, within 90 days you can't show you can begin the process of integrating, out you go. Their ratio is about 1:5, though typically they let the people resign since it's far less damaging to their future careers. I say 1:5, which I feel is high, this number despite a rigorous technical interview process. On a different note, another company that somehow started in small-town U.S. needed to expand their engineering staff. They looked in the Bay Area but the salary reqs were far too high so they settled on Portland. Got a team of engineers stood up in a satellite office. And then because of some minor personality conflicts and a lack of management skill failed to use them. This gave that team a bad reputation as "the team that sucks". Now to be fair, they weren't the hottest rock-star coders in the world. But they could take a detailed spec and put out some reasonably solid work -- in other words, the absolutely normal, run of the mill developer. The problem was with the front office, not the engineers, they simply didn't know how to put together technical requirements that a remote site could follow. They conducted all of their engineering task assignments with daily, in-person staff meetings, verbally assigning tasks to engineers and writing down the task name in a development tracker (usually with lots of white board time). A year later, the Portland team, unable to ever attend any of the daily, in-person, task assignments, and the front office unable to put together a decent set of specifications to send to a remote office, had no assignments, and a bad rep. The whole team was ultimately let go.