3 ms·
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,
by 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 agoMarc 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.