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

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.