15 ms·

It's Never Too Early to Fire

249 points by jbyers 9y ago

erikpukinskis 9y ago
Weirdly, I think we would all benefit quite a lot from a normalization of fast firing. Part of the reason it's hard to get a job is that companies are afraid to fire you, so they jump through all kinds of strange hoops to try to predict how good an employee you'll be based on, really, no information. This also forces companies to filter out "possibly good" candidates and only hire "probably good" candidates. If it were normal to get fired after a day or a week, you could get hired at 10 different companies over a span of two months and likely find a really great position, where you're a great fit. My next company will have explicit rubrics for what it takes to get fired, and your status will be tracked daily. You'll know at all times exactly how close you are to getting fired with how much severance. It will never be a surprise, unless it's a reaction to an acute event (sexual harassment, etc). We'll hire pretty much everyone who walks through the door with a plausible story for how they add value. Anyone we fire we'll sit down in the exit interview and write a plan for how they can get re-hired in a few weeks or months if they're interested. We'll also try to spin off a separate business with the fired person at the head, instead of just firing, whenever possible.
- sgift 9y ago
  > My next company will have explicit rubrics for what it takes to get fired, and your status will be tracked daily So, you have solved the "how do I track a developers usefulness to the company"-problem? Without that I don't see how that plan could work (and that ignores all the other problems others have already pointed out). Note: The problem exists for other positions too, developers are just an example.
- eganist 9y ago
  > If it were normal to get fired after a day or a week, you could get hired at 10 different companies over a span of two months and likely find a really great position, where you're a great fit. Contract to hire at temp agencies doesn't afford this level of flexibility (at times)? Maybe not 10 companies in two months, but I can think of multiple cases of contractors brought on for one-off jobs lasting two-ish sprints being retained beyond that.
- URSpider94 9y ago
  It's an interesting thought, but there are a lot of practical reasons why you want to keep your hiring process selective. If people take a job with you and then get fired after a few weeks, now they are unemployed. If they choose to sue you for unlawful termination, it's going to be pretty hard to show that you made a good faith effort to help them stay employed if you just hired them. There's also a tremendous amount of overhead in bringing on and terminating employees - training, paperwork, IT setup. And, if you terminate a lot of people, it's going to end up on Glassdoor, and you'll have a hard time hiring the next round of people to fire. That said, I applaud your proposal to have a very high level of transparency with employees about their performance and their future prospects with your company.
- alexbeloi 9y ago
  >If it were normal to get fired after a day or a week, you could get hired at 10 different companies over a span of two months and likely find a really great position, where you're a great fit. That might work well for people that are unemployed, but it'll be hard to attract anyone that has a secure job with such flimsy offers.
  - erikpukinskis 9y ago
    I don't really care about people who are happy with their current job.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      People who are good at their jobs will not care about a company with such Dilteresque ideas either.
    - commenter1207 9y ago
      The difficult thing with hiring is, most of the best people are already employed - and most of their employers are keeping them happy. If you are focusing on unhappy employees or the unemployed, then you are focusing on a comparatively poor pool of prospective hires.
- chasing 9y ago
  I believe this article is talking about senior execs and you might be talking about general employees. And your comments feel noble but a bit unrealistic to me as far as general employees go. First, there's a cost to bringing people into an organization. Letting everyone in and then having some or most of them flame out seems like a huge drain on resources -- including emotional resources. Second, the idea of being tracked daily against some firing metric sounds a bit hellish for employees. It seems like it'd breed a lot of negative reactions ranging from gaming the system all the way to nasty politics and back-stabbing along the lines of what apparently happened because of Microsoft's stack-ranking system. So, again: I respect the ideas. But I'd be concerned about how they'd play out in real life.
- forgotpw1123 9y ago
  >My next company will have explicit rubrics for what it takes to get fired, and your status will be tracked daily >You'll know at all times exactly how close you are to getting fired with how much severance Good luck getting anyone to stick around! People want job security, they don't want to feel like they're walking on eggshells every day. You seem to think the only thing people want out of a job is money. >Anyone we fire we'll sit down in the exit interview and write a plan for how they can get re-hired in a few weeks or months if they're interested. I don't think you know what firing means. It's not a mutual decision and you really don't want that employee working for you at that point. It's a serious legal risk to re-hire fired employees.
  - im3w1l 9y ago
    >It's a serious legal risk to re-hire fired employees. That's interesting to hear. Could you explain in what way?
    - arethuza 9y ago
      Maybe its a US thing - here in the UK I've seen multiple people re-hired and in each case it worked out pretty well.
      - CaveTech 9y ago
        It was likely re-hiring people who left on their own will. Re-hiring someone you fired is quite a bit different, especially if it was for cause.
      - StavrosK 9y ago
        I'm not sure if this is common knowledge outside the US (it wasn't for me): "Fired" and "let go/laid off" don't mean the same thing. Fired means they were laid off for some gross reason, e.g. incompetence, stealing from the company, etc. Laid off means they were just let go because of reasons not very related to their performance. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
        9y ago
- chrismcb 9y ago
  If someone is so bad you need to fire then after a day or a week then the is something wrong with your interview process. Especially considering the first day is mostly about learning what is going on at the company. But if you think a person should be fired after one day on the job, you should be able to discover that after a full day of interviews... By the same token of something came across in the interview that you liked, you should give the person a benefit of a doubt and give them more than one week. Even if you weaken your k interview process because of the easy firing
- asah 9y ago
  or... everyone would spend half their lives running around in job interviews, training/onboarding, exit interviews and so on. Because tech jobs are fundamentally tough and most fits are at least somewhat awkward. The valley has enough volatility - we don't need more.
- ianmcgowan 9y ago
  As others have said, this sounds a lot more like contracting than employment. I consult, and there's always a contract with (relatively) clear deliverables, timelines and costs. If it doesn't work out (it always has for me, so far) then the outcome is no more contracts in the future. I can't imagine wanting to be an employee with the level of risk you're proposing.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >My next company will have explicit rubrics for what it takes to get fired, and your status will be tracked daily. You'll know at all times exactly how close you are to getting fired with how much severance. Is this something out of Dilbert? Sounds like a quantification-obsessed culture -- the very opposite of ensuring qualitative assessment. Will probably just run to the ground as people flee the hell-hole as soon as they can find better pastures.
  - rhapsodic 9y ago
    > Is this something out of Dilbert? Yep, it was a line spoken by Dogbert. /s
- bbcbasic 9y ago
  As we move to the gig economy I think what you are saying will happen. Whether it's good is another thing.
- nvarsj 9y ago
  This sounds like a script out of Silicon Valley, satire included. I really hope you're not serious.
- nvarsj 9y ago
  This sounds like a script out of Silicon Valley, satire included. I really hope you're not serious.
- ramblerman 9y ago
  As a contractor moving into permanent recently this rings true. It was just downright awkward to go for the 4th or 5th interview. Everything was really good, but now the cto needed to meet me as wel etc etc... I'm used to one interview (2 tops) to get started one week later. I've never been let go, but I think there is less taboo about firing contractors.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    I've never been anywhere that didn't hire after two interviews, tops - I've never even applied anywhere like that. One wonders if the company you're talking about has so much trouble making any decision, or only this sort.
- Trundle 9y ago
  I believe people that would thrive in that environment would already be working as contractors or founders or at least in an industry where compensation is strongly tied to recent KPI's like sales or finance. Things might be different if everyone was doing it like you say, but as it is right now there's a lot of work and friction involved with changing jobs. Getting hired is an ordeal during which you're not getting paid. If someone receives an offer from A with which they can be 90% sure that they'll have the position in a year or two if they want it still, or from B where they will most likely have no job again next week, why the hell would they ever choose B? Let alone common scenarios that come with job change such as moving a family, buying a house in a different city, intentionally leaving a specific position elsewhere to gamble on this one, etc. I'm almost certain you'd be signing yourself up to employ the worst the labour pool has to offer, which is going to suck no matter how quickly you fire because you're still going to have to be on boarding them.
- walshemj 9y ago
  how is it "hard" to fire in the USA
  - lr4444lr 9y ago
    In private industry, very easy. Employment is at will. Except for senior people who may have custom contracts and classes of people protected by anti-discrimination law, the employer, not employee, owns the position.
    - johan_larson 9y ago
      True, but in fairness, the US is also a rather litigious society, and improper termination is one of the things people are inclined to sue over. That's why mature companies tend to put some procedural obstacles in place to keep managers from firing people at the drop of a hat. Typically the manager has to show a long series of specific deficiencies in the employee's work and attempts at counselling and remediation before they are allowed to fire someone. Things are sometimes done more quickly at smaller places, but even then it's fairly common for employers to offer termination agreements, typically for a few months salary, to avoid even the possibility of litigation.
  - eeZah7Ux 9y ago
    If anything, it's far too easy.
- arjie 9y ago
  You're going to run full pace into Goodhart's Law. > When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure That's my prediction. But I haven't run a company myself so who can tell.
- whatshisface 9y ago
  >My next company will have explicit rubrics for what it takes to get fired, and your status will be tracked daily. Hi, I'm whatshisface, and unscrupulous team lead from the 1970s, when metering code seemed pretty workable. I can write 100kloc of code a day (my editor is set to convert spaces into line breaks) and commit once per typed character. Also, I'm a great team player who can work with QA to file and fix thousands of trivial tickets every week. If those numbers aren't what you're looking for, I'm also a social butterfly who can ace any peer ranking on charisma alone. When can I start?
- jaclaz 9y ago
  >Anyone we fire we'll sit down in the exit interview and write a plan for how they can get re-hired in a few weeks or months if they're interested. Maybe firing means something different in your company/mindset, but I understand it as as an instantaneous cessation of reciprocal obbligations, or (allowed by the Law of course) one-sided termination of a contract, the one in which you give me money in exchange for my work, i.e. for my time. Maybe it is just me, but I won't be sitting anywhere for no [insert strong word here] "exit interview" nor write down any "plan" the second after you have fired me, or you'll have to pay me really good money to have me sitting down for the time needed to hear your re-hiring plans and write my own ...
- Sorreah 9y ago
  >Anyone we fire we'll sit down in the exit interview and write a plan for how they can get re-hired in a few weeks or months if they're interested. We'll also try to spin off a separate business with the fired person at the head, instead of just firing, whenever possible. "So hey, listen, this isn't working out, so for the next few months you're going to have to worry about feeding and clothing your child unless you find a new job real quick. Please sit down and write a plan with us about how we can rehire you in a few months if you dedicate all your energy on providing free work for us instead of getting a job! Oh, by the way, would you want to start a business instead? We value your work low enough that we'd like to fire you, but if you can pay a few of the people we deem low performers out of your own pocket and provide that work for us for free? Even better."
- Spooky23 9y ago
  Firing people is a failure on both parties part. If you're seriously thinking that firing new hires within a week is a good idea, and you're not talking fast food or day labor, you're a menace. I've had hundreds of employees under my direct or indirect supervision. Other than pre-career fast food type gigs, I've had to fire 2 for cause. Even in the fast food/retail gigs, I think we canned like 5-6, for attendance problems or pilferage... most problem people there came down to needing a frank discussion about showing up on time and could be addressed without termination. People aren't robots. Your supervisors, managers and leaders need to know how to hire and manage people effectively.
- timwaagh 9y ago
  i am sure you have the right intentions but programmers tend to need some time to get up to speed. besides, nobody really wants to work at a shop like that. every employee will think you don't care. meaning you will have to deal with people leaving you for a more dependable company. recruiters won't like you as they are unlikely to get their money and need to find new people all the time. it is possible if you offer employees a lot of money. some financial companies do things like this (fire 5% every year) and manage quite well but i doubt it works in sectors where personnel costs are significant. If you have been fired in a week or so then you know the psychological impact of these practices.
- rhapsodic 9y ago
  >We'll also try to spin off a separate business with the fired person at the head, instead of just firing, whenever possible. That is priceless. A true gem.
- panda88888 9y ago
  Sounds like permanent PIP for all employees, along with an unpaid PIP for when you are let go.
Clubber 9y ago
>Don’t trigger the decay model of trust — why is management tolerating this shit?! I can't reiterate this enough. Once company I worked for fired the COO that had built the operations when he had serious personal issues that bled into the working environment. I knew it was a serious company after that, I could imagine how difficult it was and he created a great operational culture and working environment before his issues. Fast forward a few years after an acquisition. The new owners have so many Bozo's in executive positions the place is toxic.
- phkahler 9y ago
  >> Fast forward a few years after an acquisition. The new owners have so many Bozo's in executive positions the place is toxic. Someone once summarized that as "The fish rots from the head".
wtvanhest 9y ago
Just a note, this isnt about firing junior people fast. That is absolutely scummy. This is about hiring/firing very senior, well paid people with lots of prior experience. If you are hiring and then firing junior people fast, you are the problem.
- hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
  > If you are hiring and then firing junior people fast, you are the problem. I'm going to challenge this point of view. It is absolutely, and obviously, expected that junior people have a ton to learn, and they should be given leeway for that learning process. So yes, if you fire a junior person because you're not willing to put in the mentorship necessary, then I agree, you are the problem. However, junior people really shouldn't have any problem with motivation and drive, and in those cases where I've had to fire people, I've always wished I had done it sooner. More importantly, their peers wished I had fired them sooner, too. A bad or lax attitude can be an absolute killer for team morale if the person in question isn't dealt with quickly and fairly.
  - ewjordan 9y ago
    You're pointing out an important difference: firing because of experience/performance vs firing because of behavior. Being a bit naive, making mistakes, and needing ramp-up time is to be expected, especially from a junior hire. You absolutely need to give time to correct that sort of thing, and firing fast is not a good move. Some of the best devs I've worked with needed a few months to ramp upbefore they hit full stride. On the other hand if someone is dicking around instead of working, being insubordinate, refusing to try to improve, upsetting coworkers, etc., then you've got behavioral problems on your hands. And those are absolutely good reasons to fire if they persist beyond an initial stern warning.
    - tajen 9y ago
      I just want you to know that I'm a beginner in management (having hired two juniors for my startup), and I'll use this advice (The junior is not productive, but him being reasonably motivated is the reason why I'll keep him).
pascalxus 9y ago
It takes time to build trust, at least several months, maybe even years. If you fire everyone before you even get a chance to build up trust with them, you'll never get a great team.
- everdev 9y ago
  I think it comes down to supply and demand too. If you have 10 qualified applicants, I'd be more apt to fire quick and reach back out to the pool to find a better fit. If it takes 3 months to find a qualified applicant then I'd be more likely to be patient in building trust and working through challenging times. That said, I've fired people after a day on the job. If the hiring process failed, no sense in wasting my time or theirs on trying to create a fit that doesn't exist. Better to move on and fix the hiring process. But don't fire quick and keep your same hiring process, that's just repeating mistakes, rather than being agile.
  - throw_away_777 9y ago
    This is why signing bonuses are so nice, firing someone on day 1 is just awful. If I was an employee at a company who did this to someone I would start looking for another job.
- traskjd 9y ago
  If it takes you years to build trust, maybe you're just not very good at your job. Why should the business take the risk - for years - that you might be trustworthy?
- woof 9y ago
  Read the first two paragraphs again, please.
kartan 9y ago
I like the article, and it has some really good ideas. And it is not about making firing people easier or cheaper. It is about on how to decide when to fire someone. About firing fast and easy, it is a bad idea. I work in Sweden. I don't think I have seen ever anyone fired. What I have seen is some of the best hiring processes. The process looks at the candidate values, and skills. And there is a discussion about what we expect from her, and what she expects from the job. I worked previously in Spain, I saw a lot of people fired for no good reason. And they were also hired without too much attention. Shorts interviews, no real testing, are part of a process that ends consuming a lot of effort from everyone after hiring someone that is not the correct person. Other times that people is good, and leaves, because was not the job for them. Both seem related. Cheap and easy firing produces careless recruiting. And that is more expensive that people realizes.
- lokedhs 9y ago
  I have worked in Sweden, and I would like to offer a counter point. I don't think we disagree that the reason the hiring process is so involved in Sweden is because it's so hard to fire someone. This results in a situation where the company does everything they can to minimise the risk of hiring the wrong person. The downside of this is that companies will not take any chances when it comes to hiring people. I believe this is the reason why I have seem some really bad diversity (both cultural and gender) in the Swedish tech industry, compared to other countries where I have worked. If it's easier to fire someone, it's also easier to take a chance on someone that might night be the "perfect candidate" at first glance, but perhaps he or she will shine if given the opportunity.
  - nvarsj 9y ago
    I work in the UK and it's similar. Except we have a lot of diversity due to a vibrant contractor (at-will) market. Which the Tories are trying desperately to destroy, for some reason. Permanent employees are basically impossible to fire. It's a mixed bag I think. On the one hand, there is a large social benefit to having such gov enforced job security. On the other hand, it drives down wages, and hurts companies that get stuck with a really bad employee. At least as workers we can choose to earn more money and take the riskier route via contracting.
grogenaut 9y ago
"No one was ever fired too soon" Steve Jobs may have been but then again maybe he did need time to cook in Next before coming back.
johan_larson 9y ago
Jeepers. That text needs to be a lot darker or a lot thicker.
pbreit 9y ago
This post left a bad taste in my mouth. Firing can be hard on all parties involved. Your dumb startup is not that important. If you can't figure out how to utilize an employee, that's on you.
- crispyambulance 9y ago
  Its just an advice article for C-suite wanna-be's. They love, love, LOVE stories about leaders who make "snap" decisions and win. The guy even quoted Jack Welch. You're right that firing is hard for everyone. It creates an environment of chaos and uncertainty, which if it is not properly managed, may precipitate scores of top employees to shift to job-search-mode. FWIW, however, I do think a lot more high-level execs (which is what the article is _really_ about rather than juniors) need to on the chopping block earlier and more often. At the very least it may help to promote more empathy about hiring people that have been laid-off as these people climb their way back into leadership positions.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
afpx 9y ago
Actually, pretty good advice in the opposite direction, too. If I had known at 18 that I could have easily and successfully walked away from teams, bosses, companies, partners, and investors who gave 'bad vibes', I would easily have (at least!) an extra couple million in the bank. I wasted countless opportunities waiting for things to get better, when I probably intuitively knew that they wouldn't. Partly, it was because I didn't want to be considered inconsiderate or rude. But, also, it was because I latched on to other things: the mission, the market, the tech, the product, the teams, etc.
- arjie 9y ago
  If you don't mind sharing, how did you lose the couple million to these people?
  - ckaygusu 9y ago
    I reckon it is meant in a "opportunity cost" kind of way.
    - arjie 9y ago
      Oh, I understand. I'm just wondering how choices were made which left many millions on the table. I didn't face any choices like that when I was younger so I'm curious.
      - daveguy 9y ago
        No offense, but you don't understand. Opportunity cost means specifically you aren't leaving money on the table. It means you are grabbing the pennies when you could be pursuing a more lucrative options. When you are 20 those options don't mean a million dollar deal, they mean not taking the better job that pays about the same but lets you earn 20k more in 2-3 years because you are doing something you love and thriving in it with fewer restarts. That over 20-40 years adds up to "millions in the bank", which is what the original poster said, not millions on the table. A few times not seeing bad management in a startup where you took options rather than a decent wage would do it too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
startupempl0ye 9y ago
It's never too early to remember that in a startup the decision to get fired depends mostly on the emotional state of a founder. That there is no process in place. It's random. If you do get fired, you have a good chance of ruining your carrier, not being able to get a good reference from your last place of work, wasting opportunities.
mbfg 9y ago
"You can never fire someone too soon" is a ridiculous statement as it is non-falsifiable.
- woof 9y ago
  "You can never comment to early", on the other hand... He clarifies the provocative title in the section titled "How long should you give people a chance?"
strin 9y ago
Given a shortage of supply for a job, firing early might not be a good idea. It takes months or even years to find an appropriate good fit for a job. Sometimes it's easier to just give the person another chance, than to fire him and have no one to do the work.
- traskjd 9y ago
  This is a similar logic to folks that "settle" with marriage. It's not a long term win, and if you're not building for the long term, why do it at all?
  - dullgiulio 9y ago
    On the countrary, there is a lot of evidence that people who "settle down" have lower levels of stress and overall live a better life. It might not be causation but correlation, but nonetheless, you are wrong. Marriage is definitely a long-term win. For the short term, there is Tinder.
    - throwanem 9y ago
      This might be an issue of idiom - "settle down" and "settle" do not mean the same thing. The latter refers to disregarding reasonable qualms and known issues with a potential life partner and going ahead anyway, more or less on the theory of "oh well, where am I going to do better?" Doing so can work out in the long run, I suppose. But it very often doesn't.
    - gm-conspiracy 9y ago
      Not disagreeing, but link, please?
  - UK-AL 9y ago
    People in long term successful marriages are generally a lot happier and less stressed.
horsecaptin 9y ago
Why would anyone work in a person or company that is known to fire quickly?
- usmeteora 9y ago
  the big thing here is the struggle between companies like amazon google apple who have tons of applicants, and a startup who has less applicants, and less experience from hiring false positives and identifying false negatives. They acknowledge that they turn down many good people, but also most if not all of the people not qualified. They arent worried about false negatives, they are worried about false positives. So they are willing to filter out a good portion of qualified people they aren't quite sure about who might have some overlapping results as people who are not qualified, knowing they are filtering out most if not all unqualified people. Startups do not have the same level of people experiences to draw conclusions based on interviewing thousands and thousands of applicants and tracking the success of accepted applicants based on a large portfolio of information. Probably the best thing you can do in a situation like this is GET someone from a company like that who has had years of experience interviewing candidates, and they will be able to bring along that experience of identifying potential false positives from the get go. That is honestly the biggest asset to these companies, their ability to hire and maintain high quality people. in addition to the countless benefits and opportunities for varied career trajectories in multiple and evolving technologies for smart people once getting into these places, is the fact that they highly value the social network of these work places, and they cannot be duplicated in many places elsewhere, further incentivizing them to stay and internally recommending other high quality friends from elsewhere to interview.
  - nradov 9y ago
    There is no real evidence that companies like Amazon / Google / Apple are actually better than other organizations at filtering out false positives, or that they have struck the optimal balance between false positives and false negatives. These are simply unsupported subjective assertions.
    - 9y ago
tkyjonathan 9y ago
I like this sort of mentality in companies that think they are some sort of hot start ups that can fire anyone they feel like. I dunno how it is with management types, but this sort of approach is extremely amusing to me in niche skill areas. For example, this happened to me a few times, but as I am 1 in 25 people in the country that can do what I do, it takes that company 12-18 month to find a replacement, if at all.
scandox 9y ago
> Of course I’m being a bit provocative to open this post with, “I have never fired anyone too early.” I have almost always given people a chance to correct course, and suggest you do too. For anyone that didn't reach the end.
_pmf_ 9y ago
It's necessary to fire early, but investors should keep pushing money into unicorns without any business model because ...
- wyclif 9y ago
  Right. It's like putting a band-aid on cancer. Or perhaps tearing off the band-aid.
kristiandupont 9y ago
>I have never fired anyone too early. This may well be true but how do you know? The only way I can think of is if the employee went on to become such a rock star at some other place that you actually hear about it. But that's not the only situation where they might have been valuable to you after a while.
- oddlyaromatic 9y ago
  Everyone has potential to turn it around and get awesome at their job. This leads to the hand wringing and delays he is taking about. But if you are hiring senior leadership with experience ... You probably expect they have figured out a lot of their work practices already. Other commenters are pointing out that juniors typically take time to flourish and that's normal. Lars is focused on the fact that keeping a senior employee who gives you a bad feeling that things are not working out is actively harmful to your company. Whether they turn into a rockstar later in a different context that big of a deal if you replace them with somebody who is at lest not causing good employees to leave.
- raoulr 9y ago
  You'll probably never know if you fired too soon. Confirmation bias Will confirm the decision. You'll always know if it was too late.
  - pillowkusis 9y ago
    isn't it always "too late"? The fired employee would have to have a long pattern of problems. With the benefit of hindsight you'd know that you should have fired them after the first 5 or 10 problems.
logicallee 9y ago
>To be provocative: No one ever fired someone too soon. how about when the board fired Steve Jobs? (Specifically, stripped him from all responsibilities, removed him from the head of the mac division, gave him an office with nothing to do). No? After all, he didn't code, was kind of a weirdo, and the board had every reason to have some doubts. Was that a "wrong" decision?
- gm-conspiracy 9y ago
  The Apple Newton and Pepsi tell us that answer.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  It's really hard to imagine an early-90s Apple that Jobs wouldn't have left anyway - probably with high drama - if he hadn't been fired. But the Apple story makes the point - most CEOs are mediocre. Sculley and Amelio (and Spindler, whom almost everyone has forgotten) were all competent in their previous jobs, and usually also in subsequent jobs. But you don't want to settle for competence in the C-suite. You want outstanding - a genuine 10X CEO. There aren't many of those around. But there are plenty of 0.1X pretenders, and you'd better hope you don't end up hiring one, because no one will do more damage to a company.
red_hairing 9y ago
we need more worker protections and right and benefits....it should be harder to fire workers...and the work week should be no longer than 35 hours.
gommm 9y ago
In the first company I confounded, we recruited a friend of my cofounder to a senior job. He looked like the right guy for the job but he actually really wasn't. He was completely underperforming and junior employees looked at him and lost respect for both and my cofounder for keeping him on. Because he was a friend who had left his job to work for us, we didn't fire him and he continued undermining the company with his poor performance for a year. I think this was the worst mistake I did. In the end, he left the company and screwed us over on some account. So, I've learned from this: - do not hire friends as senior executive - if you insist on hiring friend, have a clear backup plan if things don't work out so that you can both end the relationship. Be prepared to lose your friendship in doing that. - never let an underperforming senior employee fester in your company. It's like rot, it will drag down the entire company by devaluating the work your other employees do
- Retric 9y ago
  Alternatively, don't recruit friends that already have jobs or need to relocate. If someones out of work to start then letting them go is arguably less traumatic.
- nashashmi 9y ago
  Also, if you hire a friend, keep him at a distance, say one or two tiers. This way, feedback will still be there, and you won't be making the decision of firing all by yourself. And of course, work won't come in the way of friendship.
dbg31415 9y ago
This is probably the worst advice for a young founder. Had a client who was a 24-year-old startup founder, one of his investors got me involved to help him hire some folks and help define project process. We hired a great developer, who freaked when he saw how sloppy the code was. Rightfully said, "We can't maintain this..." Anyway, the founder had written a lot of it, so it wasn't a shock to him that the code was bad and needed to be re-done. Hew knew it was all quick and dirty and hacked together. By the time I got inovlved, we had issues doing deployments (deployments would take half a day and a lot of stress around testing once code went live), we had issues around infrastructure being unstable (lost 2 days worth of customer data once after a bug caused the DB to crash), and of course, nothing would have scaled. No code review, not much of a QA process, just a million things that needed to be done better -- you can cut some corners as a startup, you can't cut every corner. There were a handful of paying clients, but most had been sold a promise of feature A-through-Z, and really the tools did like A-through-C... the moment one of them complained the young CEO lost it because he hated criticism, especially from customers, and he didn't want people to think he had lied to them... even though he had pretty clearly over-promised. The dev I brought on wanted to re-do a lot of things, write unit tests, set up a CI / CD process, proper backups, basically do all the stuff that should have been done day one to ensure we could work fast and have confidence the wheels wouldn't come off. The founder had been on board with trying to reduce outages and crashes, but about a week into it, when one of the customers complained about something, the young CEO freaked when he couldn't simultaneously have new features and a re-done core codebase on the schedule he wanted. So even though a week before he had said that he liked the idea of reducing a lot of our technical debt, and giving the new dev a chance to work on clean good code... since he was young (not sure if that's the best excuse) he flip-flopped. And three weeks into the overhaul (that was supposed to take 5 weeks), he was furious. "This dev is costing us time and just doesn't get our culture and isn't aligned with our goals and just isn't working out!" I got called in, looked over what the dev had done. Nothing short of a miracle he had accomplished so much so fast. I said as much. Later that day I get an email from the founder, "I had to let [the dev] go, he just wasn't working out." I left the project shortly after, and the founder burned through another $300k in seed money (his parents') before shutting down. Anyway this whole "trust your gut" thing... and "don't ask around before firing" -- that's only good advice if you've got some experience and a cool temperament. If you're a new CEO, ask around. Figure out what's going on, and if you tell people to zig, and they zig, don't get mad at them for not zagging -- they aren't mind-readers. Flipping on decisions like that are extremely demotivating to everyone who works for you, and flipping on a hire (firing someone) is the potentially most demotivating thing you can do if it's not done correctly. You hire smart people, if you can't trust their expertise, don't hire them. Since you trust their expertise, don't micromanage them, or expect the impossible from them.
nilved 9y ago
From the last couple paragraphs this reads like a16z is still mad over getting fired years ago. They should know that being fired is a traumatic experience, and not use this as justification for their future carelessness. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Ajedi32 9y ago
That's crazy; Extra Credits posted a video about this exact same topic a couple days ago, (with an extra focus on indie game development): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnhlDwCRwkU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnhlDwCRwkU
tiatia 9y ago
I have a different take. Never forget that you can get fired but also never forget you can fire! You can fire jobs. You can fire friends. You can fire customers. Makes life so much easier!
phkahler 9y ago
>> After a while of trying and challenging them directly to step up you’ve realized that what sounded like their “experience” in the interview and even confirmed in reference checks, turns out to be things they observed but they didn’t really drive (or truly understood from within) and therefore can’t replicate. That is a sign of a poor hiring process. It's a common mistake but it's the number one thing I try to figure out when hiring. I'll have to write a blog about it some time.
pmarreck 9y ago
Is intuition infallible? I want to hear stories about people who followed their intuition on staying or going (or keeping or firing) and it ended up being the wrong decision long-term. Falsifiability is IMHO an important element of arguing for "intuition" And yet, I look back and I can't think of a single example in my own life where "listening to my gut" seemed to lead me astray. But I also don't trust my own brain to remember such instances...
- pillowkusis 9y ago
  if you fired someone too early, how would you ever know? They're at a different company. You'd have to somehow hear from a separate, trusted source that they were actually doing way better. Incredibly rare. the whole thesis of this article ("you can never fire someone too soon") reeks of selection bias
  - pmarreck 9y ago
    Exactly!
devy 9y ago
Although there are lots of these career "advices" that are perceived as "universal truth", I hardly believe they are the only truth. Life is more complicated than that sometimes, so are your workplace. Use your best judgement(s), rather than follow the dogma. Long enough you will have your own believes, perhaps from a different angle to the same dilima.
paulsutter 9y ago
Even more important is to take the blame yourself and fix your hiring process. In the example below, detect the exaggeration during the interview not after they start. > you’ve realized that what sounded like their “experience” in the interview and even confirmed in reference checks, turns out to be things they observed but they didn’t really drive (or truly understood from within) and therefore can’t replicate
ElijahLynn 9y ago
From the book 'Peak: Secrets of the new science of expertise', Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool state that to be an expert you must be successful at something more than once. Which means that just because someone was successful doesn't mean they were directly responsible for it. Like being on a team where you may have even been the manager but the team players were what made it truly successful. If you were successful on two different teams then the odds of you being a key player in that success are much higher.
vonnik 9y ago
The way the job market works is the larger problem. It usually forces both employers and employees to make a big commitment based on deeply imperfect information. It's like asking someone to marry after the second date, usually when they're already married and can't survive long without being married.

249 points by jbyers 9y ago

Weirdly, I think we would all benefit quite a lot from a normalization of fast firing. Part of the reason it's hard to get a job is that companies are afraid to fire you, so they jump through all kinds of strange hoops to try to predict how good an employee you'll be based on, really, no information. This also forces companies to filter out "possibly good" candidates and only hire "probably good" candidates. If it were normal to get fired after a day or a week, you could get hired at 10 different companies over a span of two months and likely find a really great position, where you're a great fit. My next company will have explicit rubrics for what it takes to get fired, and your status will be tracked daily. You'll know at all times exactly how close you are to getting fired with how much severance. It will never be a surprise, unless it's a reaction to an acute event (sexual harassment, etc). We'll hire pretty much everyone who walks through the door with a plausible story for how they add value. Anyone we fire we'll sit down in the exit interview and write a plan for how they can get re-hired in a few weeks or months if they're interested. We'll also try to spin off a separate business with the fired person at the head, instead of just firing, whenever possible.

sgift 9y ago
> My next company will have explicit rubrics for what it takes to get fired, and your status will be tracked daily So, you have solved the "how do I track a developers usefulness to the company"-problem? Without that I don't see how that plan could work (and that ignores all the other problems others have already pointed out). Note: The problem exists for other positions too, developers are just an example.
eganist 9y ago
> If it were normal to get fired after a day or a week, you could get hired at 10 different companies over a span of two months and likely find a really great position, where you're a great fit. Contract to hire at temp agencies doesn't afford this level of flexibility (at times)? Maybe not 10 companies in two months, but I can think of multiple cases of contractors brought on for one-off jobs lasting two-ish sprints being retained beyond that.
URSpider94 9y ago
It's an interesting thought, but there are a lot of practical reasons why you want to keep your hiring process selective. If people take a job with you and then get fired after a few weeks, now they are unemployed. If they choose to sue you for unlawful termination, it's going to be pretty hard to show that you made a good faith effort to help them stay employed if you just hired them. There's also a tremendous amount of overhead in bringing on and terminating employees - training, paperwork, IT setup. And, if you terminate a lot of people, it's going to end up on Glassdoor, and you'll have a hard time hiring the next round of people to fire. That said, I applaud your proposal to have a very high level of transparency with employees about their performance and their future prospects with your company.
alexbeloi 9y ago
>If it were normal to get fired after a day or a week, you could get hired at 10 different companies over a span of two months and likely find a really great position, where you're a great fit. That might work well for people that are unemployed, but it'll be hard to attract anyone that has a secure job with such flimsy offers.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  I don't really care about people who are happy with their current job.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    People who are good at their jobs will not care about a company with such Dilteresque ideas either.
  - commenter1207 9y ago
    The difficult thing with hiring is, most of the best people are already employed - and most of their employers are keeping them happy. If you are focusing on unhappy employees or the unemployed, then you are focusing on a comparatively poor pool of prospective hires.
chasing 9y ago
I believe this article is talking about senior execs and you might be talking about general employees. And your comments feel noble but a bit unrealistic to me as far as general employees go. First, there's a cost to bringing people into an organization. Letting everyone in and then having some or most of them flame out seems like a huge drain on resources -- including emotional resources. Second, the idea of being tracked daily against some firing metric sounds a bit hellish for employees. It seems like it'd breed a lot of negative reactions ranging from gaming the system all the way to nasty politics and back-stabbing along the lines of what apparently happened because of Microsoft's stack-ranking system. So, again: I respect the ideas. But I'd be concerned about how they'd play out in real life.
forgotpw1123 9y ago
>My next company will have explicit rubrics for what it takes to get fired, and your status will be tracked daily >You'll know at all times exactly how close you are to getting fired with how much severance Good luck getting anyone to stick around! People want job security, they don't want to feel like they're walking on eggshells every day. You seem to think the only thing people want out of a job is money. >Anyone we fire we'll sit down in the exit interview and write a plan for how they can get re-hired in a few weeks or months if they're interested. I don't think you know what firing means. It's not a mutual decision and you really don't want that employee working for you at that point. It's a serious legal risk to re-hire fired employees.
- im3w1l 9y ago
  >It's a serious legal risk to re-hire fired employees. That's interesting to hear. Could you explain in what way?
  - arethuza 9y ago
    Maybe its a US thing - here in the UK I've seen multiple people re-hired and in each case it worked out pretty well.
    - CaveTech 9y ago
      It was likely re-hiring people who left on their own will. Re-hiring someone you fired is quite a bit different, especially if it was for cause.
    - StavrosK 9y ago
      I'm not sure if this is common knowledge outside the US (it wasn't for me): "Fired" and "let go/laid off" don't mean the same thing. Fired means they were laid off for some gross reason, e.g. incompetence, stealing from the company, etc. Laid off means they were just let go because of reasons not very related to their performance. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
      - 9y ago
chrismcb 9y ago
If someone is so bad you need to fire then after a day or a week then the is something wrong with your interview process. Especially considering the first day is mostly about learning what is going on at the company. But if you think a person should be fired after one day on the job, you should be able to discover that after a full day of interviews... By the same token of something came across in the interview that you liked, you should give the person a benefit of a doubt and give them more than one week. Even if you weaken your k interview process because of the easy firing
asah 9y ago
or... everyone would spend half their lives running around in job interviews, training/onboarding, exit interviews and so on. Because tech jobs are fundamentally tough and most fits are at least somewhat awkward. The valley has enough volatility - we don't need more.
ianmcgowan 9y ago
As others have said, this sounds a lot more like contracting than employment. I consult, and there's always a contract with (relatively) clear deliverables, timelines and costs. If it doesn't work out (it always has for me, so far) then the outcome is no more contracts in the future. I can't imagine wanting to be an employee with the level of risk you're proposing.
coldtea 9y ago
>My next company will have explicit rubrics for what it takes to get fired, and your status will be tracked daily. You'll know at all times exactly how close you are to getting fired with how much severance. Is this something out of Dilbert? Sounds like a quantification-obsessed culture -- the very opposite of ensuring qualitative assessment. Will probably just run to the ground as people flee the hell-hole as soon as they can find better pastures.
- rhapsodic 9y ago
  > Is this something out of Dilbert? Yep, it was a line spoken by Dogbert. /s
bbcbasic 9y ago
As we move to the gig economy I think what you are saying will happen. Whether it's good is another thing.
nvarsj 9y ago
This sounds like a script out of Silicon Valley, satire included. I really hope you're not serious.
nvarsj 9y ago
This sounds like a script out of Silicon Valley, satire included. I really hope you're not serious.
ramblerman 9y ago
As a contractor moving into permanent recently this rings true. It was just downright awkward to go for the 4th or 5th interview. Everything was really good, but now the cto needed to meet me as wel etc etc... I'm used to one interview (2 tops) to get started one week later. I've never been let go, but I think there is less taboo about firing contractors.
- throwanem 9y ago
  I've never been anywhere that didn't hire after two interviews, tops - I've never even applied anywhere like that. One wonders if the company you're talking about has so much trouble making any decision, or only this sort.
Trundle 9y ago
I believe people that would thrive in that environment would already be working as contractors or founders or at least in an industry where compensation is strongly tied to recent KPI's like sales or finance. Things might be different if everyone was doing it like you say, but as it is right now there's a lot of work and friction involved with changing jobs. Getting hired is an ordeal during which you're not getting paid. If someone receives an offer from A with which they can be 90% sure that they'll have the position in a year or two if they want it still, or from B where they will most likely have no job again next week, why the hell would they ever choose B? Let alone common scenarios that come with job change such as moving a family, buying a house in a different city, intentionally leaving a specific position elsewhere to gamble on this one, etc. I'm almost certain you'd be signing yourself up to employ the worst the labour pool has to offer, which is going to suck no matter how quickly you fire because you're still going to have to be on boarding them.
walshemj 9y ago
how is it "hard" to fire in the USA
- lr4444lr 9y ago
  In private industry, very easy. Employment is at will. Except for senior people who may have custom contracts and classes of people protected by anti-discrimination law, the employer, not employee, owns the position.
  - johan_larson 9y ago
    True, but in fairness, the US is also a rather litigious society, and improper termination is one of the things people are inclined to sue over. That's why mature companies tend to put some procedural obstacles in place to keep managers from firing people at the drop of a hat. Typically the manager has to show a long series of specific deficiencies in the employee's work and attempts at counselling and remediation before they are allowed to fire someone. Things are sometimes done more quickly at smaller places, but even then it's fairly common for employers to offer termination agreements, typically for a few months salary, to avoid even the possibility of litigation.
- eeZah7Ux 9y ago
  If anything, it's far too easy.
arjie 9y ago
You're going to run full pace into Goodhart's Law. > When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure That's my prediction. But I haven't run a company myself so who can tell.
whatshisface 9y ago
>My next company will have explicit rubrics for what it takes to get fired, and your status will be tracked daily. Hi, I'm whatshisface, and unscrupulous team lead from the 1970s, when metering code seemed pretty workable. I can write 100kloc of code a day (my editor is set to convert spaces into line breaks) and commit once per typed character. Also, I'm a great team player who can work with QA to file and fix thousands of trivial tickets every week. If those numbers aren't what you're looking for, I'm also a social butterfly who can ace any peer ranking on charisma alone. When can I start?
jaclaz 9y ago
>Anyone we fire we'll sit down in the exit interview and write a plan for how they can get re-hired in a few weeks or months if they're interested. Maybe firing means something different in your company/mindset, but I understand it as as an instantaneous cessation of reciprocal obbligations, or (allowed by the Law of course) one-sided termination of a contract, the one in which you give me money in exchange for my work, i.e. for my time. Maybe it is just me, but I won't be sitting anywhere for no [insert strong word here] "exit interview" nor write down any "plan" the second after you have fired me, or you'll have to pay me really good money to have me sitting down for the time needed to hear your re-hiring plans and write my own ...
Sorreah 9y ago
>Anyone we fire we'll sit down in the exit interview and write a plan for how they can get re-hired in a few weeks or months if they're interested. We'll also try to spin off a separate business with the fired person at the head, instead of just firing, whenever possible. "So hey, listen, this isn't working out, so for the next few months you're going to have to worry about feeding and clothing your child unless you find a new job real quick. Please sit down and write a plan with us about how we can rehire you in a few months if you dedicate all your energy on providing free work for us instead of getting a job! Oh, by the way, would you want to start a business instead? We value your work low enough that we'd like to fire you, but if you can pay a few of the people we deem low performers out of your own pocket and provide that work for us for free? Even better."
Spooky23 9y ago
Firing people is a failure on both parties part. If you're seriously thinking that firing new hires within a week is a good idea, and you're not talking fast food or day labor, you're a menace. I've had hundreds of employees under my direct or indirect supervision. Other than pre-career fast food type gigs, I've had to fire 2 for cause. Even in the fast food/retail gigs, I think we canned like 5-6, for attendance problems or pilferage... most problem people there came down to needing a frank discussion about showing up on time and could be addressed without termination. People aren't robots. Your supervisors, managers and leaders need to know how to hire and manage people effectively.
timwaagh 9y ago
i am sure you have the right intentions but programmers tend to need some time to get up to speed. besides, nobody really wants to work at a shop like that. every employee will think you don't care. meaning you will have to deal with people leaving you for a more dependable company. recruiters won't like you as they are unlikely to get their money and need to find new people all the time. it is possible if you offer employees a lot of money. some financial companies do things like this (fire 5% every year) and manage quite well but i doubt it works in sectors where personnel costs are significant. If you have been fired in a week or so then you know the psychological impact of these practices.
rhapsodic 9y ago
>We'll also try to spin off a separate business with the fired person at the head, instead of just firing, whenever possible. That is priceless. A true gem.
panda88888 9y ago
Sounds like permanent PIP for all employees, along with an unpaid PIP for when you are let go.

Clubber 9y ago

>Don’t trigger the decay model of trust — why is management tolerating this shit?! I can't reiterate this enough. Once company I worked for fired the COO that had built the operations when he had serious personal issues that bled into the working environment. I knew it was a serious company after that, I could imagine how difficult it was and he created a great operational culture and working environment before his issues. Fast forward a few years after an acquisition. The new owners have so many Bozo's in executive positions the place is toxic.

phkahler 9y ago
>> Fast forward a few years after an acquisition. The new owners have so many Bozo's in executive positions the place is toxic. Someone once summarized that as "The fish rots from the head".

wtvanhest 9y ago

Just a note, this isnt about firing junior people fast. That is absolutely scummy. This is about hiring/firing very senior, well paid people with lots of prior experience. If you are hiring and then firing junior people fast, you are the problem.

hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
> If you are hiring and then firing junior people fast, you are the problem. I'm going to challenge this point of view. It is absolutely, and obviously, expected that junior people have a ton to learn, and they should be given leeway for that learning process. So yes, if you fire a junior person because you're not willing to put in the mentorship necessary, then I agree, you are the problem. However, junior people really shouldn't have any problem with motivation and drive, and in those cases where I've had to fire people, I've always wished I had done it sooner. More importantly, their peers wished I had fired them sooner, too. A bad or lax attitude can be an absolute killer for team morale if the person in question isn't dealt with quickly and fairly.
- ewjordan 9y ago
  You're pointing out an important difference: firing because of experience/performance vs firing because of behavior. Being a bit naive, making mistakes, and needing ramp-up time is to be expected, especially from a junior hire. You absolutely need to give time to correct that sort of thing, and firing fast is not a good move. Some of the best devs I've worked with needed a few months to ramp upbefore they hit full stride. On the other hand if someone is dicking around instead of working, being insubordinate, refusing to try to improve, upsetting coworkers, etc., then you've got behavioral problems on your hands. And those are absolutely good reasons to fire if they persist beyond an initial stern warning.
  - tajen 9y ago
    I just want you to know that I'm a beginner in management (having hired two juniors for my startup), and I'll use this advice (The junior is not productive, but him being reasonably motivated is the reason why I'll keep him).

pascalxus 9y ago

It takes time to build trust, at least several months, maybe even years. If you fire everyone before you even get a chance to build up trust with them, you'll never get a great team.

everdev 9y ago
I think it comes down to supply and demand too. If you have 10 qualified applicants, I'd be more apt to fire quick and reach back out to the pool to find a better fit. If it takes 3 months to find a qualified applicant then I'd be more likely to be patient in building trust and working through challenging times. That said, I've fired people after a day on the job. If the hiring process failed, no sense in wasting my time or theirs on trying to create a fit that doesn't exist. Better to move on and fix the hiring process. But don't fire quick and keep your same hiring process, that's just repeating mistakes, rather than being agile.
- throw_away_777 9y ago
  This is why signing bonuses are so nice, firing someone on day 1 is just awful. If I was an employee at a company who did this to someone I would start looking for another job.
traskjd 9y ago
If it takes you years to build trust, maybe you're just not very good at your job. Why should the business take the risk - for years - that you might be trustworthy?
woof 9y ago
Read the first two paragraphs again, please.

kartan 9y ago

I like the article, and it has some really good ideas. And it is not about making firing people easier or cheaper. It is about on how to decide when to fire someone. About firing fast and easy, it is a bad idea. I work in Sweden. I don't think I have seen ever anyone fired. What I have seen is some of the best hiring processes. The process looks at the candidate values, and skills. And there is a discussion about what we expect from her, and what she expects from the job. I worked previously in Spain, I saw a lot of people fired for no good reason. And they were also hired without too much attention. Shorts interviews, no real testing, are part of a process that ends consuming a lot of effort from everyone after hiring someone that is not the correct person. Other times that people is good, and leaves, because was not the job for them. Both seem related. Cheap and easy firing produces careless recruiting. And that is more expensive that people realizes.

lokedhs 9y ago
I have worked in Sweden, and I would like to offer a counter point. I don't think we disagree that the reason the hiring process is so involved in Sweden is because it's so hard to fire someone. This results in a situation where the company does everything they can to minimise the risk of hiring the wrong person. The downside of this is that companies will not take any chances when it comes to hiring people. I believe this is the reason why I have seem some really bad diversity (both cultural and gender) in the Swedish tech industry, compared to other countries where I have worked. If it's easier to fire someone, it's also easier to take a chance on someone that might night be the "perfect candidate" at first glance, but perhaps he or she will shine if given the opportunity.
- nvarsj 9y ago
  I work in the UK and it's similar. Except we have a lot of diversity due to a vibrant contractor (at-will) market. Which the Tories are trying desperately to destroy, for some reason. Permanent employees are basically impossible to fire. It's a mixed bag I think. On the one hand, there is a large social benefit to having such gov enforced job security. On the other hand, it drives down wages, and hurts companies that get stuck with a really bad employee. At least as workers we can choose to earn more money and take the riskier route via contracting.

grogenaut 9y ago

"No one was ever fired too soon" Steve Jobs may have been but then again maybe he did need time to cook in Next before coming back.

johan_larson 9y ago

Jeepers. That text needs to be a lot darker or a lot thicker.

pbreit 9y ago

This post left a bad taste in my mouth. Firing can be hard on all parties involved. Your dumb startup is not that important. If you can't figure out how to utilize an employee, that's on you.

crispyambulance 9y ago
Its just an advice article for C-suite wanna-be's. They love, love, LOVE stories about leaders who make "snap" decisions and win. The guy even quoted Jack Welch. You're right that firing is hard for everyone. It creates an environment of chaos and uncertainty, which if it is not properly managed, may precipitate scores of top employees to shift to job-search-mode. FWIW, however, I do think a lot more high-level execs (which is what the article is _really_ about rather than juniors) need to on the chopping block earlier and more often. At the very least it may help to promote more empathy about hiring people that have been laid-off as these people climb their way back into leadership positions.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

afpx 9y ago

Actually, pretty good advice in the opposite direction, too. If I had known at 18 that I could have easily and successfully walked away from teams, bosses, companies, partners, and investors who gave 'bad vibes', I would easily have (at least!) an extra couple million in the bank. I wasted countless opportunities waiting for things to get better, when I probably intuitively knew that they wouldn't. Partly, it was because I didn't want to be considered inconsiderate or rude. But, also, it was because I latched on to other things: the mission, the market, the tech, the product, the teams, etc.

arjie 9y ago
If you don't mind sharing, how did you lose the couple million to these people?
- ckaygusu 9y ago
  I reckon it is meant in a "opportunity cost" kind of way.
  - arjie 9y ago
    Oh, I understand. I'm just wondering how choices were made which left many millions on the table. I didn't face any choices like that when I was younger so I'm curious.
    - daveguy 9y ago
      No offense, but you don't understand. Opportunity cost means specifically you aren't leaving money on the table. It means you are grabbing the pennies when you could be pursuing a more lucrative options. When you are 20 those options don't mean a million dollar deal, they mean not taking the better job that pays about the same but lets you earn 20k more in 2-3 years because you are doing something you love and thriving in it with fewer restarts. That over 20-40 years adds up to "millions in the bank", which is what the original poster said, not millions on the table. A few times not seeing bad management in a startup where you took options rather than a decent wage would do it too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost

startupempl0ye 9y ago

It's never too early to remember that in a startup the decision to get fired depends mostly on the emotional state of a founder. That there is no process in place. It's random. If you do get fired, you have a good chance of ruining your carrier, not being able to get a good reference from your last place of work, wasting opportunities.

mbfg 9y ago

"You can never fire someone too soon" is a ridiculous statement as it is non-falsifiable.

woof 9y ago
"You can never comment to early", on the other hand... He clarifies the provocative title in the section titled "How long should you give people a chance?"

strin 9y ago

Given a shortage of supply for a job, firing early might not be a good idea. It takes months or even years to find an appropriate good fit for a job. Sometimes it's easier to just give the person another chance, than to fire him and have no one to do the work.

traskjd 9y ago
This is a similar logic to folks that "settle" with marriage. It's not a long term win, and if you're not building for the long term, why do it at all?
- dullgiulio 9y ago
  On the countrary, there is a lot of evidence that people who "settle down" have lower levels of stress and overall live a better life. It might not be causation but correlation, but nonetheless, you are wrong. Marriage is definitely a long-term win. For the short term, there is Tinder.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    This might be an issue of idiom - "settle down" and "settle" do not mean the same thing. The latter refers to disregarding reasonable qualms and known issues with a potential life partner and going ahead anyway, more or less on the theory of "oh well, where am I going to do better?" Doing so can work out in the long run, I suppose. But it very often doesn't.
  - gm-conspiracy 9y ago
    Not disagreeing, but link, please?
- UK-AL 9y ago
  People in long term successful marriages are generally a lot happier and less stressed.

horsecaptin 9y ago

Why would anyone work in a person or company that is known to fire quickly?

usmeteora 9y ago
the big thing here is the struggle between companies like amazon google apple who have tons of applicants, and a startup who has less applicants, and less experience from hiring false positives and identifying false negatives. They acknowledge that they turn down many good people, but also most if not all of the people not qualified. They arent worried about false negatives, they are worried about false positives. So they are willing to filter out a good portion of qualified people they aren't quite sure about who might have some overlapping results as people who are not qualified, knowing they are filtering out most if not all unqualified people. Startups do not have the same level of people experiences to draw conclusions based on interviewing thousands and thousands of applicants and tracking the success of accepted applicants based on a large portfolio of information. Probably the best thing you can do in a situation like this is GET someone from a company like that who has had years of experience interviewing candidates, and they will be able to bring along that experience of identifying potential false positives from the get go. That is honestly the biggest asset to these companies, their ability to hire and maintain high quality people. in addition to the countless benefits and opportunities for varied career trajectories in multiple and evolving technologies for smart people once getting into these places, is the fact that they highly value the social network of these work places, and they cannot be duplicated in many places elsewhere, further incentivizing them to stay and internally recommending other high quality friends from elsewhere to interview.
- nradov 9y ago
  There is no real evidence that companies like Amazon / Google / Apple are actually better than other organizations at filtering out false positives, or that they have struck the optimal balance between false positives and false negatives. These are simply unsupported subjective assertions.
  - 9y ago

tkyjonathan 9y ago

I like this sort of mentality in companies that think they are some sort of hot start ups that can fire anyone they feel like. I dunno how it is with management types, but this sort of approach is extremely amusing to me in niche skill areas. For example, this happened to me a few times, but as I am 1 in 25 people in the country that can do what I do, it takes that company 12-18 month to find a replacement, if at all.

scandox 9y ago

> Of course I’m being a bit provocative to open this post with, “I have never fired anyone too early.” I have almost always given people a chance to correct course, and suggest you do too. For anyone that didn't reach the end.

_pmf_ 9y ago

It's necessary to fire early, but investors should keep pushing money into unicorns without any business model because ...

wyclif 9y ago
Right. It's like putting a band-aid on cancer. Or perhaps tearing off the band-aid.

kristiandupont 9y ago

>I have never fired anyone too early. This may well be true but how do you know? The only way I can think of is if the employee went on to become such a rock star at some other place that you actually hear about it. But that's not the only situation where they might have been valuable to you after a while.

oddlyaromatic 9y ago
Everyone has potential to turn it around and get awesome at their job. This leads to the hand wringing and delays he is taking about. But if you are hiring senior leadership with experience ... You probably expect they have figured out a lot of their work practices already. Other commenters are pointing out that juniors typically take time to flourish and that's normal. Lars is focused on the fact that keeping a senior employee who gives you a bad feeling that things are not working out is actively harmful to your company. Whether they turn into a rockstar later in a different context that big of a deal if you replace them with somebody who is at lest not causing good employees to leave.
raoulr 9y ago
You'll probably never know if you fired too soon. Confirmation bias Will confirm the decision. You'll always know if it was too late.
- pillowkusis 9y ago
  isn't it always "too late"? The fired employee would have to have a long pattern of problems. With the benefit of hindsight you'd know that you should have fired them after the first 5 or 10 problems.

logicallee 9y ago

>To be provocative: No one ever fired someone too soon. how about when the board fired Steve Jobs? (Specifically, stripped him from all responsibilities, removed him from the head of the mac division, gave him an office with nothing to do). No? After all, he didn't code, was kind of a weirdo, and the board had every reason to have some doubts. Was that a "wrong" decision?

gm-conspiracy 9y ago
The Apple Newton and Pepsi tell us that answer.
TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
It's really hard to imagine an early-90s Apple that Jobs wouldn't have left anyway - probably with high drama - if he hadn't been fired. But the Apple story makes the point - most CEOs are mediocre. Sculley and Amelio (and Spindler, whom almost everyone has forgotten) were all competent in their previous jobs, and usually also in subsequent jobs. But you don't want to settle for competence in the C-suite. You want outstanding - a genuine 10X CEO. There aren't many of those around. But there are plenty of 0.1X pretenders, and you'd better hope you don't end up hiring one, because no one will do more damage to a company.

red_hairing 9y ago

we need more worker protections and right and benefits....it should be harder to fire workers...and the work week should be no longer than 35 hours.

gommm 9y ago

In the first company I confounded, we recruited a friend of my cofounder to a senior job. He looked like the right guy for the job but he actually really wasn't. He was completely underperforming and junior employees looked at him and lost respect for both and my cofounder for keeping him on. Because he was a friend who had left his job to work for us, we didn't fire him and he continued undermining the company with his poor performance for a year. I think this was the worst mistake I did. In the end, he left the company and screwed us over on some account. So, I've learned from this: - do not hire friends as senior executive - if you insist on hiring friend, have a clear backup plan if things don't work out so that you can both end the relationship. Be prepared to lose your friendship in doing that. - never let an underperforming senior employee fester in your company. It's like rot, it will drag down the entire company by devaluating the work your other employees do

Retric 9y ago
Alternatively, don't recruit friends that already have jobs or need to relocate. If someones out of work to start then letting them go is arguably less traumatic.
nashashmi 9y ago
Also, if you hire a friend, keep him at a distance, say one or two tiers. This way, feedback will still be there, and you won't be making the decision of firing all by yourself. And of course, work won't come in the way of friendship.

dbg31415 9y ago

This is probably the worst advice for a young founder. Had a client who was a 24-year-old startup founder, one of his investors got me involved to help him hire some folks and help define project process. We hired a great developer, who freaked when he saw how sloppy the code was. Rightfully said, "We can't maintain this..." Anyway, the founder had written a lot of it, so it wasn't a shock to him that the code was bad and needed to be re-done. Hew knew it was all quick and dirty and hacked together. By the time I got inovlved, we had issues doing deployments (deployments would take half a day and a lot of stress around testing once code went live), we had issues around infrastructure being unstable (lost 2 days worth of customer data once after a bug caused the DB to crash), and of course, nothing would have scaled. No code review, not much of a QA process, just a million things that needed to be done better -- you can cut some corners as a startup, you can't cut every corner. There were a handful of paying clients, but most had been sold a promise of feature A-through-Z, and really the tools did like A-through-C... the moment one of them complained the young CEO lost it because he hated criticism, especially from customers, and he didn't want people to think he had lied to them... even though he had pretty clearly over-promised. The dev I brought on wanted to re-do a lot of things, write unit tests, set up a CI / CD process, proper backups, basically do all the stuff that should have been done day one to ensure we could work fast and have confidence the wheels wouldn't come off. The founder had been on board with trying to reduce outages and crashes, but about a week into it, when one of the customers complained about something, the young CEO freaked when he couldn't simultaneously have new features and a re-done core codebase on the schedule he wanted. So even though a week before he had said that he liked the idea of reducing a lot of our technical debt, and giving the new dev a chance to work on clean good code... since he was young (not sure if that's the best excuse) he flip-flopped. And three weeks into the overhaul (that was supposed to take 5 weeks), he was furious. "This dev is costing us time and just doesn't get our culture and isn't aligned with our goals and just isn't working out!" I got called in, looked over what the dev had done. Nothing short of a miracle he had accomplished so much so fast. I said as much. Later that day I get an email from the founder, "I had to let [the dev] go, he just wasn't working out." I left the project shortly after, and the founder burned through another $300k in seed money (his parents') before shutting down. Anyway this whole "trust your gut" thing... and "don't ask around before firing" -- that's only good advice if you've got some experience and a cool temperament. If you're a new CEO, ask around. Figure out what's going on, and if you tell people to zig, and they zig, don't get mad at them for not zagging -- they aren't mind-readers. Flipping on decisions like that are extremely demotivating to everyone who works for you, and flipping on a hire (firing someone) is the potentially most demotivating thing you can do if it's not done correctly. You hire smart people, if you can't trust their expertise, don't hire them. Since you trust their expertise, don't micromanage them, or expect the impossible from them.

nilved 9y ago

From the last couple paragraphs this reads like a16z is still mad over getting fired years ago. They should know that being fired is a traumatic experience, and not use this as justification for their future carelessness. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Ajedi32 9y ago

That's crazy; Extra Credits posted a video about this exact same topic a couple days ago, (with an extra focus on indie game development): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnhlDwCRwkU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnhlDwCRwkU

tiatia 9y ago

I have a different take. Never forget that you can get fired but also never forget you can fire! You can fire jobs. You can fire friends. You can fire customers. Makes life so much easier!

phkahler 9y ago

>> After a while of trying and challenging them directly to step up you’ve realized that what sounded like their “experience” in the interview and even confirmed in reference checks, turns out to be things they observed but they didn’t really drive (or truly understood from within) and therefore can’t replicate. That is a sign of a poor hiring process. It's a common mistake but it's the number one thing I try to figure out when hiring. I'll have to write a blog about it some time.

pmarreck 9y ago

Is intuition infallible? I want to hear stories about people who followed their intuition on staying or going (or keeping or firing) and it ended up being the wrong decision long-term. Falsifiability is IMHO an important element of arguing for "intuition" And yet, I look back and I can't think of a single example in my own life where "listening to my gut" seemed to lead me astray. But I also don't trust my own brain to remember such instances...

pillowkusis 9y ago
if you fired someone too early, how would you ever know? They're at a different company. You'd have to somehow hear from a separate, trusted source that they were actually doing way better. Incredibly rare. the whole thesis of this article ("you can never fire someone too soon") reeks of selection bias
- pmarreck 9y ago
  Exactly!

devy 9y ago

Although there are lots of these career "advices" that are perceived as "universal truth", I hardly believe they are the only truth. Life is more complicated than that sometimes, so are your workplace. Use your best judgement(s), rather than follow the dogma. Long enough you will have your own believes, perhaps from a different angle to the same dilima.

paulsutter 9y ago

Even more important is to take the blame yourself and fix your hiring process. In the example below, detect the exaggeration during the interview not after they start. > you’ve realized that what sounded like their “experience” in the interview and even confirmed in reference checks, turns out to be things they observed but they didn’t really drive (or truly understood from within) and therefore can’t replicate

ElijahLynn 9y ago

From the book 'Peak: Secrets of the new science of expertise', Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool state that to be an expert you must be successful at something more than once. Which means that just because someone was successful doesn't mean they were directly responsible for it. Like being on a team where you may have even been the manager but the team players were what made it truly successful. If you were successful on two different teams then the odds of you being a key player in that success are much higher.

vonnik 9y ago

The way the job market works is the larger problem. It usually forces both employers and employees to make a big commitment based on deeply imperfect information. It's like asking someone to marry after the second date, usually when they're already married and can't survive long without being married.