6 ms·

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

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.

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.