5 ms·

Do you ever fire people who are nice and really trying?

eropple 8y ago
The low emotional intelligence on display throughout this thread is both disappointing and unsurprising. I have fired "nice and really trying" people. Because they were decent people, I have also then recommended them to my personal network for positions that are better suited to their skills (and more than once have they gone on to success at a friend's company), because hiring somebody who can't do the job is management's fault. I also fire people who are toxic assholes. I do not recommend them to my network because I would not inflict them upon people I like. Even if they're competent. You can, in fact, do both, and hats off to Linus for at least making a goddamned attempt to not be the latter.
- notyourday 8y ago
  Thank you for providing a glimpse into a mind bending gymnastics one might need to engage in to convince himself or herself that it is different somehow: this is actually why work references are absolutely useless - people love to coddle incompetence in order to be perceived as "nice bosses". If someone's being unable to do a job is management's fault ( in this case yours, since you are the manager of the person that you have fired ), then the person who needs to be fired should be the manager, not the person who cannot do the job.
  - matthewmacleod 8y ago
    I have absolutely no idea how you can draw this conclusion. There is a pretty obvious difference between "giving feedback in a respectful, polite and constructive manner" and "giving feedback in an aggressive, disrespectful and unhelpful manner". The former isn't "coddling" – it's "being a decent human being". The problem I see is that too many people seem to confuse "having strong views and standing by them" with "being an unnecessary dick about it". You don't have to do the latter to achieve the former, and I'd argue that it is almost universally harmful.
    - hashhar 8y ago
      Reminds me a lot of a Jeff Atwood quote from the Stackoverflow.com podcast's initial days. >It's much better to have "strong views, weakly held" than to have "weak views, strongly held". Meaning that you should be confident in your opinions but at the same time be willing to concede defeat if someone can show you why your opinion is wrong or not the most optimal one. Rather than persistently defending a view that you also over time come to realise was wrong. Since you've invested so much time and are holding onto the weak view strongly, you would not want to abandon the view due to the feeling that it was all a waste.
  - eropple 8y ago
    Wow. This...uh. There's a lot of shitty to unpack in this post. First: I've never had to fire somebody I hired. I have had to fire people I inherited. It doesn't suck less, but given your odd attempt at turning this into a referendum on people who aren't big on jerkass coworkers, I feel like it helps complete the picture. Second: firing people is rather unlike "coddling". Third: that I have fired people does not mean I do not think that they are decent people. It does not mean that I think they are fit for no job. And it does not mean that I, as somebody with a working empathic function, don't want to help them to land as softly as possible in a job where they can be happy and productive. Fourth: the notion that a reference can't be honest because somebody puts forth the above idea is entirely and only in your goddamn head. You are projecting. On the other hand, I've told somebody who asked (off the record) something along the lines of "I would not hire this person as a team lead because I've observed deficiencies in X, Y, and Z, but their strengths in A, B, and C make them good for role R" because honesty does not require being a prick. Fifth: somebody who is fired for being an asshole--and, yeah, I've done that, and again, nobody I've ever hired--has no value to my network. I'm not going to inject the toxin I have spat out into somebody I actually like. Because I actually like those people and I want them to succeed. It isn't hard. Were I in your shoes I'd be looking in the mirror right now. You're projecting something real ugly onto me and its source is worth thinking about.
    - notyourday 8y ago
      Your website's cert has expired nearly a week ago. Competency is clearly overrated in the land of empathetic bosses. Edit: So I address for this being a dig. It is an observation. Those who are empathetic eventually spend all of their time talking about feels rather than addressing issues. Time is a finite resource. Sooner or later ( typically sooner rather than later ) one needs to decide what he or she is going to value more : competency or empathy. Also, I apologize if me noticing a bad cert was hurtful.
      - eropple 8y ago
        Oh, darn! I was on vacation and a reboot seems to have horked the cron job that runs certbot on the website that fronts my basically-spun-down consulting business and a side project of mine. I probably should have gone through my emails a bit closer when I got back from my trip! And, of course, that totally invalidates an argument. I want to dig, though: is this what you think an argument is, from you? Do you think you're saying something meaningful? I can guarantee you've fucked up something quite a lot bigger and quite a lot more expensive in your career--or you haven't done anything, anything, of note. (Hell, I have. And I talk about it regularly! That's how you learn things.) And yet that doesn't diminish your argument. Your argument falls on its face on its merits.
- whiddershins 8y ago
  I would like to point out: you just insulted a number of people’s emotional intelligence, while talking about how important it is to be nice.
  - eropple 8y ago
    Correctly identifying poor emotional intelligence as such is not necessarily nice, no. Fortunately I never-not-once said a word about "how important it is to be nice". It's important to not be a toxic asshole. There is a real and obvious difference between the assertion I made and the assertion you are attempting to say that I made.
    - inawarminister 8y ago
      Sorry, that kind of thinking is problematic. A person can't exactly change their EQ, so you shouldn't be so toxic about this.
- sctb 8y ago
  > The low emotional intelligence on display throughout this thread is both disappointing and unsurprising. You're pretty close to behaving a certain way mentioned in this comment yourself. Could you please, like we've asked before, try not to be so mean to other users?
matthewmacleod 8y ago
Yeah, I've done that – and I've not been a dick about it. Why is it such a prevalent idea that someone has to be an asshole in order to give negative feedback, or to take an action that someone doesn't like?
- notyourday 8y ago
  Because me telling you that your code sucks is not being anti-gay if you are gay or anti-trans if you are trans. It is me telling you that your code sucks. You should either make your code not suck, or you can GTFO unless I'm lower on the org chart than you are, then you can do whatever you want, including telling me to shove it or GTFO and based on how I feel about it, I can either forget about it or GTFO. That's equality - we are dealing with code and not our sexual lifestyle(s). Org chart is used to determine who gets to win in the argument if neither of the two sides are willing to budge. Alternatively, we can spend a year debating if me using a word "suck" is appropriate or triggering because you found out based on the DNA testing of your twice removed uncle that his grandfather was lactose intolerant which caused you to develop an emotional response while your code continues to suck and create problems, causing the company to lose money or a project to lose users.
  - tylermac1 8y ago
    You must be insufferable to be around. Here's a novel idea, how about instead of directly resorting to "Your code sucks." we instead say something like "I think there's still some work to do here. Here's the way I would have done this." It's really not that hard to give constructive criticism.
    - 08-15 8y ago
      In practice it works like this: "Your code invokes undefined behavior and may fail in the following ways. These corner cases are handled incorrectly. There are a few other cases I'm not sure about, because I have trouble following the logic." "The code is fine. I have tested it!" "It happens to work on you current machine. That's the nature of undefined behavior. It might fail in the future without warning." "I tested it, it works. Now merge it!" "Sorry, man, the code is crap. Go and fix it." Nobody resorts directly to "your code sucks". Engineers love to give constructive criticism, but they hate to give marks for effort. And where constructive arguments fall on deaf ears, they give up and either ignore you or tell you to GTFO. Both are perceived as impolite, but what else could they do?

The low emotional intelligence on display throughout this thread is both disappointing and unsurprising. I have fired "nice and really trying" people. Because they were decent people, I have also then recommended them to my personal network for positions that are better suited to their skills (and more than once have they gone on to success at a friend's company), because hiring somebody who can't do the job is management's fault. I also fire people who are toxic assholes. I do not recommend them to my network because I would not inflict them upon people I like. Even if they're competent. You can, in fact, do both, and hats off to Linus for at least making a goddamned attempt to not be the latter.

notyourday 8y ago
Thank you for providing a glimpse into a mind bending gymnastics one might need to engage in to convince himself or herself that it is different somehow: this is actually why work references are absolutely useless - people love to coddle incompetence in order to be perceived as "nice bosses". If someone's being unable to do a job is management's fault ( in this case yours, since you are the manager of the person that you have fired ), then the person who needs to be fired should be the manager, not the person who cannot do the job.
- matthewmacleod 8y ago
  I have absolutely no idea how you can draw this conclusion. There is a pretty obvious difference between "giving feedback in a respectful, polite and constructive manner" and "giving feedback in an aggressive, disrespectful and unhelpful manner". The former isn't "coddling" – it's "being a decent human being". The problem I see is that too many people seem to confuse "having strong views and standing by them" with "being an unnecessary dick about it". You don't have to do the latter to achieve the former, and I'd argue that it is almost universally harmful.
  - hashhar 8y ago
    Reminds me a lot of a Jeff Atwood quote from the Stackoverflow.com podcast's initial days. >It's much better to have "strong views, weakly held" than to have "weak views, strongly held". Meaning that you should be confident in your opinions but at the same time be willing to concede defeat if someone can show you why your opinion is wrong or not the most optimal one. Rather than persistently defending a view that you also over time come to realise was wrong. Since you've invested so much time and are holding onto the weak view strongly, you would not want to abandon the view due to the feeling that it was all a waste.
- eropple 8y ago
  Wow. This...uh. There's a lot of shitty to unpack in this post. First: I've never had to fire somebody I hired. I have had to fire people I inherited. It doesn't suck less, but given your odd attempt at turning this into a referendum on people who aren't big on jerkass coworkers, I feel like it helps complete the picture. Second: firing people is rather unlike "coddling". Third: that I have fired people does not mean I do not think that they are decent people. It does not mean that I think they are fit for no job. And it does not mean that I, as somebody with a working empathic function, don't want to help them to land as softly as possible in a job where they can be happy and productive. Fourth: the notion that a reference can't be honest because somebody puts forth the above idea is entirely and only in your goddamn head. You are projecting. On the other hand, I've told somebody who asked (off the record) something along the lines of "I would not hire this person as a team lead because I've observed deficiencies in X, Y, and Z, but their strengths in A, B, and C make them good for role R" because honesty does not require being a prick. Fifth: somebody who is fired for being an asshole--and, yeah, I've done that, and again, nobody I've ever hired--has no value to my network. I'm not going to inject the toxin I have spat out into somebody I actually like. Because I actually like those people and I want them to succeed. It isn't hard. Were I in your shoes I'd be looking in the mirror right now. You're projecting something real ugly onto me and its source is worth thinking about.
  - notyourday 8y ago
    Your website's cert has expired nearly a week ago. Competency is clearly overrated in the land of empathetic bosses. Edit: So I address for this being a dig. It is an observation. Those who are empathetic eventually spend all of their time talking about feels rather than addressing issues. Time is a finite resource. Sooner or later ( typically sooner rather than later ) one needs to decide what he or she is going to value more : competency or empathy. Also, I apologize if me noticing a bad cert was hurtful.
    - eropple 8y ago
      Oh, darn! I was on vacation and a reboot seems to have horked the cron job that runs certbot on the website that fronts my basically-spun-down consulting business and a side project of mine. I probably should have gone through my emails a bit closer when I got back from my trip! And, of course, that totally invalidates an argument. I want to dig, though: is this what you think an argument is, from you? Do you think you're saying something meaningful? I can guarantee you've fucked up something quite a lot bigger and quite a lot more expensive in your career--or you haven't done anything, anything, of note. (Hell, I have. And I talk about it regularly! That's how you learn things.) And yet that doesn't diminish your argument. Your argument falls on its face on its merits.
whiddershins 8y ago
I would like to point out: you just insulted a number of people’s emotional intelligence, while talking about how important it is to be nice.
- eropple 8y ago
  Correctly identifying poor emotional intelligence as such is not necessarily nice, no. Fortunately I never-not-once said a word about "how important it is to be nice". It's important to not be a toxic asshole. There is a real and obvious difference between the assertion I made and the assertion you are attempting to say that I made.
  - inawarminister 8y ago
    Sorry, that kind of thinking is problematic. A person can't exactly change their EQ, so you shouldn't be so toxic about this.
sctb 8y ago
> The low emotional intelligence on display throughout this thread is both disappointing and unsurprising. You're pretty close to behaving a certain way mentioned in this comment yourself. Could you please, like we've asked before, try not to be so mean to other users?

matthewmacleod 8y ago

Yeah, I've done that – and I've not been a dick about it. Why is it such a prevalent idea that someone has to be an asshole in order to give negative feedback, or to take an action that someone doesn't like?

notyourday 8y ago
Because me telling you that your code sucks is not being anti-gay if you are gay or anti-trans if you are trans. It is me telling you that your code sucks. You should either make your code not suck, or you can GTFO unless I'm lower on the org chart than you are, then you can do whatever you want, including telling me to shove it or GTFO and based on how I feel about it, I can either forget about it or GTFO. That's equality - we are dealing with code and not our sexual lifestyle(s). Org chart is used to determine who gets to win in the argument if neither of the two sides are willing to budge. Alternatively, we can spend a year debating if me using a word "suck" is appropriate or triggering because you found out based on the DNA testing of your twice removed uncle that his grandfather was lactose intolerant which caused you to develop an emotional response while your code continues to suck and create problems, causing the company to lose money or a project to lose users.
- tylermac1 8y ago
  You must be insufferable to be around. Here's a novel idea, how about instead of directly resorting to "Your code sucks." we instead say something like "I think there's still some work to do here. Here's the way I would have done this." It's really not that hard to give constructive criticism.
  - 08-15 8y ago
    In practice it works like this: "Your code invokes undefined behavior and may fail in the following ways. These corner cases are handled incorrectly. There are a few other cases I'm not sure about, because I have trouble following the logic." "The code is fine. I have tested it!" "It happens to work on you current machine. That's the nature of undefined behavior. It might fail in the future without warning." "I tested it, it works. Now merge it!" "Sorry, man, the code is crap. Go and fix it." Nobody resorts directly to "your code sucks". Engineers love to give constructive criticism, but they hate to give marks for effort. And where constructive arguments fall on deaf ears, they give up and either ignore you or tell you to GTFO. Both are perceived as impolite, but what else could they do?