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I've been in this business for a very long time, and I have heard this my entire career from everyone except HR professionals and lawyers. First, in jurisdicti

I've been in this business for a very long time, and I have heard this my entire career from everyone except HR professionals and lawyers. First, in jurisdictions like Ontario, there is a probation period during which a new employee can be fired for no reason at all. They can be a top performer and still get fired, and they have no recourse. There are Ontario Human Rights exceptions to this, you can’t have a “Cowboys and Squaws Dress Day” and then fire the newly hired First Nations person who objects. But I have been to a number of management training programs put on by HR consulting firms, and zero of them have said, “Be 100% certain about your new hired, because firing them is difficult and expensive if they don't work out.” It’s true that after they’ve been around for a while, firing someone without cause entails some costs. But here in Ontario, they are surprisingly low. It’s possible to get sued, and win or lose that costs money and time, so most employers either go through a PIP process before letting someone go, or write a decent but not outrageously large cheque in exchange for agreement. On the whole, “Avoid all but the most insanely qualified candidate because firing people is hard” is not anything I’ve heard from a professional. At least, not in my jurisdiction. ——- The above is my recounting my factual experience. And now to my conjectures: What I have heard from fellow managers has more to do with team morale. Hiring and firing people on a regular basis destabilizes the teams they join. Hiring people without ensuring they're a decent fit sends a message that the company doesn't value competence. When such things were in vogue, using bullshit a-hair-to-the-right-of-astrology tests like “How many weights do you need to use a balancing scale to...” acted as a signal to existing employees that they are super smart elite braniacs, and the company values that. I suspect that a lot of risk-aversion with hiring is a combination of “apocraphyl stories going around the intrnet, but nobody is quoting actual research and case law,” combined with cultural signalling. At my current employer, there are lots of people who don’t pass our interview system, but when we review a candidate, we are often less concerned with how capable they are today than with our estimate of how amenable they are to growing on the job. That obviously applies a lot more to people coming in at a lower level, but I assure you that we value great people, but we aren’t insanely risk-averse. Being too risk-averse with hiring is a failure mode, just as being too risk-averse with engineering and product development.

microtherion 7y ago
> When such things were in vogue, using bullshit a-hair-to-the-right-of-astrology tests like “How many weights do you need to use a balancing scale to...” Ah, you're lucky to be living in such an enlightened society. In Switzerland you can still find employers who require handwritten applications because they have them evaluated by professional graphologists!
- braythwayt 7y ago
  That kind of thing leaves me scratching my head. BTW, don’t scratch your head. It throws off the phrenological screen.
steventhedev 7y ago
How many people have you hired with you as their direct manager? How many of those have you had to fire? I've only had to fire one person, but it was as a part time homework checker. I've only been personally responsible for 3 FTE hires in my career (beyond CV screen). I'm not the most qualified person to talk about actual hard data points on the importance of success in the hiring/firing process. However, I do screen CVs and I've seen several thousand of those so we can imply some data from other companies experiences. I'd say maybe 5% pop out as truly problematic people who jump jobs more than once a year. There's another 10% who have been at their current job for less than a year. The overwhelming majority of those 10% are leaving because the role isn't what they were told it would be (they are pure backend dev's being forced into a frontend role, different tech stack, QA job advertised as devops, etc). The next 60% work at each job between 2 to 4 years and leave because they got bored, or weren't allowed to grow, or they were asked to work harder than they feel they should have to. The rest leave because the business closed or similar circumstances. While some of these people may be lying about the reason they're leaving, I don't think they'd lie about the amount of time they worked somewhere. So what makes someone a bad hire? The obvious ones you can easily filter for in your hiring process. The ones that cause the conventional wisdom of "firing is hard" are the ones who just barely scrape by, draining the team with extra training, extra work, extra bugfixes, extra "oops" moments for the longest time. They're the ones who go on a PIP and improve enough that it's difficult to justify firing them with cause. The reason "firing someone is hard" isn't because the process itself is hard. It's because the ones you need to fire, the ones you're warned against, they're just a bad fit. They take up an extra desk and shorten your runway (or budget) while providing just barely more than what they cost. It's the opportunity cost of hiring someone who's not great but not horrible. The actual cost of firing an underperfomer is 2 or 3 months salary equivalent depending on contract/jurisdiction. So we're stuck with "a-hair-to-the-right-of-astrology" because it's really difficult to filter reliably, and an amazing worker on the right team could be "meh" on the wrong one (for him/her). It may be bullshit but at least it's bullshit the entire team believes in.

microtherion 7y ago

> When such things were in vogue, using bullshit a-hair-to-the-right-of-astrology tests like “How many weights do you need to use a balancing scale to...” Ah, you're lucky to be living in such an enlightened society. In Switzerland you can still find employers who require handwritten applications because they have them evaluated by professional graphologists!

braythwayt 7y ago
That kind of thing leaves me scratching my head. BTW, don’t scratch your head. It throws off the phrenological screen.

steventhedev 7y ago

How many people have you hired with you as their direct manager? How many of those have you had to fire? I've only had to fire one person, but it was as a part time homework checker. I've only been personally responsible for 3 FTE hires in my career (beyond CV screen). I'm not the most qualified person to talk about actual hard data points on the importance of success in the hiring/firing process. However, I do screen CVs and I've seen several thousand of those so we can imply some data from other companies experiences. I'd say maybe 5% pop out as truly problematic people who jump jobs more than once a year. There's another 10% who have been at their current job for less than a year. The overwhelming majority of those 10% are leaving because the role isn't what they were told it would be (they are pure backend dev's being forced into a frontend role, different tech stack, QA job advertised as devops, etc). The next 60% work at each job between 2 to 4 years and leave because they got bored, or weren't allowed to grow, or they were asked to work harder than they feel they should have to. The rest leave because the business closed or similar circumstances. While some of these people may be lying about the reason they're leaving, I don't think they'd lie about the amount of time they worked somewhere. So what makes someone a bad hire? The obvious ones you can easily filter for in your hiring process. The ones that cause the conventional wisdom of "firing is hard" are the ones who just barely scrape by, draining the team with extra training, extra work, extra bugfixes, extra "oops" moments for the longest time. They're the ones who go on a PIP and improve enough that it's difficult to justify firing them with cause. The reason "firing someone is hard" isn't because the process itself is hard. It's because the ones you need to fire, the ones you're warned against, they're just a bad fit. They take up an extra desk and shorten your runway (or budget) while providing just barely more than what they cost. It's the opportunity cost of hiring someone who's not great but not horrible. The actual cost of firing an underperfomer is 2 or 3 months salary equivalent depending on contract/jurisdiction. So we're stuck with "a-hair-to-the-right-of-astrology" because it's really difficult to filter reliably, and an amazing worker on the right team could be "meh" on the wrong one (for him/her). It may be bullshit but at least it's bullshit the entire team believes in.