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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

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.

braythwayt 7y ago
Your entire argument smells to me like The Politician’s Fallacy: Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do it. There’s lots of that in business: Long explanation for why something must be done, then a short explanation for what “this” is, and we just have to take it on faith that “this” will do anything to fix the problem that makes us feel like something must be done. But as long as “everyone else is doing it,” we all believe in this something that we must do, and as long as we all believe it, we’ll all back “this something” we must do. Whether it works, doesn’t work, or even makes it worse. e.g. If you ask people how many golf balls fit in an airplane, word gets around and the next thing you know, people who can game PIPs to not get fired will game your interview to get hired in the first place. And by hiring them, you don’t hire someone else who can actually do the job but doesn’t solve recreational puzzles for a hobby, nor do they spend any time learning how to game interviews. This is the thinking that also brought us, “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM,” and so forth: An emphasis on doing the thing people believe must be done, rather than looking for something that works whether it’s popular or not.

braythwayt 7y ago

Your entire argument smells to me like The Politician’s Fallacy: Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do it. There’s lots of that in business: Long explanation for why something must be done, then a short explanation for what “this” is, and we just have to take it on faith that “this” will do anything to fix the problem that makes us feel like something must be done. But as long as “everyone else is doing it,” we all believe in this something that we must do, and as long as we all believe it, we’ll all back “this something” we must do. Whether it works, doesn’t work, or even makes it worse. e.g. If you ask people how many golf balls fit in an airplane, word gets around and the next thing you know, people who can game PIPs to not get fired will game your interview to get hired in the first place. And by hiring them, you don’t hire someone else who can actually do the job but doesn’t solve recreational puzzles for a hobby, nor do they spend any time learning how to game interviews. This is the thinking that also brought us, “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM,” and so forth: An emphasis on doing the thing people believe must be done, rather than looking for something that works whether it’s popular or not.