6 ms·

Firing someone for a "lack of chemistry" and refusing to give details is a Grade A dick move.

pmiller2 6y ago
Is it any better or worse than "Sorry, it's just not working out?" I've seen this happen a few times.
DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
IANAL, but I think the general perception is that by giving reasons, one exposes the employer to additional risk of a lawsuit. So IIUC, the legal system carries some of the blame here.
wyldfire 6y ago
And maybe a recipe for a lawsuit here in the US. The only female developer? It looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck.
kemiller2002 6y ago
Honestly, not really. It sucks, but from a risk management perspective, less information given out is always better. Was she fired for legit reasons? Who knows. There is no advantage to the employer to give reasons. You can't really blame anyone for trying not to be sued.
- steve_g 6y ago
  I'd say the dick move is firing someone without any kind of coaching or explanation about what you'd like to see done differently. The coaching should have happened well in advance of the firing. A firing that comes as a complete surprise to the employee is generally a sign of a bad manager (not always, but true enough to be a useful heuristic).
  - Can_Not 6y ago
    I guess there could be some improvements, such as a right to feedback law (protections for both parties), make it harder to legally fire someone but easier if it's a real democratic team decision, better short term unemployment benefits.
- munificent 6y ago
  Knowingly hurting someone else in order to avoid the risk of getting sued is a dick move. It's a selfish, rational dick move, but most are. People rarely do dick moves that don't benefit themselves.
- ironmagma 6y ago
  However, life isn't all about avoiding risk. Sometimes you should seek out risk to make you a better person. Or, if you're part of a company, to make you a better company. Telling people why they weren't hired / were fired helps them improve, and taken to the limit, it helps the entire society improve.
- midasz 6y ago
  What could be a legit reason that could've given credence to a lawsuit? If the reason was: "You're a woman" then they should've been sued.
dec0dedab0de 6y ago
I worked at a small company where everyone was on probation their first 3 months, towards the end of the 3 months our manager would come around and ask what we thought of the new person. If enough of the team found you annoying, you didn't get to stay.
pmarreck 6y ago
Assuming that a firing for "lack of chemistry" (which is a very real and valid concern, btw: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/importance-relationships-workplace-10380.html https://smallbusiness.chron.com/importance-relationships-wor...) is, without evidence, veiled discrimination, is also a Grade A dick move, by being a "default victimization mindset". Anecdotal firings of minority hires are insubstantial proof of discrimination; in fact it may be the opposite, if there's a diversity retention policy (meaning that the problem was significant enough to violate their own policies). This is exactly the kind of conclusion-jumping that rubs people the wrong way and ironically makes it more likely for you to get let go based on "lack of chemistry" (because it's really "we can sense this person is just itching for an opportunity to be a victim and we don't want to be subject to a baseless lawsuit"... but of course, that can't be stated aloud, because http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) I'll be honest again: Yes, I'm a white male, but I'm considering hiring people for the first time and this sort of thing TERRIFIES me because I genuinely want to help out whoever I can, and I'm even a natural fan of "underdogs"... What would I do if my nonwhite, nonmale (or both) hire just isn't working out (for valid reasons) but I can't yet afford to fight a discrimination lawsuit? Let's say my imperfect solution to this was simply to just keep hiring other white males for a while. Eventually I realize I NEED more diversity, but now I've created the perfect conditions for discrimination lawsuits by having an all-white, all-male company... Do you see yet what the problem is, here?
- fwip 6y ago
  This article may be worth a read for you: https://www.paychex.com/articles/human-resources/eeoc-workplace-discrimination-enforcement-and-litigation https://www.paychex.com/articles/human-resources/eeoc-workpl... Below, I do some napkin math to attempt to estimate your likelihood of getting in trouble for firing somebody. In 20 years, there were 1.8M employee discrimination cases filed in the US, so ~roughly 90K per year. Each year, about 19M employees are fired or laid off. Considering that not all employee discrimination suits arise from termination, we can expect a rate to be significantly below the calculated likelihood of 0.04% (90K/19M), or less than 1 in 200. However, I don't have an estimate for this, You can adjust that for the prevalence of underrepresented groups in your field, of course - usually it will be about half that have some protected factor (age, gender, ethnicity, disability, etc.), so let's double that, for 1 in 100. Of those cases, 82% were closed without even a settlement. So we're back down to about 1 in 500, if you pretend that the EEOC chooses entirely randomly and cannot differentiate between real discrimination and made up ones. I think it would be worthwhile for you to do some real risk assessment, and figure out whether the < 1/500 chance of paying some money, if you need to fire a person with a protected attribute, is worth being "terrified" about. (Also, age discrimination constitutes the plurality of EEOC cases, so you should possibly be more concerned about hiring people over the age of 35 than hiring women or black people).
UncleOxidant 6y ago
Similar to interviewing where they never tell you why you weren't selected (or very rarely - it's happened once in my experience) - they don't want any kind of legal liability. The less info they give you, the less you have to file a lawsuit is the theory. It definitely sucks, though.
- Kranar 6y ago
  I don't let candidates know either and it has nothing to do with legal liability whatsoever. If I post a job up for a developer position, even as a small company in Toronto I get on the order of 1000 applicants in a matter of 2-3 weeks and I usually will only hire 1-4. I am not going to come up with a rejection reason for 996 people. The reason you got rejected is because there are a ton of you out there and I can only hire so many so I am going to hire the very few who I am very certain will do a good job for the specific requirements my company has right now, even if it does something means I end up rejecting even better qualified candidates who I am uncertain about. Every hire costs me on the order of 50k per person in straight up recruiting costs, ramp up time to get that member to be productive, time lost doing interviews and filtering 1000s of people. Hiring and firing people is basically the option of last resort because of how risky, expensive, and time consuming it is. Finally it's highly unlikely that anything I say will be of much help to you anyways.
  - UncleOxidant 6y ago
    Not talking about all applicants here, I'm referring to people that have been interviewed and made it to some kind of final interviewing stage where typically you end up with only 3 or 4 applicants max. The one time this happened I had gone through the phone interview and had what I thought was one of the best onsite interviews I'd ever had (in over 25 years of software development). The hiring manager actually called me up a few days later and apologized for not selecting me. He said that I interviewed well and everyone on the team liked me, but that the other candidate had some extra experience in an arcane area that was quite relevant to what they were going to be doing. I thanked him and told him that I understood as not many people would have actual experience in that tech. It was helpful to know that my perception (that I had interviewed well) matched their perception.

Is it any better or worse than "Sorry, it's just not working out?" I've seen this happen a few times.

IANAL, but I think the general perception is that by giving reasons, one exposes the employer to additional risk of a lawsuit. So IIUC, the legal system carries some of the blame here.

wyldfire 6y ago

And maybe a recipe for a lawsuit here in the US. The only female developer? It looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck.

kemiller2002 6y ago

Honestly, not really. It sucks, but from a risk management perspective, less information given out is always better. Was she fired for legit reasons? Who knows. There is no advantage to the employer to give reasons. You can't really blame anyone for trying not to be sued.

steve_g 6y ago
I'd say the dick move is firing someone without any kind of coaching or explanation about what you'd like to see done differently. The coaching should have happened well in advance of the firing. A firing that comes as a complete surprise to the employee is generally a sign of a bad manager (not always, but true enough to be a useful heuristic).
- Can_Not 6y ago
  I guess there could be some improvements, such as a right to feedback law (protections for both parties), make it harder to legally fire someone but easier if it's a real democratic team decision, better short term unemployment benefits.
munificent 6y ago
Knowingly hurting someone else in order to avoid the risk of getting sued is a dick move. It's a selfish, rational dick move, but most are. People rarely do dick moves that don't benefit themselves.
ironmagma 6y ago
However, life isn't all about avoiding risk. Sometimes you should seek out risk to make you a better person. Or, if you're part of a company, to make you a better company. Telling people why they weren't hired / were fired helps them improve, and taken to the limit, it helps the entire society improve.
midasz 6y ago
What could be a legit reason that could've given credence to a lawsuit? If the reason was: "You're a woman" then they should've been sued.

dec0dedab0de 6y ago

I worked at a small company where everyone was on probation their first 3 months, towards the end of the 3 months our manager would come around and ask what we thought of the new person. If enough of the team found you annoying, you didn't get to stay.

pmarreck 6y ago

Assuming that a firing for "lack of chemistry" (which is a very real and valid concern, btw: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/importance-relationships-workplace-10380.html https://smallbusiness.chron.com/importance-relationships-wor...) is, without evidence, veiled discrimination, is also a Grade A dick move, by being a "default victimization mindset". Anecdotal firings of minority hires are insubstantial proof of discrimination; in fact it may be the opposite, if there's a diversity retention policy (meaning that the problem was significant enough to violate their own policies). This is exactly the kind of conclusion-jumping that rubs people the wrong way and ironically makes it more likely for you to get let go based on "lack of chemistry" (because it's really "we can sense this person is just itching for an opportunity to be a victim and we don't want to be subject to a baseless lawsuit"... but of course, that can't be stated aloud, because http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) I'll be honest again: Yes, I'm a white male, but I'm considering hiring people for the first time and this sort of thing TERRIFIES me because I genuinely want to help out whoever I can, and I'm even a natural fan of "underdogs"... What would I do if my nonwhite, nonmale (or both) hire just isn't working out (for valid reasons) but I can't yet afford to fight a discrimination lawsuit? Let's say my imperfect solution to this was simply to just keep hiring other white males for a while. Eventually I realize I NEED more diversity, but now I've created the perfect conditions for discrimination lawsuits by having an all-white, all-male company... Do you see yet what the problem is, here?

fwip 6y ago
This article may be worth a read for you: https://www.paychex.com/articles/human-resources/eeoc-workplace-discrimination-enforcement-and-litigation https://www.paychex.com/articles/human-resources/eeoc-workpl... Below, I do some napkin math to attempt to estimate your likelihood of getting in trouble for firing somebody. In 20 years, there were 1.8M employee discrimination cases filed in the US, so ~roughly 90K per year. Each year, about 19M employees are fired or laid off. Considering that not all employee discrimination suits arise from termination, we can expect a rate to be significantly below the calculated likelihood of 0.04% (90K/19M), or less than 1 in 200. However, I don't have an estimate for this, You can adjust that for the prevalence of underrepresented groups in your field, of course - usually it will be about half that have some protected factor (age, gender, ethnicity, disability, etc.), so let's double that, for 1 in 100. Of those cases, 82% were closed without even a settlement. So we're back down to about 1 in 500, if you pretend that the EEOC chooses entirely randomly and cannot differentiate between real discrimination and made up ones. I think it would be worthwhile for you to do some real risk assessment, and figure out whether the < 1/500 chance of paying some money, if you need to fire a person with a protected attribute, is worth being "terrified" about. (Also, age discrimination constitutes the plurality of EEOC cases, so you should possibly be more concerned about hiring people over the age of 35 than hiring women or black people).

UncleOxidant 6y ago

Similar to interviewing where they never tell you why you weren't selected (or very rarely - it's happened once in my experience) - they don't want any kind of legal liability. The less info they give you, the less you have to file a lawsuit is the theory. It definitely sucks, though.

Kranar 6y ago
I don't let candidates know either and it has nothing to do with legal liability whatsoever. If I post a job up for a developer position, even as a small company in Toronto I get on the order of 1000 applicants in a matter of 2-3 weeks and I usually will only hire 1-4. I am not going to come up with a rejection reason for 996 people. The reason you got rejected is because there are a ton of you out there and I can only hire so many so I am going to hire the very few who I am very certain will do a good job for the specific requirements my company has right now, even if it does something means I end up rejecting even better qualified candidates who I am uncertain about. Every hire costs me on the order of 50k per person in straight up recruiting costs, ramp up time to get that member to be productive, time lost doing interviews and filtering 1000s of people. Hiring and firing people is basically the option of last resort because of how risky, expensive, and time consuming it is. Finally it's highly unlikely that anything I say will be of much help to you anyways.
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  Not talking about all applicants here, I'm referring to people that have been interviewed and made it to some kind of final interviewing stage where typically you end up with only 3 or 4 applicants max. The one time this happened I had gone through the phone interview and had what I thought was one of the best onsite interviews I'd ever had (in over 25 years of software development). The hiring manager actually called me up a few days later and apologized for not selecting me. He said that I interviewed well and everyone on the team liked me, but that the other candidate had some extra experience in an arcane area that was quite relevant to what they were going to be doing. I thanked him and told him that I understood as not many people would have actual experience in that tech. It was helpful to know that my perception (that I had interviewed well) matched their perception.