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I’m not too shocked by this. Firing people is really, truly hard. Traumatizing even. It’s so much easier to keep a low performer around and try to encourage and

I’m not too shocked by this. Firing people is really, truly hard. Traumatizing even. It’s so much easier to keep a low performer around and try to encourage and coach them up - and sometimes, over time, they improve enough that it works out! The easier “solution” most teams default toward when someone is underperforming is to hire more people. But what I think most people don’t realize is just how much of a drag the low performers on a team are. Not only is their output below everyone else, but they lower everyone else’s output because they mess things up and other people have to invest time fixing the mess and trying to teach the person how to avoid it in the future. I think there’s some opportunity to create more structured apprenticeship programs and other kinds of intensive training to help build up borderline performers into solid contributors. But in the absence of that, a good manager has to be able to recognize when someone’s performance is dragging the rest of the team down and let that person go. “Mandatory firing” practices try to force this to happen, but just like stack ranking, it ends up being too crude an instrument. Within any large organization there are teams where every person on the team is a high performer, and teams were all or almost all the team are low performers. When you do any kind of stock ranking or mandatory firing across the company, you end up in situations where managers play ridiculous games like “hire to fire” in order to hang onto their talented team, or intentionally spread high performers out with a lot of low performers around them so they can always be “stack ranked” at the top. Incentives are hard, managing a highly effective organization at scale is hard, and at the end of the day there’s no substitute for well-trained and highly skilled front line managers using their own judgement to make the best personnel decisions.

cratermoon 5y ago
> they lower everyone else’s output because they mess things up and other people have to invest time fixing the mess https://wiki.c2.com/?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer https://wiki.c2.com/?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer
- 99_00 5y ago
  I agree with the counter argument in that link. The programmer is net negative, true, but better management and appropriate tasks would fix that. edit: downvoted for an opinion presented with a neutral tone?
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    In some fraction of the cases, I agree. Estimating what the likelihood for any given case is still a difficult challenge, but I think it's always under 75% and generally under 50%.
sinsterizme 5y ago
And as a secondary effect, it lowers team morale when a low performer is consistently draining other team members of their time. And lowered morale leads to lower performance and other issues.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
asdfman123 5y ago
The profession of "management" has a problem similar to one a lot of tech companies have: if you reward the generation of new ideas, you get a huge proliferation of them that aren't necessarily better and make everything more complicated. It's like these people are thinking, "Humans are messy and difficult? Better come up with a management technique that gives the illusion of control." But a piece of art is often finished once there's nothing left to remove. I once saw someone on Twitter whose bio said "deeply passionate about Agile." That made me low-key angry, because the last thing programmers need is a person who has dedicated their career to creating more process. If it works or makes things worse it doesn't matter -- their career is invested in creating process.
- andor 5y ago
  I agree, but the "agile" I know is actually about less process and more communication to deal with reality.
- bartread 5y ago
  > "deeply passionate about Agile" It makes me low key angry because I simply don't believe that Agile is anywhere near interesting enough to justify being "deeply passionate" about: it comes off as phoney. Beyond this it's just so narrow that it makes no sense. I can absolutely understand somebody who wants to find ways to make a company run better (more revenue, profit, more efficiency, better products, whatever), which will inevitably involve some amount of engineering processes. Somebody like the late Andy Grove would probably fit into this category, and that I can absolutely get on board with. But Agile is so far from the be-all-end-all of good process that to be "deeply passionate" about it is almost beyond satire. Good process should make things more effective, should make teams more effective, should make you more effective. Note: effective not productive. It's far too easy to be uselessly busy. As an executive a substantial proportion of my time is spent on "bullshit elimination"[0]: stopping things from happening that create unnecessary work, ideally before they start to cause serious issues. Instead, allow people to focus on the things that we employ them for and that, for the most part, they want to be doing (all jobs have some elements that we don't like, of course). And, importantly, instilling a culture of "bullshit elimination" in my teams. Sometimes that involves creating, modifying, or even killing processes - and enabling those in our teams to do so when they need to. The key is that process should be malleable and simplify rather than complicate. Formalised processes can often look complex even when they are a simplification because what happened before, ad hoc, was a large amount of unnecessary thrashing that was never captured. [0] Honestly, I'd rather be programming but SOMEBODY needs to do this, and it turns out I have some aptitude - and possibly the right temperament (thoughtful but just impatient enough; not actually rabid) - for it.
op00to 5y ago
Sorry, people who make mistakes are not low performers dragging the team down. Learning from mistakes in an open and non-judge mental way is a marker of a healthy team culture.
- Dudeman112 5y ago
  Do low performers not exist?
  - op00to 5y ago
    Do you think the rain will hurt the rhubarb?
- burlesona 5y ago
  I agree completely. In my experience, low performers are people who do not learn from their mistakes, and even when given ample support and constructive feedback, do not adjust their behavior or make an earnest effort to improve. Fortunately most people don’t fall into that bucket, but unfortunately some do.
pas 5y ago
Stack ranking is basically the "up or out"[0] with the added idiocy that there's not enough space "up". That said, most of the problems stem from tying up project and team fit with employment and career. (Again a similar phenomenon in the military: commanders during WW2 were given a short time to achieve results. If they failed the command was transferred to someone else. It was not a stigma like today. [1]) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OehvY94N-WA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OehvY94N-WA
not_jd_salinger 5y ago
> Firing people is really, truly hard. Traumatizing even. For the people getting fired it certainly is, I used to think this was true of people doing the firing but my recent experiences have changed my view on this dramatically. I've had the misfortune of working at two places in a row that almost delighted in firing people. My experience at both places was that the firing had far less to do with skill or capability in the role, but moreso using the Amazon/Netflix model (by people who have never worked at either of these places) to justify removing anyone who is in any way critical of the organization. Earlier in my career the only people that got fired where ones that clearly did not contribute and where a source consistent pain for the rest of the team. Reasonable questioning of team direction and goals, and organization objectives was practically expected of good engineers. In the past few years I've seen repeated cases where valued members of the team that were respected for both their technical skills and personalities were removed because they questioned some of the decisions of management. One organization made particularly sure to smear any of these previous employees, and used them as examples to threaten anyone stepping out of line. I've been in situations where a team member is weighing down the rest of the group, and as frustrating as that can be, I much prefer it to the completely inhuman culture of firing I've seen becoming the norm at more and more tech companies.
- stronglikedan 5y ago
  > > Firing people is really, truly hard. Traumatizing even. This still holds true for most people that have to fire someone.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Management is a difficult topic to discuss online because the average commenter is statistically far more likely to be an IC than a manager. Before I transitioned to management, I would read these stories from the perspective of an IC. That is, the one being fired. None of us likes to think of ourselves as under qualified or deserving of being fired, so these stories feel deeply unfair. They also play to tropes about businesses being inhumane or rigged against the individual, or the idea that everything that goes wrong is the manager’s fault rather than the blameless employee. As a manager, I read these stories and immediately think of the problematic employees I’ve had to deal with over the years. Firing people is never easy, as you said, but one of the epiphanies of management is watching a team’s performance and morale improve after a refractory employee is removed from the company. It’s hard to truly understand until you’ve been through it, but some times it’s just not possible to manage underperforming or even troublesome employees into good team members. It’s also not fair to the rest of the team if you have to spend 50% of your time dealing with 10% of the employees causing all of the problems. If nothing else, we have to acknowledge that interviewing is a highly imperfect process. It’s unrealistic expect companies to never make an incorrect hire, and it’s also unrealistic to expect companies to never fire any incorrect hires. Every company of significant size will always have some number of underperforming or troublesome employees. They don’t benefit by hiring people to fire them, but they do need to induce some targeted turnover to avoid accumulating incorrect hires.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  That's orthogonal to the point. There are also teams with no "refractory employees", no morale problems, and no performance problems. But according to this piece, Amazon and other companies who practice what used to be called stack ranking assume that someone needs to go anyway. It's pure cargo cult management. Not only does it have no relationship to performance, it actively degrades it. It actively degrades performance because these choices can easily become political. Competent people may disagree with management, and sometimes they disagree for good reasons. A culture that can't handle that is not a good culture. Good people who execute and have rational strategic insight are management track almost by definition, and throwing them out is not a winning move.
- 5y ago

cratermoon 5y ago

> they lower everyone else’s output because they mess things up and other people have to invest time fixing the mess https://wiki.c2.com/?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer https://wiki.c2.com/?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer

99_00 5y ago
I agree with the counter argument in that link. The programmer is net negative, true, but better management and appropriate tasks would fix that. edit: downvoted for an opinion presented with a neutral tone?
- sokoloff 5y ago
  In some fraction of the cases, I agree. Estimating what the likelihood for any given case is still a difficult challenge, but I think it's always under 75% and generally under 50%.

sinsterizme 5y ago

And as a secondary effect, it lowers team morale when a low performer is consistently draining other team members of their time. And lowered morale leads to lower performance and other issues.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

asdfman123 5y ago

The profession of "management" has a problem similar to one a lot of tech companies have: if you reward the generation of new ideas, you get a huge proliferation of them that aren't necessarily better and make everything more complicated. It's like these people are thinking, "Humans are messy and difficult? Better come up with a management technique that gives the illusion of control." But a piece of art is often finished once there's nothing left to remove. I once saw someone on Twitter whose bio said "deeply passionate about Agile." That made me low-key angry, because the last thing programmers need is a person who has dedicated their career to creating more process. If it works or makes things worse it doesn't matter -- their career is invested in creating process.

andor 5y ago
I agree, but the "agile" I know is actually about less process and more communication to deal with reality.
bartread 5y ago
> "deeply passionate about Agile" It makes me low key angry because I simply don't believe that Agile is anywhere near interesting enough to justify being "deeply passionate" about: it comes off as phoney. Beyond this it's just so narrow that it makes no sense. I can absolutely understand somebody who wants to find ways to make a company run better (more revenue, profit, more efficiency, better products, whatever), which will inevitably involve some amount of engineering processes. Somebody like the late Andy Grove would probably fit into this category, and that I can absolutely get on board with. But Agile is so far from the be-all-end-all of good process that to be "deeply passionate" about it is almost beyond satire. Good process should make things more effective, should make teams more effective, should make you more effective. Note: effective not productive. It's far too easy to be uselessly busy. As an executive a substantial proportion of my time is spent on "bullshit elimination"[0]: stopping things from happening that create unnecessary work, ideally before they start to cause serious issues. Instead, allow people to focus on the things that we employ them for and that, for the most part, they want to be doing (all jobs have some elements that we don't like, of course). And, importantly, instilling a culture of "bullshit elimination" in my teams. Sometimes that involves creating, modifying, or even killing processes - and enabling those in our teams to do so when they need to. The key is that process should be malleable and simplify rather than complicate. Formalised processes can often look complex even when they are a simplification because what happened before, ad hoc, was a large amount of unnecessary thrashing that was never captured. [0] Honestly, I'd rather be programming but SOMEBODY needs to do this, and it turns out I have some aptitude - and possibly the right temperament (thoughtful but just impatient enough; not actually rabid) - for it.

op00to 5y ago

Sorry, people who make mistakes are not low performers dragging the team down. Learning from mistakes in an open and non-judge mental way is a marker of a healthy team culture.

Dudeman112 5y ago
Do low performers not exist?
- op00to 5y ago
  Do you think the rain will hurt the rhubarb?
burlesona 5y ago
I agree completely. In my experience, low performers are people who do not learn from their mistakes, and even when given ample support and constructive feedback, do not adjust their behavior or make an earnest effort to improve. Fortunately most people don’t fall into that bucket, but unfortunately some do.

pas 5y ago

Stack ranking is basically the "up or out"[0] with the added idiocy that there's not enough space "up". That said, most of the problems stem from tying up project and team fit with employment and career. (Again a similar phenomenon in the military: commanders during WW2 were given a short time to achieve results. If they failed the command was transferred to someone else. It was not a stigma like today. [1]) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OehvY94N-WA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OehvY94N-WA

not_jd_salinger 5y ago

> Firing people is really, truly hard. Traumatizing even. For the people getting fired it certainly is, I used to think this was true of people doing the firing but my recent experiences have changed my view on this dramatically. I've had the misfortune of working at two places in a row that almost delighted in firing people. My experience at both places was that the firing had far less to do with skill or capability in the role, but moreso using the Amazon/Netflix model (by people who have never worked at either of these places) to justify removing anyone who is in any way critical of the organization. Earlier in my career the only people that got fired where ones that clearly did not contribute and where a source consistent pain for the rest of the team. Reasonable questioning of team direction and goals, and organization objectives was practically expected of good engineers. In the past few years I've seen repeated cases where valued members of the team that were respected for both their technical skills and personalities were removed because they questioned some of the decisions of management. One organization made particularly sure to smear any of these previous employees, and used them as examples to threaten anyone stepping out of line. I've been in situations where a team member is weighing down the rest of the group, and as frustrating as that can be, I much prefer it to the completely inhuman culture of firing I've seen becoming the norm at more and more tech companies.

stronglikedan 5y ago
> > Firing people is really, truly hard. Traumatizing even. This still holds true for most people that have to fire someone.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

Management is a difficult topic to discuss online because the average commenter is statistically far more likely to be an IC than a manager. Before I transitioned to management, I would read these stories from the perspective of an IC. That is, the one being fired. None of us likes to think of ourselves as under qualified or deserving of being fired, so these stories feel deeply unfair. They also play to tropes about businesses being inhumane or rigged against the individual, or the idea that everything that goes wrong is the manager’s fault rather than the blameless employee. As a manager, I read these stories and immediately think of the problematic employees I’ve had to deal with over the years. Firing people is never easy, as you said, but one of the epiphanies of management is watching a team’s performance and morale improve after a refractory employee is removed from the company. It’s hard to truly understand until you’ve been through it, but some times it’s just not possible to manage underperforming or even troublesome employees into good team members. It’s also not fair to the rest of the team if you have to spend 50% of your time dealing with 10% of the employees causing all of the problems. If nothing else, we have to acknowledge that interviewing is a highly imperfect process. It’s unrealistic expect companies to never make an incorrect hire, and it’s also unrealistic to expect companies to never fire any incorrect hires. Every company of significant size will always have some number of underperforming or troublesome employees. They don’t benefit by hiring people to fire them, but they do need to induce some targeted turnover to avoid accumulating incorrect hires.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
That's orthogonal to the point. There are also teams with no "refractory employees", no morale problems, and no performance problems. But according to this piece, Amazon and other companies who practice what used to be called stack ranking assume that someone needs to go anyway. It's pure cargo cult management. Not only does it have no relationship to performance, it actively degrades it. It actively degrades performance because these choices can easily become political. Competent people may disagree with management, and sometimes they disagree for good reasons. A culture that can't handle that is not a good culture. Good people who execute and have rational strategic insight are management track almost by definition, and throwing them out is not a winning move.
5y ago