> Conversely, keeping clueless people around is demoralizing and insulting to the people actually doing the work. I think this is only true in the most egregio

> Conversely, keeping clueless people around is demoralizing and insulting to the people actually doing the work. I think this is only true in the most egregious of cases. A somewhat counter-intuitive thing I've learned is that highly productive programmers like working with less productive programmers. They've spent a lot of time with this person, maybe got to like them on a personal level. But beyond that, they don't have to butt heads all the time, it's one more person to stamp your diff without excessive nitpicking, someone to bounce ideas off of, someone to handle the more mundane coding work, someone to share blame with. Almost like an assistant programmer. A backfill will have to trained and knowledge-transferred again from zero. This isn't to say the organization is best served by keeping low-performers around at full salary to keep their high performers happy. That depends on higher level organizational goals. My point is to support GP's quoted statement in your post, that firing is dangerous and can demoralize teams.