9 ms·

Firing

153 points by jayliew 14y ago

chris_wot 14y ago
"The good people bounce up, the bad ones bounce down" - That's a very broad, sweeping statement. I'd love to know how many people he's fired/known to be fired to see if this is true. I mean, does he constantly watch the working career of the folks he fired? How would he know whether the "bounce up" or "bounce down". Incidentally, how the heck does one "bounce down"?
- loteck 14y ago
  Thought the same thing. "At the time, I thought this just made him feel better about himself. Over time, I’ve seen the wisdom in what he said." No, you were right the first time. "The good ones" and "the bad ones"? I feel sorry for the "ones", period.
  - cdixon 14y ago
    I think you guys are being a bit too literal. This is how people talk in colloquially, and it's a common phrase in the hedge fund world where I was working at the time.
    - rhizome 14y ago
      That doesn't make the aphorism any more logical. To me it's probably trying to say that people who "bounce up" are worth more than others.
    - chris_wot 14y ago
      If I took it literally, then I'd be imagining "good" employees literally bouncing around, and "bad" employees... well, I have no idea how to bounce down, so perhaps my imagination is not as good as it should be. :-) However, I still don't see how you can back up your claims that good employees seem to recover better than bad employees. I don't see how you could know!
      - adrianhoward 14y ago
        However, I still don't see how you can back up your claims that good employees seem to recover better than bad employees. I don't see how you could know! You'll be surprised at the number of times you encounter folk you've worked with again. I suspect you're also more likely to stay in touch or hear more about the "good" employees.
- tedunangst 14y ago
  bounce down == sitting at home sulking and not looking for work
- corry 14y ago
  I took it as "bounce up" = reboot, refocus, jump to a better / better-suited position, use it as an opportunity for growth / moving up. "Bounce down" = settle for something worse quickly, victimize yourself, take it too personally, etc. Many of the people I've let go fit this pattern. I always tried to do what I could to help them use the firing as a way of "bouncing up" (although I don't think I was very successful). FWIW, I used to follow the careers of the first few people I let go. Not sure why exactly - combination of guilt and curiosity. I bet doing so is pretty common with younger founders / executives.
- protomyth 14y ago
  It is a broad statement and relies on the good people having a good or at least neutral support situation around them. Good people can have health problem or have people they are supporting in rough situations. The net result of firing them will be "bounce down" or "bury". As an employer you should do what best for all the people at the company, but do not kid yourself into thinking "good people" will recover and move on to a better place. It might happen and they will go on to fortune and fame. It might also be the final brick in the wall. That is just a nice way of making yourself feel better in this situation.
goochtek 14y ago
I liked the article. The part about firing early is very true. It's like ripping a Band-Aid off quickly rather than slowly. Just get it over with as it may affect your future and everyone else's, as the article also mentions. One thing that caught my eye though was in the comments. The user claims that the article could be put another way " why hiring right team is crucial for startups". I don't agree with that at all. Someone may look good on paper and interview great, but they may not be a good fit for the company. It may be anything from conflicts with other staff to consistent lateness. You can't find these out in an interview. You also can't find out by checking references as many employers will give glowing references to staff they want to get rid of but can't.
john_horton 14y ago
There's a famous paper in economics that looks at the long-term labor market outcomes for people that were laid-off because of plant closings versus those were just laid-off: http://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jlabec/v9y1991i4p351-80.html http://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jlabec/v9y1991i4p351-80.html The plant-closing people generally fair better: the idea is that the market/future employers infer that the firm used their discretion when making regular layoffs (using it as a chance to get rid of the low performers) but that no negative inference is warranted in the case of plant closings.
chime 14y ago
As I read points 1-3, I kept thinking "how do you fire someone very high up in the chain of command who is careful enough to never make a fireable offense and is also important enough that customers will raise eyebrows (e.g. CTO of a tech company or CFO of a finance company)?" Then I read: > 4) The other choice is firing everyone. When you look at it this way, rest of the reasons don't really matter. It is indeed possible for just one person to bring down them morale of their department, direct reports, or immediate team members. That in turn infects the rest of the company over time, slowly lowering the bar for performance, quality, and enthusiasm. And that can most certainly bring about 4) in the not-too-distant long term.
- drac 14y ago
  For people who's departure causes significant external ripples, it's never really couched as firing though, is it? There is a carefully coded message (perhaps even internally) about departing for other startups as yet unspecified, or of pursuing different opportunities or of spending time with the family. In many cases, will we even know if it was mutual or just an understandable need for a change of scene? Contrast the departures of Bret Anderson from Facebook, Naveen Selvadurai of Foursquare and Marco Arment from Tumblr [and these are just CTO/co-founder examples]
- _delirium 14y ago
  That's true, but firing one person can also cause surprisingly large problems for morale, depending on the person and circumstances. The classic case is the underproductive but friendly and intelligent person who has a good rapport with everyone in the office, good answers/comments in discussions with coworkers, willingness to do miscellaneous odd jobs and help people out, etc. Axing that person can depress the mood around the office and cause others to view management as harsh, especially if they had a higher estimation of the person's productivity than management did.
  - mindcrime 14y ago
    The classic case is the underproductive but friendly and intelligent person who has a good rapport with everyone in the office, good answers/comments in discussions with coworkers, willingness to do miscellaneous odd jobs and help people out, etc. In that case, I'd question if that person is truly unproductive. More likely management just doesn't understand how to properly value their actual role, which may not be reflected by their job title. In that case, instead of firing them, it might be better to either: A. understand the actual value they deliver and leave well enough alone or B. create a new title for them, which reflects the value they produce and then hire somebody else for their old position.
DanielRibeiro 14y ago
Even then, some startups, like Github, have managed not fire anyone in 4 years[1]. Of course, there are people that say that Github is a special case[2]. Which I believe is a nice way to deflect the hard question: "how can we do better?" Which, as it seems, is the very question that Chris Dixon is tackling. [1] https://twitter.com/timanderson/status/178093828111208449 https://twitter.com/timanderson/status/178093828111208449 [2] http://swombat.com/2011/3/30/github http://swombat.com/2011/3/30/github
- swombat 14y ago
  I don't think I'm so much deflecting the question as much as just highlighting that Github is a special case, so one should take extra care when translating their insights and lessons to one's business. Github is a product for geeks (few of those take off), build by a founder team consisting exclusively of uber-geeks, with the exact right timing (wasn't possible before, and someone else would have done git hosting later - and did, but less well), in a winner-takes-all market (which, to be fair to them, they engineered - source code hosting didn't use to be a winner-takes-all market, but github's social features made it so). Moreover, Github lent itself very well to a viral spread model (doesn't work in most cases, and is hard to bolt on to an unsuitable product), and so had less need for sales efforts than most B2B products. I'm not putting down Github's team (they executed brilliantly), or even the lessons that they garnered - those are worthwhile lessons to pay attention to and learn from. However, be careful when translating those to your startup, which is probably a very different beast and may crash and burn if you just apply Github's lessons directly!
  - DanielRibeiro 14y ago
    I obviously completely agree with you (being a long time reader of your blog). The point is not that Github is a special case, but that all startups are a special case, and every founder has to figure out what works and what it doesn't for their own. I have spinned up the contrarian touch a bit in order to exactly get this kind of reaction, and to raise this conversation, which I don't think we have enough.
    - 14y ago
nostromo 14y ago
> The good people bounce up, the bad ones bounce down. That's tautological if you're judging by the future result. But that's just a nitpick. Nice post. #4 is a great way of framing a bad situation.
physcab 14y ago
This article is half as good as it could be. The underlying assumption here is that you already know an employee is bad and that you need to fire them. But how do you know an employee is bad? This is a question that no one seems to get right, unless its fairly obvious. If they stole something, no brainer. If they sexually harassed an employee, should be a no brainer. And if the company is in a financially distressed position, it may be unpleasant to fire someone, but atleast its understandable. What if the company is healthy and employee did nothing obviously wrong? Then I guess, you look at the quality of their work. But judging quality is subjective, and you're likely to have a sliding scale depending on employee's past experience and delta to their start date. And what about periodic reviews? What about quarterly objectives? What about what other employee's think? How long do you warn an employee before you go ahead with it? I think one of the better ways of dealing with firing is how it was handled in grad school. At my school, you had a series of qualifying examinations and you had a committee. The rules were pretty clear: 2 chances to pass and if not, goodbye. One of the tests was an oral examination in front of the committee of 5. There weren't any clear answers, but the committee would convene and in an hour they'd have a decision with lots of feedback. I failed my first attempt. But guess what? After that, I honed in on their feedback, worked my fucking ass off and passed my second attempt with flying colors. I don't see this happening at many (or any) companies. I'm not sure why, but IMHO employers use the "at will termination" too liberally. Either that, or they let the bad employees stay far too long. Sometimes I wonder if a second chance would help bubble good employees to the top when you had previously mis-classified them as bad or vice versa. Firing scares the shit out of people...why not make this process less of a surprise than it has to be.
- Jare 14y ago
  I've had all sorts of experiences: fired people who were good but their minds were elsewhere, fired bad people that shouldn't have been hired; I have waited too long to fire someone, and also I have kept people I intended to fire and seen them improve. Outside of the obvious cases you cite, firing should be the end of a process, not an isolated action. As soon as you start having real doubts about the performance or fitness of an employee, have at least two meetings with them to discuss the issues and create improvement plans and actions, before resorting to firing them. Those meetings are hard to approach correctly, but not as hard as actually firing the person, so please do not wait to have them, and make the most out of them. They will not just benefit the employee (clarifying your expectations of them), but often also yourself (understanding your own mistakes as a manager).
spaghetti 14y ago
I enjoyed this article. The emphasis on firing someone and still being friends or peers is a nice separation between business and relating to other people. I'm curious about employer/business owner and worker relationships going forward. There's major downsides to full-time employees: it's difficult to hire someone that's skilled and gets along with others and firing a full-time employee is not a pleasant experience for anyone. There's also additional overhead associated with benefits and hr departments. The modern tech ecosystem has eliminated much of my need to hire other full-time employees. Github takes care of version control. Mixpanel takes care of analytics. Even Airbnb simplifies traveling to the extent that I don't need any help. I can just pay contractors and freelancers for the work where I do require help. The point is that full-time employees are looking less and less attractive to someone like me who's starting a new company. The path of least resistance is to just adjust my business structure or model to minimize the number of full-time employees I might need in the future. There are certainly upsides to having full-time employees. And many companies require them. I think the extent to which I'm avoiding full-time employees long-term is interesting. I doubt I'm the only person considering this. So I'm curious how the employer/business owner and worker relationships will change in the next decade or so.
- Monkeyget 14y ago
  Another model which already exists today is the 'Hollywood model'. People will get together, create a movie and then disband once the movie is done. In 'the nature of the firm'[0] Donald Coase asked himself why there are businesses with employees at all when an entrepreneur could instead contract the work, a la Hollywood model. The ultimate answer is that the transaction cost of having to go to a market every time you need to get something done outweighs the inefficiencies of having employees. He got the Nobel prize for that. I got acquainted of those notions trough the book 'Here 'Comes Everybody' [1]. It talks about the way the internet reduce transaction costs and allow new forms of sharing and collaboration that weren't possible before. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase#The_Nature_of_the_Firm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase#The_Nature_of_the_... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody
  - 14y ago
Professoroak 14y ago
I keep reading about how managers fire employees and I can't help but think there was something under the surface going on when I was fired. I wasn't given any warning or explanation, and it came as a shock to coworkers that I worker closely with. Unfortunately, I'm take with trying to describe this situation to every potential employer anyway. Its great to hear that maybe my case was there exception, and that most employers are more transparent and open about performance expectations and how their employees are doing at their job.
- slurgfest 14y ago
  Sorry to hear that. Just because people are over you in an organization doesn't mean they are wise and mature. Of course, if you are in the position to hire and fire then you get to make reality to some extent because you have more power. The employee has to pretend the boss knew what they were doing even afterward on penalty of being blackballed. It's not so easy to get an employer blackballed because somebody else always needs the money. And the culture says that a complaining employee is a liability, and if someone was fired or not hired then there is probably a good reason not to hire them. Hiring and firing are just another job, and they are done by the same smart, average and stupid people doing other jobs. Let's not pretend that these decisions only ever depend on sound, objective calls completely grounded in consideration of facts and business.
citricsquid 14y ago
Something I've been curious about relating to this topic, what do you do in a situation where an ex-employee (or ex co-worker) is lying about their position with the company? Are you allowed to sue for misrepresentation (if such a thing exists) or is it pretty much deal with it? For example someone claiming to have been with the company for a year longer than they really were in a role they never held (eg: someone working in customer service at Facebook from 2008 - 2009 then claiming on their resumé they worked in the engineering department from 2008 - 2011).
- scott_w 14y ago
  Possibly not, unless you can prove it's causing harm to your company. The hiring person can certainly sue somebody for lying on their CV e.g. after calling your company and finding out they misrepresented their position.
  - stellar678 14y ago
    Sue? How about telling them you don't hire people who misrepresent themselves, then not hiring them. Why in god's name would you sue a person for lying on a resume?
    - markokocic 14y ago
      More work for USA lawyers. Everyone want to sue over everything, and then complain when someone else sues over only slightly different reasons :-)
    - tedunangst 14y ago
      Tangentially related. http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/blog/2012/05/lawsuit-seen-likely-in-yahoo-ceo.html http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/blog/2012/05/lawsuit-seen...
    - scott_w 14y ago
      I don't know how things work in the USA, but in the UK, your references don't get contacted until after you're hired, usually on a probation period. If the wage you're being paid is high enough, it could be worthwhile taking someone to court to claim it back, as they're effectively defrauding your company.
dsirijus 14y ago
If you'd replace "firing" with "dumping your gf/bf", this would end up in teen column.
- ebiester 14y ago
  Judging by what I've seen of adult relationships, it's a column that's needed by more than just "teens." We, as a species, are afraid of rejection, and we hate being the ones to reject another person. I don't know if it's evolutionary or so ingrained in every culture as to be effectively evolutionary, but somewhere in our caveman brain, we're kicking someone out of a small tribe and leaving them to die, something to be taken very seriously. Further, we've told these people to quit their current stable jobs, or start making plans with the income they have, rather than thinking of it as fleeting or temporary. It feels like an awful human thing to do, especially to a likable person. Many of the firing advice columns I've seen are as simple as "it's not the end of the world for either of you." And that's a lesson that takes more than one link on HN to get. (I think it's also a lesson that's hard in most of our dating lives, from what I've seen..)
  - dsirijus 14y ago
    Don't really agree with that one. Forcing a relationship to work makes one re-evaluate oneself which might work for better, not worse. On the other hand, it's time and labour intensive process, and at some point, you really need to cut it. So, in the article, I basically have issue with point 2, "doing it early". No, you need to try to make it work, and make that process beneficial for both parties. Work it up to a certain point, of course.
kunle 14y ago
Spot on post. So many times when talking to seasoned/experienced founders, this comes up as the thing that most founders (seasoned or first timers) get wrong. To quote Max Levchin (on #2): "When there's a doubt, there is no doubt."
- slurgfest 14y ago
  > "When there's a doubt, there is no doubt." Too bad employees can't think this way about the companies they are at.
  - tedunangst 14y ago
    Why not? I've left companies when things went sour. I know lots of people who have.
adrianhoward 14y ago
There's two reasons for firing somebody in my experience. Hiring a bad employee and hiring the wrong employee. This list is mostly about the first kind I think - because of the line "Some people who get fired react by fixing their weaknesses". The wrong person doesn't have "weaknesses" to fix. You hired a round peg, when you should have hired a square one. Its your fault - not theirs. (Okay - the "bad" employee hire is your fault too, but it's a different kind of mistake.)
sparknlaunch 14y ago
Can better hiring method avoid the need to fire staff? Could you create a culture that retains the right people and forces wrong people to leave? Looking at previous work experiences, you sometimes wonder how some people ever got through the interview process.
- adrianhoward 14y ago
  Can better hiring method avoid the need to fire staff? Could you create a culture that retains the right people and forces wrong people to leave? No. It assumes that the "wrong" people now were the "wrong" people from the start. Your business changes. People change. The combination of those two factors mean that sometimes you have no choice but to fire somebody.
  - heliodor 14y ago
    Your point about businesses changing reminds me of the arguments I've read in the past that there's too much full time employment and not enough freelancing. The idea is to get the best person for the task then move on instead of constantly trying to adapt everyone to the latest departmental needs.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
tokenadult 14y ago
Firing is gut-wrenching for the person who does the firing, and for the person who gets fired (of course). The submitted blog post makes the point that sometimes, despite the short-term wrenching of guts, everyone is better off if an employee who doesn't fit in one workplace moves on to another. Several of the interesting comments here ask what connection there is between how someone is hired and whether or not someone will be fired. Even if it's not possible to guarantee that you'll never hire someone whom you'll later need to fire, it sounds like all of us want to reduce the risk of making hiring mistakes that will lead to unpleasant experiences later with employees who just don't fit. With that in mind, I'd like to ask some questions. What hiring procedures are you using now? How structured are your hiring procedures? How much looking ahead to reducing the probability of future firing is built into your hiring procedures? Hacker News readers who haven't seen it recently may be interested in a FAQ document about hiring employees, based on suggestions I've received from several participants here in previous discussions of how companies hire. Many hackers think many companies hire based on crazy procedures. Research suggests that most companies in most places don't use the best available hiring procedures. I'd appreciate comments about the hiring procedures FAQ below. There are many discussions here on HN about company hiring procedures. From participants in earlier discussions I have learned about many useful references on the subject, which I have gathered here in a FAQ file. The review article by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings," Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274 http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%... sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews for job experience, checks for academic credentials, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations. The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well (but only about at the 0.5 level, standing alone). One is a general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general mental ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than any other single-factor hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes. Because of a Supreme Court decision in the United States (the decision does not apply in other countries, which have different statutes about employment), it is legally risk to give job applicants general mental ability tests such as a straight-up IQ test (as was commonplace in my parents' generation) as a routine part of hiring procedures. The Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196978&q=Griggs+Duke+Power&hl=en&as_sdt=2,24 http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196... interpreted a federal statute about employment discrimination and held that general intelligence tests used in hiring that could have a "disparate impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." In other words, a company that wants to use a test like the Wonderlic, or like the SAT, or like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ tests, in a hiring procedure had best conduct a specific validation study of the test related to performance on the job in question. Some companies do the validation study, and use IQ-like tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like tests in hiring and hope that no one sues (which is not what I would advise any company). Note that a brain-teaser-type test used in a hiring procedure could be challenged as illegal if it can be shown to have disparate impact on some job applicants. A company defending a brain-teaser test for hiring would have to defend it by showing it is supported by a validation study demonstrating that the test is related to successful performance on the job. Such validation studies can be quite expensive. (Companies outside the United States are regulated by different laws. One other big difference between the United States and other countries is the relative ease with which workers may be fired in the United States, allowing companies to correct hiring mistakes by terminating the employment of the workers they hired mistakenly. The more legal protections a worker has from being fired, the more careful companies have to be about hiring in the first place.) The social background to the legal environment in the United States is explained in many books about hiring procedures http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6TEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA271&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology&ots=iCXkgXrlOV&sig=ctblj9SW2Dth7TceaFSNIdVMoEw#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology&f=false http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6... http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6TEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA95&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology&ots=iCXkgXrnMW&sig=LKLi-deKtnP20VYZo9x0jfvqzLI#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology&f=false http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6... Some of the social background appears to be changing in the most recent few decades, with the prospect for further changes. http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_Racial_Inequality.pdf http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_R... http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWlMYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA9&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology+%22predictive+validity%22+Duke+Power&ots=5O9Hx_E1vY&sig=g-zERWztBWq3h4guEuv9VVkTh8I#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology%20%22predictive%20validity%22%20Duke%20Power&f=false http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWl... Previous discussion on HN pointed out that the Schmidt & Hunter (1998) article showed that multi-factor procedures work better than single-factor procedures, a summary of that article we can find in the current professional literature, in "Reasons for being selective when choosing personnel selection procedures" (2010) by Cornelius J. König, Ute-Christine Klehe, Matthias Berchtold, and Martin Kleinmann: "Choosing personnel selection procedures could be so simple: Grab your copy of Schmidt and Hunter (1998) and read their Table 1 (again). This should remind you to use a general mental ability (GMA) test in combination with an integrity test, a structured interview, a work sample test, and/or a conscientiousness measure." http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/preprint_j.1468_2389.2010.00485.x.pdf http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/prepri... But the 2010 article notes, looking at actual practice of companies around the world, "However, this idea does not seem to capture what is actually happening in organizations, as practitioners worldwide often use procedures with low predictive validity and regularly ignore procedures that are more valid (e.g., Di Milia, 2004; Lievens & De Paepe, 2004; Ryan, McFarland, Baron, & Page, 1999; Scholarios & Lockyer, 1999; Schuler, Hell, Trapmann, Schaar, & Boramir, 2007; Taylor, Keelty, & McDonnell, 2002). For example, the highly valid work sample tests are hardly used in the US, and the potentially rather useless procedure of graphology (Dean, 1992; Neter & Ben-Shakhar, 1989) is applied somewhere between occasionally and often in France (Ryan et al., 1999). In Germany, the use of GMA tests is reported to be low and to be decreasing (i.e., only 30% of the companies surveyed by Schuler et al., 2007, now use them)."

153 points by jayliew 14y ago

"The good people bounce up, the bad ones bounce down" - That's a very broad, sweeping statement. I'd love to know how many people he's fired/known to be fired to see if this is true. I mean, does he constantly watch the working career of the folks he fired? How would he know whether the "bounce up" or "bounce down". Incidentally, how the heck does one "bounce down"?

loteck 14y ago
Thought the same thing. "At the time, I thought this just made him feel better about himself. Over time, I’ve seen the wisdom in what he said." No, you were right the first time. "The good ones" and "the bad ones"? I feel sorry for the "ones", period.
- cdixon 14y ago
  I think you guys are being a bit too literal. This is how people talk in colloquially, and it's a common phrase in the hedge fund world where I was working at the time.
  - rhizome 14y ago
    That doesn't make the aphorism any more logical. To me it's probably trying to say that people who "bounce up" are worth more than others.
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    If I took it literally, then I'd be imagining "good" employees literally bouncing around, and "bad" employees... well, I have no idea how to bounce down, so perhaps my imagination is not as good as it should be. :-) However, I still don't see how you can back up your claims that good employees seem to recover better than bad employees. I don't see how you could know!
    - adrianhoward 14y ago
      However, I still don't see how you can back up your claims that good employees seem to recover better than bad employees. I don't see how you could know! You'll be surprised at the number of times you encounter folk you've worked with again. I suspect you're also more likely to stay in touch or hear more about the "good" employees.
tedunangst 14y ago
bounce down == sitting at home sulking and not looking for work
corry 14y ago
I took it as "bounce up" = reboot, refocus, jump to a better / better-suited position, use it as an opportunity for growth / moving up. "Bounce down" = settle for something worse quickly, victimize yourself, take it too personally, etc. Many of the people I've let go fit this pattern. I always tried to do what I could to help them use the firing as a way of "bouncing up" (although I don't think I was very successful). FWIW, I used to follow the careers of the first few people I let go. Not sure why exactly - combination of guilt and curiosity. I bet doing so is pretty common with younger founders / executives.
protomyth 14y ago
It is a broad statement and relies on the good people having a good or at least neutral support situation around them. Good people can have health problem or have people they are supporting in rough situations. The net result of firing them will be "bounce down" or "bury". As an employer you should do what best for all the people at the company, but do not kid yourself into thinking "good people" will recover and move on to a better place. It might happen and they will go on to fortune and fame. It might also be the final brick in the wall. That is just a nice way of making yourself feel better in this situation.

goochtek 14y ago

I liked the article. The part about firing early is very true. It's like ripping a Band-Aid off quickly rather than slowly. Just get it over with as it may affect your future and everyone else's, as the article also mentions. One thing that caught my eye though was in the comments. The user claims that the article could be put another way " why hiring right team is crucial for startups". I don't agree with that at all. Someone may look good on paper and interview great, but they may not be a good fit for the company. It may be anything from conflicts with other staff to consistent lateness. You can't find these out in an interview. You also can't find out by checking references as many employers will give glowing references to staff they want to get rid of but can't.

john_horton 14y ago

There's a famous paper in economics that looks at the long-term labor market outcomes for people that were laid-off because of plant closings versus those were just laid-off: http://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jlabec/v9y1991i4p351-80.html http://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jlabec/v9y1991i4p351-80.html The plant-closing people generally fair better: the idea is that the market/future employers infer that the firm used their discretion when making regular layoffs (using it as a chance to get rid of the low performers) but that no negative inference is warranted in the case of plant closings.

chime 14y ago

As I read points 1-3, I kept thinking "how do you fire someone very high up in the chain of command who is careful enough to never make a fireable offense and is also important enough that customers will raise eyebrows (e.g. CTO of a tech company or CFO of a finance company)?" Then I read: > 4) The other choice is firing everyone. When you look at it this way, rest of the reasons don't really matter. It is indeed possible for just one person to bring down them morale of their department, direct reports, or immediate team members. That in turn infects the rest of the company over time, slowly lowering the bar for performance, quality, and enthusiasm. And that can most certainly bring about 4) in the not-too-distant long term.

drac 14y ago
For people who's departure causes significant external ripples, it's never really couched as firing though, is it? There is a carefully coded message (perhaps even internally) about departing for other startups as yet unspecified, or of pursuing different opportunities or of spending time with the family. In many cases, will we even know if it was mutual or just an understandable need for a change of scene? Contrast the departures of Bret Anderson from Facebook, Naveen Selvadurai of Foursquare and Marco Arment from Tumblr [and these are just CTO/co-founder examples]
_delirium 14y ago
That's true, but firing one person can also cause surprisingly large problems for morale, depending on the person and circumstances. The classic case is the underproductive but friendly and intelligent person who has a good rapport with everyone in the office, good answers/comments in discussions with coworkers, willingness to do miscellaneous odd jobs and help people out, etc. Axing that person can depress the mood around the office and cause others to view management as harsh, especially if they had a higher estimation of the person's productivity than management did.
- mindcrime 14y ago
  The classic case is the underproductive but friendly and intelligent person who has a good rapport with everyone in the office, good answers/comments in discussions with coworkers, willingness to do miscellaneous odd jobs and help people out, etc. In that case, I'd question if that person is truly unproductive. More likely management just doesn't understand how to properly value their actual role, which may not be reflected by their job title. In that case, instead of firing them, it might be better to either: A. understand the actual value they deliver and leave well enough alone or B. create a new title for them, which reflects the value they produce and then hire somebody else for their old position.

DanielRibeiro 14y ago

Even then, some startups, like Github, have managed not fire anyone in 4 years[1]. Of course, there are people that say that Github is a special case[2]. Which I believe is a nice way to deflect the hard question: "how can we do better?" Which, as it seems, is the very question that Chris Dixon is tackling. [1] https://twitter.com/timanderson/status/178093828111208449 https://twitter.com/timanderson/status/178093828111208449 [2] http://swombat.com/2011/3/30/github http://swombat.com/2011/3/30/github

swombat 14y ago
I don't think I'm so much deflecting the question as much as just highlighting that Github is a special case, so one should take extra care when translating their insights and lessons to one's business. Github is a product for geeks (few of those take off), build by a founder team consisting exclusively of uber-geeks, with the exact right timing (wasn't possible before, and someone else would have done git hosting later - and did, but less well), in a winner-takes-all market (which, to be fair to them, they engineered - source code hosting didn't use to be a winner-takes-all market, but github's social features made it so). Moreover, Github lent itself very well to a viral spread model (doesn't work in most cases, and is hard to bolt on to an unsuitable product), and so had less need for sales efforts than most B2B products. I'm not putting down Github's team (they executed brilliantly), or even the lessons that they garnered - those are worthwhile lessons to pay attention to and learn from. However, be careful when translating those to your startup, which is probably a very different beast and may crash and burn if you just apply Github's lessons directly!
- DanielRibeiro 14y ago
  I obviously completely agree with you (being a long time reader of your blog). The point is not that Github is a special case, but that all startups are a special case, and every founder has to figure out what works and what it doesn't for their own. I have spinned up the contrarian touch a bit in order to exactly get this kind of reaction, and to raise this conversation, which I don't think we have enough.
  - 14y ago

nostromo 14y ago

> The good people bounce up, the bad ones bounce down. That's tautological if you're judging by the future result. But that's just a nitpick. Nice post. #4 is a great way of framing a bad situation.

physcab 14y ago

This article is half as good as it could be. The underlying assumption here is that you already know an employee is bad and that you need to fire them. But how do you know an employee is bad? This is a question that no one seems to get right, unless its fairly obvious. If they stole something, no brainer. If they sexually harassed an employee, should be a no brainer. And if the company is in a financially distressed position, it may be unpleasant to fire someone, but atleast its understandable. What if the company is healthy and employee did nothing obviously wrong? Then I guess, you look at the quality of their work. But judging quality is subjective, and you're likely to have a sliding scale depending on employee's past experience and delta to their start date. And what about periodic reviews? What about quarterly objectives? What about what other employee's think? How long do you warn an employee before you go ahead with it? I think one of the better ways of dealing with firing is how it was handled in grad school. At my school, you had a series of qualifying examinations and you had a committee. The rules were pretty clear: 2 chances to pass and if not, goodbye. One of the tests was an oral examination in front of the committee of 5. There weren't any clear answers, but the committee would convene and in an hour they'd have a decision with lots of feedback. I failed my first attempt. But guess what? After that, I honed in on their feedback, worked my fucking ass off and passed my second attempt with flying colors. I don't see this happening at many (or any) companies. I'm not sure why, but IMHO employers use the "at will termination" too liberally. Either that, or they let the bad employees stay far too long. Sometimes I wonder if a second chance would help bubble good employees to the top when you had previously mis-classified them as bad or vice versa. Firing scares the shit out of people...why not make this process less of a surprise than it has to be.

Jare 14y ago
I've had all sorts of experiences: fired people who were good but their minds were elsewhere, fired bad people that shouldn't have been hired; I have waited too long to fire someone, and also I have kept people I intended to fire and seen them improve. Outside of the obvious cases you cite, firing should be the end of a process, not an isolated action. As soon as you start having real doubts about the performance or fitness of an employee, have at least two meetings with them to discuss the issues and create improvement plans and actions, before resorting to firing them. Those meetings are hard to approach correctly, but not as hard as actually firing the person, so please do not wait to have them, and make the most out of them. They will not just benefit the employee (clarifying your expectations of them), but often also yourself (understanding your own mistakes as a manager).

spaghetti 14y ago

I enjoyed this article. The emphasis on firing someone and still being friends or peers is a nice separation between business and relating to other people. I'm curious about employer/business owner and worker relationships going forward. There's major downsides to full-time employees: it's difficult to hire someone that's skilled and gets along with others and firing a full-time employee is not a pleasant experience for anyone. There's also additional overhead associated with benefits and hr departments. The modern tech ecosystem has eliminated much of my need to hire other full-time employees. Github takes care of version control. Mixpanel takes care of analytics. Even Airbnb simplifies traveling to the extent that I don't need any help. I can just pay contractors and freelancers for the work where I do require help. The point is that full-time employees are looking less and less attractive to someone like me who's starting a new company. The path of least resistance is to just adjust my business structure or model to minimize the number of full-time employees I might need in the future. There are certainly upsides to having full-time employees. And many companies require them. I think the extent to which I'm avoiding full-time employees long-term is interesting. I doubt I'm the only person considering this. So I'm curious how the employer/business owner and worker relationships will change in the next decade or so.

Monkeyget 14y ago
Another model which already exists today is the 'Hollywood model'. People will get together, create a movie and then disband once the movie is done. In 'the nature of the firm'[0] Donald Coase asked himself why there are businesses with employees at all when an entrepreneur could instead contract the work, a la Hollywood model. The ultimate answer is that the transaction cost of having to go to a market every time you need to get something done outweighs the inefficiencies of having employees. He got the Nobel prize for that. I got acquainted of those notions trough the book 'Here 'Comes Everybody' [1]. It talks about the way the internet reduce transaction costs and allow new forms of sharing and collaboration that weren't possible before. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase#The_Nature_of_the_Firm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase#The_Nature_of_the_... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody
- 14y ago

Professoroak 14y ago

I keep reading about how managers fire employees and I can't help but think there was something under the surface going on when I was fired. I wasn't given any warning or explanation, and it came as a shock to coworkers that I worker closely with. Unfortunately, I'm take with trying to describe this situation to every potential employer anyway. Its great to hear that maybe my case was there exception, and that most employers are more transparent and open about performance expectations and how their employees are doing at their job.

slurgfest 14y ago
Sorry to hear that. Just because people are over you in an organization doesn't mean they are wise and mature. Of course, if you are in the position to hire and fire then you get to make reality to some extent because you have more power. The employee has to pretend the boss knew what they were doing even afterward on penalty of being blackballed. It's not so easy to get an employer blackballed because somebody else always needs the money. And the culture says that a complaining employee is a liability, and if someone was fired or not hired then there is probably a good reason not to hire them. Hiring and firing are just another job, and they are done by the same smart, average and stupid people doing other jobs. Let's not pretend that these decisions only ever depend on sound, objective calls completely grounded in consideration of facts and business.

citricsquid 14y ago

Something I've been curious about relating to this topic, what do you do in a situation where an ex-employee (or ex co-worker) is lying about their position with the company? Are you allowed to sue for misrepresentation (if such a thing exists) or is it pretty much deal with it? For example someone claiming to have been with the company for a year longer than they really were in a role they never held (eg: someone working in customer service at Facebook from 2008 - 2009 then claiming on their resumé they worked in the engineering department from 2008 - 2011).

scott_w 14y ago
Possibly not, unless you can prove it's causing harm to your company. The hiring person can certainly sue somebody for lying on their CV e.g. after calling your company and finding out they misrepresented their position.
- stellar678 14y ago
  Sue? How about telling them you don't hire people who misrepresent themselves, then not hiring them. Why in god's name would you sue a person for lying on a resume?
  - markokocic 14y ago
    More work for USA lawyers. Everyone want to sue over everything, and then complain when someone else sues over only slightly different reasons :-)
  - tedunangst 14y ago
    Tangentially related. http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/blog/2012/05/lawsuit-seen-likely-in-yahoo-ceo.html http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/blog/2012/05/lawsuit-seen...
  - scott_w 14y ago
    I don't know how things work in the USA, but in the UK, your references don't get contacted until after you're hired, usually on a probation period. If the wage you're being paid is high enough, it could be worthwhile taking someone to court to claim it back, as they're effectively defrauding your company.

dsirijus 14y ago

If you'd replace "firing" with "dumping your gf/bf", this would end up in teen column.

ebiester 14y ago
Judging by what I've seen of adult relationships, it's a column that's needed by more than just "teens." We, as a species, are afraid of rejection, and we hate being the ones to reject another person. I don't know if it's evolutionary or so ingrained in every culture as to be effectively evolutionary, but somewhere in our caveman brain, we're kicking someone out of a small tribe and leaving them to die, something to be taken very seriously. Further, we've told these people to quit their current stable jobs, or start making plans with the income they have, rather than thinking of it as fleeting or temporary. It feels like an awful human thing to do, especially to a likable person. Many of the firing advice columns I've seen are as simple as "it's not the end of the world for either of you." And that's a lesson that takes more than one link on HN to get. (I think it's also a lesson that's hard in most of our dating lives, from what I've seen..)
- dsirijus 14y ago
  Don't really agree with that one. Forcing a relationship to work makes one re-evaluate oneself which might work for better, not worse. On the other hand, it's time and labour intensive process, and at some point, you really need to cut it. So, in the article, I basically have issue with point 2, "doing it early". No, you need to try to make it work, and make that process beneficial for both parties. Work it up to a certain point, of course.

kunle 14y ago

Spot on post. So many times when talking to seasoned/experienced founders, this comes up as the thing that most founders (seasoned or first timers) get wrong. To quote Max Levchin (on #2): "When there's a doubt, there is no doubt."

slurgfest 14y ago
> "When there's a doubt, there is no doubt." Too bad employees can't think this way about the companies they are at.
- tedunangst 14y ago
  Why not? I've left companies when things went sour. I know lots of people who have.

adrianhoward 14y ago

There's two reasons for firing somebody in my experience. Hiring a bad employee and hiring the wrong employee. This list is mostly about the first kind I think - because of the line "Some people who get fired react by fixing their weaknesses". The wrong person doesn't have "weaknesses" to fix. You hired a round peg, when you should have hired a square one. Its your fault - not theirs. (Okay - the "bad" employee hire is your fault too, but it's a different kind of mistake.)

sparknlaunch 14y ago

Can better hiring method avoid the need to fire staff? Could you create a culture that retains the right people and forces wrong people to leave? Looking at previous work experiences, you sometimes wonder how some people ever got through the interview process.

adrianhoward 14y ago
Can better hiring method avoid the need to fire staff? Could you create a culture that retains the right people and forces wrong people to leave? No. It assumes that the "wrong" people now were the "wrong" people from the start. Your business changes. People change. The combination of those two factors mean that sometimes you have no choice but to fire somebody.
- heliodor 14y ago
  Your point about businesses changing reminds me of the arguments I've read in the past that there's too much full time employment and not enough freelancing. The idea is to get the best person for the task then move on instead of constantly trying to adapt everyone to the latest departmental needs.

deleted 14y ago

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tokenadult 14y ago

Firing is gut-wrenching for the person who does the firing, and for the person who gets fired (of course). The submitted blog post makes the point that sometimes, despite the short-term wrenching of guts, everyone is better off if an employee who doesn't fit in one workplace moves on to another. Several of the interesting comments here ask what connection there is between how someone is hired and whether or not someone will be fired. Even if it's not possible to guarantee that you'll never hire someone whom you'll later need to fire, it sounds like all of us want to reduce the risk of making hiring mistakes that will lead to unpleasant experiences later with employees who just don't fit. With that in mind, I'd like to ask some questions. What hiring procedures are you using now? How structured are your hiring procedures? How much looking ahead to reducing the probability of future firing is built into your hiring procedures? Hacker News readers who haven't seen it recently may be interested in a FAQ document about hiring employees, based on suggestions I've received from several participants here in previous discussions of how companies hire. Many hackers think many companies hire based on crazy procedures. Research suggests that most companies in most places don't use the best available hiring procedures. I'd appreciate comments about the hiring procedures FAQ below. There are many discussions here on HN about company hiring procedures. From participants in earlier discussions I have learned about many useful references on the subject, which I have gathered here in a FAQ file. The review article by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings," Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274 http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%... sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews for job experience, checks for academic credentials, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations. The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well (but only about at the 0.5 level, standing alone). One is a general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general mental ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than any other single-factor hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes. Because of a Supreme Court decision in the United States (the decision does not apply in other countries, which have different statutes about employment), it is legally risk to give job applicants general mental ability tests such as a straight-up IQ test (as was commonplace in my parents' generation) as a routine part of hiring procedures. The Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196978&q=Griggs+Duke+Power&hl=en&as_sdt=2,24 http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196... interpreted a federal statute about employment discrimination and held that general intelligence tests used in hiring that could have a "disparate impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." In other words, a company that wants to use a test like the Wonderlic, or like the SAT, or like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ tests, in a hiring procedure had best conduct a specific validation study of the test related to performance on the job in question. Some companies do the validation study, and use IQ-like tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like tests in hiring and hope that no one sues (which is not what I would advise any company). Note that a brain-teaser-type test used in a hiring procedure could be challenged as illegal if it can be shown to have disparate impact on some job applicants. A company defending a brain-teaser test for hiring would have to defend it by showing it is supported by a validation study demonstrating that the test is related to successful performance on the job. Such validation studies can be quite expensive. (Companies outside the United States are regulated by different laws. One other big difference between the United States and other countries is the relative ease with which workers may be fired in the United States, allowing companies to correct hiring mistakes by terminating the employment of the workers they hired mistakenly. The more legal protections a worker has from being fired, the more careful companies have to be about hiring in the first place.) The social background to the legal environment in the United States is explained in many books about hiring procedures http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6TEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA271&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology&ots=iCXkgXrlOV&sig=ctblj9SW2Dth7TceaFSNIdVMoEw#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology&f=false http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6... http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6TEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA95&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology&ots=iCXkgXrnMW&sig=LKLi-deKtnP20VYZo9x0jfvqzLI#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology&f=false http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6... Some of the social background appears to be changing in the most recent few decades, with the prospect for further changes. http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_Racial_Inequality.pdf http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_R... http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWlMYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA9&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology+%22predictive+validity%22+Duke+Power&ots=5O9Hx_E1vY&sig=g-zERWztBWq3h4guEuv9VVkTh8I#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology%20%22predictive%20validity%22%20Duke%20Power&f=false http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWl... Previous discussion on HN pointed out that the Schmidt & Hunter (1998) article showed that multi-factor procedures work better than single-factor procedures, a summary of that article we can find in the current professional literature, in "Reasons for being selective when choosing personnel selection procedures" (2010) by Cornelius J. König, Ute-Christine Klehe, Matthias Berchtold, and Martin Kleinmann: "Choosing personnel selection procedures could be so simple: Grab your copy of Schmidt and Hunter (1998) and read their Table 1 (again). This should remind you to use a general mental ability (GMA) test in combination with an integrity test, a structured interview, a work sample test, and/or a conscientiousness measure." http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/preprint_j.1468_2389.2010.00485.x.pdf http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/prepri... But the 2010 article notes, looking at actual practice of companies around the world, "However, this idea does not seem to capture what is actually happening in organizations, as practitioners worldwide often use procedures with low predictive validity and regularly ignore procedures that are more valid (e.g., Di Milia, 2004; Lievens & De Paepe, 2004; Ryan, McFarland, Baron, & Page, 1999; Scholarios & Lockyer, 1999; Schuler, Hell, Trapmann, Schaar, & Boramir, 2007; Taylor, Keelty, & McDonnell, 2002). For example, the highly valid work sample tests are hardly used in the US, and the potentially rather useless procedure of graphology (Dean, 1992; Neter & Ben-Shakhar, 1989) is applied somewhere between occasionally and often in France (Ryan et al., 1999). In Germany, the use of GMA tests is reported to be low and to be decreasing (i.e., only 30% of the companies surveyed by Schuler et al., 2007, now use them)."