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> Companies just need to fork the upfront $13-1500 dollars for a set of plane tickets for their hiring team and rented conference rooms for a week. It's a whole

• Aurornis 2y ago
  I thought "fire fast" was a viable strategy until I joined a company that did exactly that. They didn't fire many people quickly, but it had a deeply chilling effect when someone was only at the company for a month or two before disappearing. One of the unspoken difficulties of firing fast is that the person does a lot of relationship building with people who don't work with their output. It was often the case that someone would become well-liked by people who never saw their code, who would then become distraught when the likable person vanished one day.
  • esafak 2y ago
    You should be giving constant feedback; firing should not come as a surprise. And if someone is not delivering, the people who depend on that output will know. Totally unrelated people should reserve judgment.
    • Aurornis 2y ago
      > firing should not come as a surprise. The surprise was for the people around them, not the person being fired. > Totally unrelated people should reserve judgment. In the real world, they don't.
    • squiffsquiff 2y ago
      There were 30% layoffs at a company I worked at and one of the 'survivors' was so traumatised by it that they took their own life. It's a known phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_guilt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_guilt
      • aaomidi 2y ago
        Layoffs are generally random firing. Especially when we talk about % points.
        • sethammons 2y ago
          What's your point? The thread is about how other people being fired is stressful.
    • ghaff 2y ago
      You might be surprised how many totally oblivious and un-self-aware people there are out there.
  • neilv 2y ago
    Excellent points. Building on that, if the people who are bothered by that leave or withdraw, won't the workplace come to be dominated by people who aren't bothered by that? If so, a question is why they aren't bothered by that. Is the culture then cold-hearted? Mercenary? Sociopathic? Oblivious?
    • Aurornis 2y ago
      People who stayed long enough adjusted, but it didn't mean they were cold-hearted. They just realized that there was more to the story that they saw. The real challenge was when recent hires would see it and get spooked. One person would get fired and then two people around them would panic and start looking for other jobs. Several people panicked and jumped right back into their previous jobs. It was also tough when we'd hire someone and they'd discover their predecessor lasted for 2-3 months. There were also problems with the hire fast part: Often teams would "hire fast" and then lose 3-4 months because they had to deal with someone who lied through the interview, had to be fired, and then another hiring cycle restarted.
      • neilv 2y ago
        Interesting. What kind of sense of working as a team, and loyalty to the team, developed there? (Among the people who lasted, and how they related to new hires.) Do you think the hire&fire practices influenced that?
      • enasterosophes 2y ago
        I feel like we're working at the same company. Not just this comment but your others on the same topic. I've seen all the exact same mistakes over the last year. The company wants to grow fast so hires quickly, but then the people hired quickly underperform, so then they're fired quickly, but firing people quickly results in fear, grief and guilt for everyone who hasn't been fired "this time". The top talent never feel comfortable in this cold mercenary culture, so they don't settle in and soon move onto somewhere less cut-throat.
        • roguecoder 2y ago
  • charlie0 2y ago
    This seems like a case of not managing expectations. The following should be clear: 1. We fire fast. 2. We don't want to fire people and will do our best to help you succeed. 3. Here are the bars you need to clear in order to stay with us. (They should be reasonable.) 4. We will provide frequent feedback to let you know where you are. Not sure about everyone else, but to me it's often obvious who wasn't going to make the cut within the first 1-2 months of their employment.
• ghaff 2y ago
  If you won’t fly out for an interview you’re probably not that interested and the company probably shouldn’t be either. Pre-COVID this was absolutely the normal way interviews were conducted.
  • 9rx 2y ago
    If I'm not that interested in a company, I won't waste my time to contact them (or pay attention to their efforts to contact me). Having interest in them does not imply that I have an interest in travel, however. If I had an interest in travel, I'd have become an airline pilot or something like that instead. But if they think they need someone who has a secret desire to man a ship or be a touring musician – cool. A good fit isn't a good fit.
    • ghaff 2y ago
      It’s fine to have quirks. And yes that is largely a quirk. And it’s fine for others to decide that’s it’s more trouble than they want to deal with. I would probably be one of those people-/absent compelling reasons.
      • 9rx 2y ago
        > It’s fine to have quirks. Of course. If a company wants to be quirky, that is their choice to make. > I would probably be one of those people-/absent compelling reasons. Agreed. A job isn't usually all that compelling – there are jobs everywhere – but for the right business deal you can look past certain things.
  • spzb 2y ago
    What an arrogant, ableist thing to say. I hope you're not involved in recruitment. The world has changed. Location is not the barrier it was five years ago.
    • baq 2y ago
      Location isn't. Verification that you aren't a North Korea agent or just plain fraud is.