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In today's corporate world, it can be difficult or impossible to fire people. It's important to understand that actually removing someone from the organization

In today's corporate world, it can be difficult or impossible to fire people. It's important to understand that actually removing someone from the organization is a totally separate problem from managing the performance of the team. People who don't contribute or cause problems need to be sequestered as much as possible. Don't let them bring down the rest of the team. I think "managed out" is the term that's being used now. That is a skill that a manager of any level can use to keep their team performing even when they don't have the authority to remove someone, or the process to remove someone is many months long.

hobs 1y ago
It's just not though. People above you are making decisions to not pay what generally amounts to trivial amounts of money to (in many cases I have seen) completely fuck up their products. I have worked with enough C levels to understand that most of them just want you to manage all the problems while they collect the money and make "strategic decisions" (follow whatever fad is hot right now.) It's why I like working with smaller companies, usually not established enough to just make middle management eat shit and ignore customers.
- scottLobster 1y ago
  As an IC, one reason I left my old (hated) job was precisely that. The product was barely-functional shit. We once spent 8 months implementing a "feature" that had senior engineers walking off the program in protest, only for them to be validated when said feature caused us to miss our contractual requirements just like said senior engineers said it would, and we spent another 8 months ripping it out. Naturally I went looking for answers, started asking polite questions of my boss at 1-on-1s, started attending program-level meetings that engineers didn't typically show up to but were large/open enough I could blend into the background, and discovered that the root of the problem was roughly 3 levels into management and they weren't going to give a shit about what some engineers thought they should prioritize, even if we could tie it to financials/hours worked/cost savings (we tried and were politely ignored). Left for a smaller program at a different company, and it's night and day. I remember suggesting that it would be nice if we could have an additional server for a system we were building and got told "yeah good idea, go ask <PM> if it's in the budget". It was, and we got it. I was in heaven.
  - hobs 1y ago
    Even more well managed projects are just "here's the budget figure it out yourself or come talk to us if it will make us XX% more", but SOCII still manages to make a lot of things take forever even in the best of situations.
  - steveBK123 1y ago
    It's good to do some snooping up the food chain like that. I've been at a few small-scaling-to-big firms going through tremendous growing pains. Most of the time it was that they had the insight to hire team leads & ICs with experience from bigger competitors but not any higher up the food chain. That is - higher extremely experienced, talented people, and have them report to the some guy that was hired 20 years ago because he went to school with the founder, or his buddies kid, or some dude who never worked elsewhere in the industry. So ultimately the deciders and decisions didn't change and it was all window dressing.
xnx 1y ago
> In today's corporate world, it can be difficult or impossible to fire people Really? In the US you can fire an employee for any reason at any time (aside from a few illegal reasons: union activity, racism, etc.).
- jghn 1y ago
  > In the US you can fire an employee for any reason at any time On paper, yes. In practice, especially in a larger company? It's often a long journey that involves a lot of energy on the part of the manager. And then of course you may not get a backfill rec. So then one needs to ask themselves: is this person truly a net negative when compared to the energy that'd be required to jettison them *and* replace them with nothing? Often the answer is no.
  - olddustytrail 1y ago
    I can't speak to a US perspective but in the UK and some EU countries I've experienced, firing someone is incredibly simple. In fact every difficulty I've seen is simply that someone didn't follow the clearly defined procedure. It's literally written out for you. You don't have to think or care how you feel, just follow the process and you're done. If the process says someone should stay then you got something wrong. Simple as that.
    - jghn 1y ago
      To be clear, it's simple for a *company* to fire someone. It often can be a pain in the ass for a *manager* to do it. For instance, a process like this: 1) Need to set up a clear paper trail over a period of time. For instance, a track record of being marked as an underperformed in their reviews with concrete complaints. In places that require this to be tied to the review, and f they only have annual reviews, this can take a LONG time. 2) Bring HR into the process, where they'll do the equivalent of "did you turn it off and on again?" for quite some time 3) If they let you, set up a PIP, which itself will take several weeks 4) Finally the person is let go
      - 1y ago

hobs 1y ago

It's just not though. People above you are making decisions to not pay what generally amounts to trivial amounts of money to (in many cases I have seen) completely fuck up their products. I have worked with enough C levels to understand that most of them just want you to manage all the problems while they collect the money and make "strategic decisions" (follow whatever fad is hot right now.) It's why I like working with smaller companies, usually not established enough to just make middle management eat shit and ignore customers.

scottLobster 1y ago
As an IC, one reason I left my old (hated) job was precisely that. The product was barely-functional shit. We once spent 8 months implementing a "feature" that had senior engineers walking off the program in protest, only for them to be validated when said feature caused us to miss our contractual requirements just like said senior engineers said it would, and we spent another 8 months ripping it out. Naturally I went looking for answers, started asking polite questions of my boss at 1-on-1s, started attending program-level meetings that engineers didn't typically show up to but were large/open enough I could blend into the background, and discovered that the root of the problem was roughly 3 levels into management and they weren't going to give a shit about what some engineers thought they should prioritize, even if we could tie it to financials/hours worked/cost savings (we tried and were politely ignored). Left for a smaller program at a different company, and it's night and day. I remember suggesting that it would be nice if we could have an additional server for a system we were building and got told "yeah good idea, go ask <PM> if it's in the budget". It was, and we got it. I was in heaven.
- hobs 1y ago
  Even more well managed projects are just "here's the budget figure it out yourself or come talk to us if it will make us XX% more", but SOCII still manages to make a lot of things take forever even in the best of situations.
- steveBK123 1y ago
  It's good to do some snooping up the food chain like that. I've been at a few small-scaling-to-big firms going through tremendous growing pains. Most of the time it was that they had the insight to hire team leads & ICs with experience from bigger competitors but not any higher up the food chain. That is - higher extremely experienced, talented people, and have them report to the some guy that was hired 20 years ago because he went to school with the founder, or his buddies kid, or some dude who never worked elsewhere in the industry. So ultimately the deciders and decisions didn't change and it was all window dressing.

xnx 1y ago

> In today's corporate world, it can be difficult or impossible to fire people Really? In the US you can fire an employee for any reason at any time (aside from a few illegal reasons: union activity, racism, etc.).

jghn 1y ago
> In the US you can fire an employee for any reason at any time On paper, yes. In practice, especially in a larger company? It's often a long journey that involves a lot of energy on the part of the manager. And then of course you may not get a backfill rec. So then one needs to ask themselves: is this person truly a net negative when compared to the energy that'd be required to jettison them *and* replace them with nothing? Often the answer is no.
- olddustytrail 1y ago
  I can't speak to a US perspective but in the UK and some EU countries I've experienced, firing someone is incredibly simple. In fact every difficulty I've seen is simply that someone didn't follow the clearly defined procedure. It's literally written out for you. You don't have to think or care how you feel, just follow the process and you're done. If the process says someone should stay then you got something wrong. Simple as that.
  - jghn 1y ago
    To be clear, it's simple for a *company* to fire someone. It often can be a pain in the ass for a *manager* to do it. For instance, a process like this: 1) Need to set up a clear paper trail over a period of time. For instance, a track record of being marked as an underperformed in their reviews with concrete complaints. In places that require this to be tied to the review, and f they only have annual reviews, this can take a LONG time. 2) Bring HR into the process, where they'll do the equivalent of "did you turn it off and on again?" for quite some time 3) If they let you, set up a PIP, which itself will take several weeks 4) Finally the person is let go
    - 1y ago