Firing People
zachholman.com
zachholman.com
This egregiously unethical and it's saddening to hear Github's leadership keep sinking lower. What a way to treat literally the #1 contributor to github/github, who gave half a decade of his life to the company.
Takeaway: don't join a startup as one of the first ten employees if you value your financial future. Zach is living proof that even if you're a top performer, you fully vest and the company becomes a unicorn, you still might be broke afterwards.
They may want to discuss potential claw back contractual clauses, but again, once you starting your own, they will back down.
The biggest eye opener is that you never really "know" an employer till things go wrong and communication goes legal.
It is the dirty little startup secret. Top performers who care about the company/vision/product frequently get shafted.
The problem is they typically have significant leadership roles and have a lot of emotional investment but they haven't negotiated leadership style exit packages or any official power.
For example I was a top performer at company X ~10 years ago and I really cared about the product and our customers. So when new senior management started pushing a complete re-write of our systems into another language stack I pushed back.
I argued it would cost $8-$10 million and give us minimal benefit. It wasn't helping our product or our customers. I argued we should upgrade one part of our system and measure the benefits etc.
And then... I was let go for poor performance (way to really stick it to me!). They still haven't finished the rewrite but are still around and doing "ok" in the market.
If I was a bit wiser and more mature I would have simply said "Great lets re-write it" and used it as an opportunity to learn the new language and ecosystem and then jump ship.
Now this happens in large corporations as well as startups... But the really toxic part about startups is they go out of their way to hire and advertise to top performers who buy into the product vision etc and then they shaft them.
The only part I disagreed with was the section on being truthful in internal corporate communications. When it comes to firings, being discreet beats being truthful. The only thing the vast majority of people at the company need to know is that the fired person is no longer a coworker. Those who truly need to know more than that probably already do - and if not, they can quietly be told verbally.
Impenetrable corporate BS like "we had a very honest and productive conversation with Zach this morning and decided it was best to part ways" makes me think "oh good, the company is inclined to keep its mouth shut, and I don't need to worry quite as much about defending my reputation." If I'm not Zach but Zach's coworker, I think "whatever happened there (and if I really want to know I can ask around), it's nice that the company's not shit-talking him in public."
On the other hand, an honest internal email like "Greg was fired because he had a fundamental disagreement with our engineering team about the interaction between engineering and product management, and this lingering conflict led to him phoning it in" (to use, like Zack, a complete hypothetical) makes me think "great, I wonder who this is going to be forwarded to, and if the company will be just as mouthy later on to outsiders."
You might disagree, but I'd take the corporate BS version every time.
Yes, but honesty doesn't mean telling everyone everything. You can be honest and say nothing.
Honesty means not making up a narrative in which you had a nice chat and they left voluntarily. Just tell people "Zach no longer works for GitHub". It's honest, only presents the needed facts, and as a bonus doesn't make people who know that Zach got fired wonder what else management lie about in their internal emails.
It's a tough balancing act, but you have to give your employees something or they'll just go and make everything up themselves. It's really hard to put that genie back in the bottle.
That was me, being a hateful little shitbird. Reading that is like seeing myself in a photo of a lynching, gleefully pointing at the victim.
There's no excuse for posting like that, and I am ashamed for hurting you and kicking you when you were down.
I hope the next time I'm tempted to post like that, someone serves me up a knuckle sandwich before I hit the 'add comment' button.
I'm sorry.
> I’m still not fully certain why I got the axe ... My best guess is that it’s Tall Poppy Syndrome
Probably some signs here... I wouldn't say he was fired "fast" by any stretch of the imagination.
I will explain what firing fast means to me. I get a lot of work done through foreign devs I find on Upwork. I have to manage them closely, but overall, as they become acclimated and trained, they become pretty self-reliant in about 2-3 months.
However, I have also invested plenty of time into bad apples hoping to train their dev skills, teach them about our product, and all sorts of things only to get random "hey I'm going away for couple weeks tomorrow" kind of messages or a waning commitment to the project and quality of work.
Admittedly, I used to feel bad about firing people. I didn't care if they were "just" some Upwork guys, I try to get everyone involved in my team and feel like they're part of something. These days, I'm experienced enough to see the warning signs and rather than mull over "should I do it?" I just fire them and get onto hiring the next. I've never seen anyone turn around after warning signs, and I've gone through enough "oh come on they're human too, let me try to just understand their situation" moments to know it's a flawed manner of thinking. This is why you "fire fast" and "hire slowly".
Business is business. It sucks to get fired, but it's worse for your business to run on rusty cogs that can break at any moment.
Some further background: I don't talk to my devs with my vocal chords -- ever. It's a waste of my time and the communication is better documented in Slack (Zach actually has a good post on this). They join Slack, I assign them Pivotal stories, and they make pull requests that I review. Their onboarding is just me telling them a little about the project and their first task. I don't explain our grand purpose or any of that stuff because 4 times outta 5, they don't make the cut.
Warning signs:
* They struggle profusely with setting up the project or it takes a long time. If I have to hold your hand installing our necessary dependencies, chances are you're an inexperienced dev and/or have weak problem solving skills.
* They have very little to say besides "ok". The good ones always start asking a bunch of questions as they attempt to genuinely understand what's going on. The poor ones feign expertise.
* It takes them a long time to deliver their first unit of work and/or it's very low quality and barely meets minimum requirements.
* Their work diary shows few hours logged. I ask everyone you're willing to do 30-40 hours a week? They all say yes. About 10% actually take the hours I'm willing to give to them.
* They have a poor attitude
* They need to be constantly prodded for status updates and to work more
Good signs:
* They ask questions
* They have a positive attitude and seem appreciative of the opportunity
* They dive right into work
* They work a lot
* They hit me up randomly with status updates
People reading this are like "well ya," but what makes life interesting is the gray area. It's never this black & white and I have to just monitor them. In fact, I prefer to somewhat leave them alone to see how they really work. Anyone will log on and start coding under fear of being fired, but there's only few that take the reigns into their own hands.
Over the course of almost 2 years, I have 2 core guys who have done wonders for me each at $15/hr. They both are very happy with the opportunity and I've made them into very competent devs who I would put up against a college grad (or higher) any day of the week. I have a third who has all the right good signs, but is somewhat rough skill-wise. I don't mind because my core guy was rough in the beginning and he started reading a Scala book to get better. In general, my team is always about 4-5 since I code myself and can only do so much.
Honestly, it all comes down to attitude. I can train an earnest, hard-worker into an amazing dev but it's impossible for me to inspire someone who just doesn't care. I'm sure all this stuff carries over into the real world, but it's a lot more rapid fire in the Upwork game.
I wonder if you've tested the impact of higher/lower remuneration on this.
Money can have an odd effect on people; give them too much, they might appreciate it and work hard or think they "made it" and work lazily. Give them too little, and they might work hard for more or feel used and work begrudgingly. The culture / economy they live in dictates the actual figure.
He didn't mention it, but there was political/PR situation that happened at Github shortly before that and it's entirely conceivable that his firing was Github distancing itself from him for that reason. It was his former partner that was the center of the very public allegations of sexism at the company and she had some none-too-flattering things to say, again publicly, about his role in the matter.
As a manager, it wouldn't even cross my mind to fire someone that was underperforming when they had previously been such a strong contributor without at least first trying to figure out why the performance suffered. Where I have been involved in such abrupt terminations, it's always been because of something unrelated to performance (sexual harassment, abusing the corporate card, etc). The fact that he was never given an explanation from the company only makes this explanation seem more likely.
Similarly, don't expect to get feedback from a potential hiring manager as to why you didn't get a job you were interviewing for. Here, again, the company faces liability risk, and usually prefers to offer no comment on the matter.
I always assumed this was the case, and was surprised (well, not surprised, just disappointed I guess) to not hear this side of the story. It was very peculiar timing.
I left a college I worked at because of this they fired 12 people in the morning and called a all hands meeting at 3PM and said they were feeling horrible and please pray for them. A) It was a complete surprise to anyone that didn't know the actual numbers for incoming freshmen like I did. B) They acted like they were the ones who were equal harmed by the firings.
So you fired 12 people "fast" and you then ask for sympathy? That was September and I got the new job in May.
It is common in many companies for there to be a two-way 6 month firing/quitting limititation, meaning: At the point the worker turns in their quitting notification, they can make an agreement with the company to be let go earlier, or the company can insist on them staying the full term. Similarly when letting a worker go, the company has to let them know 6 months before that, though the worker can agree to leave earlier.
Of course faster firings are possible as well, with "immediately" usually reserved for "breaking a law". Additionally workers can be let go early for performance reasons, but only after three separate, paper-trailed notifications of such issues. Additionally, those are unlikely to be trivial, since a worker can sue their company for the remaining wage, if fired unfairly, and if successful the company will have to pay all legal bills of both sides.
This means that both sides here tend to make a lot of effort to avoid firings. The company because it's just easier to help an employee improve, and the worker because they'll see it coming.
I've been in the situation myself where a company expected certain things of me, that just didn't fit my nature and health. We tried to improve things informally for a while and i kept failing. Then we had a serious talk and agreed that things wouldn't work like that, and now i contract for them, with both sides being very happy.
--
An important contrast between that, and the american system, is that i knew at every single point exactly how far away i was from being fired. Due to the wording of my contract, i was at all times, right up to the end, exactly 3 months away from being fired, at least. My livelihood was never in danger, and i was given plenty motivation to help both myself and my company, instead of being put into an adversarial situation.
What happens if they quit showing up for work?
It is rather rare a case.
Does it mean that workers also have to give a 6 month advance notice before quitting?
Actually the worker does not have the option to do that, since it opens them up to breach-of-contract lawsuits. They could conceivably do other things, but they'd need to be VERY VERY clever about it to not break some law.
There are some reasons, called, "automatically unfair" reasons, for which you cannot fire a person: e.g. being pregnant, being a member of a union (or refusing to be), refusing to work on Sundays, and general sorts of sexual/religious/racial discrimination. Outside of that, you can dismiss somebody for any reason or no reason within the first 2 years of employment.
After that, you can dismiss a person generally only due to their incompetence, negligence, legal incapacity[1], or because you don't have any work for him to do. You are required to be fair and reasonable, a standard which is generally interpreted in the employee's interests.
One element of the article that seemed particularly off was that he claims he still doesn't know why he was fired. In the UK, you have a legal right to know the company's reason for firing you, and you can sue them if you think they lied about it.
[1] e.g. if a court order prevents the school janitor being within a mile of a school, you can fire him due to being unable to do his job.
He very likely knows, as he was in some way involved in this drama: http://readwrite.com/2014/03/15/github-julia-ann-horvath-har...
What his actual role was, however, is likely unprovable or not worth trying to prove. As informative as his blog post otherwise is, going into the "reasons" would likely re-open a can of worms everyone is happy to have closed.
Edit: I'm not saying he did anything untoward. I just find it highly unlikely that it's a coincidence that he's one of the names named by Julie after her departure and shortly afterwards he's fired under "mysterious circumstances" despite being one of the most productive and senior developers in the company. He just got caught up in that drama somehow, and as he says himself in the blog post "HR is not your friend".
I'm not sure this is factually correct, but if it is it'd be in direct conflict with what lawyers told me when I was forced out of one job in the UK. Essentially, I was powerless to do anything, since I hadn't been with the company for two years just like you say. When I was told I was being forced out, I immediately got in touch with two lawyers specializing in employment law, and independently of one another they said the exact same thing: prior to two years at the company they can do whatever they want, giving reason or not.
I was indeed given a reason, however I'm absolutely positive that it's not the truth. The company did right by me in the end anyway in terms of severance, so there are no hard feelings, but the truth would've been better. At least I imagine it would have been. Oh well.
This seems unethical.
Damn, that's a downright toxic attitude. I've never been fired, but nobody should consider their job a measure of their worth as a human being.
My point was more responding to imgabe saying "nobody should consider their job a measure of their worth as a human being." I think work matters.
Is there a reason he can't talk about what happened there?
http://www.inc.com/abigail-tracy/github-julie-ann-horvath-hr...
It seems like there is some namedropping here [1] too though I don't see anything explicitly tying them together. It may be hard to definitively know since it's an HR issue and generally separation agreements require both sides to keep quiet. (Non-disparagement clauses)
Per the article:
I’m still not fully certain why I got the axe; it was never made explicit to me. I asked other managers and those on the highest level of leadership, and everyone seemed be as confused as I was.
My best guess is that it’s Tall Poppy Syndrome, a phrase I was unfamiliar with until an Aussie told me about it. (Everything worthwhile in life I’ve learned from an Australian, basically.) The tallest poppy gets cut first.
[0] http://readwrite.com/2014/03/15/github-julia-ann-horvath-har...
[1] http://www.dailydot.com/business/julie-ann-horvath-names-git...
Can people sue for wrongful termination if she/he was fired without reason being made explicit?
The law generally doesn't require a reason or documentation unless the employee is a protected class. If you are still positive with your boss or the CEO, you can usually ask off-line if you've signed something that says you won't sue.
The only exception I'm aware of -- and why it's a great idea to get things in writing -- is in a couple of states it's possible to sue the employer if they said they'd do one thing and did another thing. Whether it's possible in your state, and whether it'd be worth the (both financial and emotional cost) of the legal proceedings, is something to talk to a lawyer about, though, and I am not one.
This exception is, by the way, the reason why employee handbooks and other company documents pretty much never explain specific procedures they'll use for correcting problems, other than a catch-all "may lead to termination". Putting a procedure in writing can lead to someone holding you to that procedure, and no well-advised company puts itself at that risk.
It isn't about churning and burning through people. This isn't about "move fast and break people." As a CEO that has had to fire employees, there is literally nothing more difficult. I'm not asking for sympathy, just communicating that nothing is more important in terms of a company's health and success than the people. I agree that managers don't deserve sympathy. They asked for or accepted the responsibility to manage people and now it's time to put up or shut up.
Firing quickly is partly about the company, but it is also respectful to the employee. If you know it isn't going to work out, don't waste their time. How many people do you know how have been in romantic relationships that dragged out for too long? Where they knew it wouldn't work out but kept the hope alive?
Everyone loses. It sucks. People are both immensely rewarding and Really Fucking Hard.
The reason people say Fire Fast is that new managers (in my experience and that of close mentors to me) almost never fire too quickly. Very often, they either make excuses for the employee or are afraid that firing is their fault. A lot of times it is.
Look, if you hire someone for a role and have to fire them, that is your fault. 100%. And it is gut-wrenching to think you built someone up, got them to quit another job, had them tell their friends and family how excited they were, then forcing them to go back and say "oh yeah, I got fired and now you think I'm a failure."
But if you are the manager and you know it isn't going to work, you owe it to the employee, to yourself, and (especially) to everyone at the company to not drag things out.
## On Zach
Github is changing and he didn't fit in with its future. They took a tone of investment and needed to be a different company. Whether that is the right or wrong strategy isn't the point (and I have no idea.) They needed people who were on board with that and believed (probably correctly) that he wouldn't be. It's not an easy decision, and everyone involved knows it could have gone down better, but it also could have been much worse.
This a thousand times. Under Microsoft's brutal stack rank system, I chatted with a peer who saw me as a good source of career advice. This fellow was not performing very well in his current team. His management had given up on him and IMO his peers didn't see him as a leader. Whether it was his skills or his environment that led to this situation, the environment was definitely no longer there for him to improve or gain responsibility.
His read of the situation was totally different. He was seeking increased responsibility in the team and had a promotion goal he was targeting. This was lunacy. His past 3 annual reviews had been the lowest score possible. If his manager was following policy, he would have been fired a long time ago, not kept on as a sacrificial lamb for the stack rank gods.
There's a lot of gray area, obviously, but I shared your feeling that "fire fast" was misrepresented here.
I can't afford to go out on a limb for a startup or to hope for some big pay day. I'm a single earner in a family of five and I can't just make my kids stop eating and growing because I want to get some stock options.
I would suggest anyone thinking of working at a startup keeps their regular salary in mind as what you need/want, and think of stock as a bonus later that probably will NOT ever come.
Stock is a nice carrot to dangle if you're a stingy employer (or one who refuses to pay folks' worth), but it shouldn't be considered as part of your compensation if you're a lowly employee like myself.
You need to be able to find a way to make ends meet with just base salary.
It's always an onerous sign when HR "joins you" for a call or an in-person meeting.
But when the person inviting you doesn't tell you in advance that they'd like to have their pal from HR join in? That's a pretty solid indication that not only is the chat not going the be particularly fun. They've pretty much reached a certain "disconnect" stage with you already, and are already in the mindset of going over your head -- and beyond caring how disconcerting this may be for you, or how you might react.
As a prerequisite to excreting you out of their system more formally and definitively, shortly thereafter.
It's been my experience that people who are on the path to getting fired turn hostile either to their direct management or to the company, and keeping them around after that is a net-negative for the team. Once you've decided to fire someone, you should do it as fast as you legally can.
>Don’t talk to HR.
This is so true in the firing case. But do remember, as a regular employee, HR can be extremely helpful. When I took a Leave of Absence for a health issue, HR was so incredibly helpful and empathetic to help me get back on my feet and return with a smooth transition on both ends.
On the other side, having mentored a lot of people at my previous job who were on PiPs/cusp of getting fired...they are definitely not your friend and their first order of business is to protect the company.
Get everything in writing, emails etc should be printed out.
It's not personal!! Don't take it personally! Unless of course it was personal.
[1]http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/23-Were_a...
Additionally this article just talks from the author's viewpoint so we really don't know exactly why he was fired. If you read the post it would seem like the CEO told him he can take a sabbatical and his manager told him don't come back. There is a huge disconnect somewhere that we are not being told about. If the author's behavior prior to leaving for sabbatical was toxic to the team the company shouldn't be responsible for taking care of his feelings and emotional state on being fired.
I'm not saying being fired doesn't suck as an employee but expecting the company to take care of you as you are being fired or afterwards is kind of naive and a little self-centric in my opinion.
When you fire a highly productive team member it will almost certainly mess with the companies culture. If that team member was "fired incorrectly" and talks to the rest of the team about it productivity and culture will take a beating.
As soon as I see a good team mate fired I start looking for a new job.
However your point is well taken in the sense that if the employee does take it personally and then spins a tale, in front of the team, that makes them look innocent and paint the company as vindictive or unreasonable, then yes it would affect team morale but that is easily remedied by managers being candid. We are actually going through a similar situation right now where I work so this topic is very timely.
If management give a good reason and they have put in place measures to reduce fallout then I'll consider staying.
One question I always ask is what work are we dropping out of scope?
I'm currently working in a team of 5. We have two high performers and three average performers (I'm one of the average performers). The top performers do ~60% of the work.
If management doesn't plan on descoping 30%+ of the work for the next 3-6 months then it means an extra 10+ hours of work each week for me.
Realistically it's an extra 120-240 hours all up. I freelance at ~$100/hr so that's a cost of $12-24k.
So yeah if they have punched or sexually assaulted a colleague etc then I'll just put up with the cost.
If they make someone feel uncomfortable or are a bit condescending and you fire fast then I'm going to be looking for a new job.
My suggestion is to remove all sentences like the above from the essay. The "four minutes" sounds juvenile or coy (or combination of both).
Are there reasonable adults out there who have no idea what the "fast" in "fire fast" actually means? If not, don't insult your audience with a caricature. Demonstrate that you have some perspective so readers can focus on the stronger parts of your commentary.
The essay is almost 10,000 words long and stumbling across that sentence doesn't entice me to commit the time and read the rest of it.
Fire fast when a few things happen, such as when energy belief and overall personality inertia has lowered of an employee where their fire has diminished for one reason or another then you should get them fired and replaced as soon as possible to not allow that to affect others on the team. This can be for a number of reasons and the signs will be clear and instead of saying "oh gee he'll turn around" just fire fast stoicly and move on. The fire fast is a very unemotional philosophy where as a leader you view the team as a chain and weakest links must be cut out and a new one placed.
Fire fast is not at all indicative of what the term entails and you can't really deduce anything from that as the right deduction is what you said, fire right after hiring! But what I think the rational interpretation is; is to fire as soon as there are negative connotations being exhibited by a team member and instead of wondering if it'll change execute an order to fix it asap. I would also say fast can mean set guidelines and expecations and transparent ways to reinstill vigor into an individual. I think fire fast has an unquantified blowback where someone who could be good( even "10X" ) is fired prematurely and they could have been someone worth multiples of their salary in output for a company but were fired for internal reasons (Your policies and docs suck).
When the relationship falls apart, for whatever reason, it is like getting a divorce. I spent most of my career at one company, and when I decided to leave, dealing with that separation was a lot harder than I thought it would be.
There is some room for agreement or disagreement with Zach's characterization of the circumstances, as indicated by many of the comments on this thread. Regardless, I think it's a worthwhile and interesting read.
Pretty much sums up most startup experiences in the area.
[1] http://valleywag.gawker.com/ims-and-email-support-allegation...
At which point what little sympathy I might had for the author vanished, unless I missed the part that explains why this isn't just outright thievery. And then to publicly admit that if it's not nailed down, you'll steal it. Yeah, "tall poppy syndrome", that must be it. You were just too good for this world.
Besides, do I want to take advice from someone with such large blinders on? Yes, HR joins video conferences because they want to personally thank you for your outstanding work. Be careful at train crossings, Zach, because if you didn't see this metapohorical train coming with it's lights and horn ablazin', you might not see a real one.
Wow, you really hate people who share things on the internet, right?
Anyway, I've worked 3 years at a company where HR joining a meeting usually meant something like "hey we have this great training/project/coach role that we think you'd like to dive in to. would you?". That, or I had large blinders on and they actually planned to fire me each time but instead sent me on a 3-day CouchDB training abroad. Oops!
Just because you wrote it on the internet doesn't mean it's beyond reproach. What's your point?
Anyway, I've worked 3 years at a company where HR joining a meeting
I wasn't talking about just the HR freight train bearing down on him. I'm willing to bet that you knew this, but just didn't like my comment so you needed a point to argue with. Have at it, won't bother me a bit.