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Comment by ng12 | Hacker News Reader

This relies on being able to accurately identify poor performing engineers, which is very tough at a big company. What I've seen happen is they hang around for a year or two, jump from failed project to failed project, until they either find a niche role where they can do no harm or run out of options and get fired -- but at that point they have a year or two on their resume and will find it that much easier to get the next gig.

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> This relies on being able to accurately identify poor performing engineers, which is very tough at a big company.

"Very tough"? The only big company I ever worked at was a more traditional engineering company, but identifying the poor performers was easy. The problem was the politically-savvy poor performers who used their savvy to shield themselves.

Fair enough -- but the bullshitters are generally pretty politically savvy :)

Thus put them into a position where political savviness will be of no use. :-)

If the person who has the power to do that knows it, might as well fire them... why even bother? The person is politically-savvy generally savvy enough to smell it ahead and get promoted else where...

Because at the moment we are talking about, we yet don't know whether the new hire is a good programmer or not (he just passed the interview). Thus my point is to put new hires into positions where political savviness will be of no use until you are sure that he is indeed a good programmer, so that they don't have any option to fake anything by political means.

I do - The not to be hired pile of resumes.

The difficulty of identifying poor hires scales with their impact. If they are hard to identify, they are minimally harmful. At a big company, poor hires are diluted by size and revenue. At a small company, it is easier to identify poor hires.

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