I suspect this is going to be a long thread ;)
For a start-up the rules are a bit different, but in a way for a start-up it is even more important to hire the right people rather than to use a more trial-and-error based approach to hiring.
Start-ups as a rule have less time to lose on stuff like that and replacing a person in a start-up usually carries a severe penalty. The teams are usually much smaller and dropping a team member will have a significant impact, much more so than in a larger organization (but even there it can hurt a lot). A start-up I invested in lost their #2 programmer due to a series of problems and it almost killed the company.
As for apprenticing, the possibility to learn is always present, but maybe not in your own company. When you find yourself in the need of knowledge it doesn't hurt to go through your addressbook, find someone with more experience in the field that you want more knowledge in and ask.
I've done that quite frequently in my career (and I still do that, as some HN'ers can attest to) and I've found that people are usually very happy to teach a new skill or to augment an existing one if you ask them. Of course they're not obliged and you can't make any demands but as a rule it doesn't hurt to ask.
> It's important to note that it's an extended paid interview.
Yes, that's true, there is some compensation. But I always looked at firing someone - and it fortunately was very rare - as a sort of divorce on bad terms. The better way to go about it is to talk things over, if possible help find your employee a spot where they're more in their place rather than at a high pressure start-up where the margin for error is a lot lower.
> I've heard and read assertions to this effect before. Do you have studies (or even anecdotal evidence) you could provide that would quantify this?
As a rule I ask companies where I do technical due dilligence how long it takes them to get a new hire up to speed. The companies where this goes fasted are around the 3 month mark, as a rule those companies have fairly simple systems and no long running projects or large code bases. The longest are around 2 years, these are companies that usually have a limited size in house development team, sometimes requiring skills on the cross roads of two or more disciplines working on technically complicated projects.
On average, assuming a linear increase in productivity over the time that you hire someone to the time that they are as productive as the 'old hands' it seems to work out to at least several monthly salaries of time wasted, for one because the new hire is not yet productive, but also because he/she is a drain on the members that were already productive before the hire was added to the team. The latter factor is one that is overlooked very frequently.
> This also begs the question of the overall productivity of the team, rather than any given individual, or is that what you mean by time spent getting them up to speed?
The team as a whole.
> Possibly, but if the firing is from a startup and the stable job was a larger company, I suggest this is to be considered part of the risk.
That's true, but then only if the person hired is made well aware of the risk and can balance it with a pay-off in proportion to that risk.
When I was young and without responsibilities other than to myself I would work simply on what I thought was interesting and I couldn't have cared less about the compensation, so if I would have gotten fired (which never happened, but theoretically it could have) I wouldn't have cared much about it.
Employing someone with a wife, kids and a mortgage and then throwing them out in the callous way the poster suggests, after hiring them capriciously is really bad for your business' reputation as well as for your employees.
You really don't want to get known as a company bad attitude towards new hires, the better people will simply not even apply to a company like that.
In the end all you'll get is people that more or less expect to be fired in the next 6 months.
One of the best companies that I've read about culture wise was the 'old' HP, I've done my best to try to learn as much as I could from how they treated their employees and I think it did me well. If this stuff interests you, then there is plenty of stuff documented on the web about it, there is also a book called 'the HP way', which contains a few valuable insights.
Other books that I've found great showing me bits and pieces of how to grow in to the role of a manager after being a techie all my life were 'the soul of a new machine' by Tracy Kidder and a book about the very first computers in war time England, but I can't recall the title.
> did exactly such enticing with a friend and colleague of mine to a startup which eventually failed (and again to another one, which is perhaps in the process of failing).
His original employer valued him enough that they were more than happy to have him back, even a year later. I expect this to extend to all "A players."
That's great, but the economy is not what it was several years ago, and I suspect that people leaving a good job will expect their new employers to treat them with some respect, it may be that by making such a move they are taking a considerable risk. Of course, nobody is forcing them, but it doesn't hurt to be careful with other people.
edit: I'm sorry you got modded down, I don't see any reason for that in your writing.