It's Never Too Early to Fire
a16z.com
a16z.com
I wasted countless opportunities waiting for things to get better, when I probably intuitively knew that they wouldn't. Partly, it was because I didn't want to be considered inconsiderate or rude. But, also, it was because I latched on to other things: the mission, the market, the tech, the product, the teams, etc.
A few times not seeing bad management in a startup where you took options rather than a decent wage would do it too.
I never heard the phrase used to represent opportunity cost and it's not clear that OP intended it in that way.
I am now in my mid 40s. I started working in tech in the mid-90s. I was ambitious and mainly only worked for or led tech startups. (I did well for myself, so can't complain too much)
When I look back on my career, had I went with my intuition at critical times, instead of what I felt was 'my duty' (or whatever justification I made to deny my intuitive senses), I would clearly be further ahead. In total, I probably wasted several years waiting for people or situations to change for the better, passing up several ultimately better opportunities.
I used to stay at a place and say "Ok, maybe its me, what can I do to put the most effort in, and maybe that will change how upper level toxic management trickles down and fundamentally changes how politics over rule technology and data based decisions, or hard workers over letting the old boys club stay comfortable"
I actually used to believe something I could do would change that or, if I worked hard enough or tip toed around management to make them feel comfortable about their culture and still find time to do the work I felt was important in my own time without offending people who felt comfortable consistently underperforming and had positions of superiority over me, that I would be recognized for my work, work ethic etc.
no, that's not the case. Leave and leave fast because while I was the one who eventually chose to leave those companies, those companies are never going to acknowledge how much you are worth, or that they don't deserve you. They care about self preservation and staying there no matter how well you perform is not going to help you get a better job elsewhere.
if it's short enough of a time then you don't even have to put it on your resume you worked there. A lesson I wish I knew fresh out of college.
of course, all of these things about me are true. There is something you can always do to improve yourself, or change your mindset to help yourself change how you approach frustrating situations to change how a team might respond to a solution or a challenge, and foster a more positive environment.
The biggest red flag? When you are constantly challenging yourself to grow and change to meet the needs of the company and find novel ways to contribute in your spare time, and basically having the "how can I rise to the challenge. How can I challenge myself? How can I grow?" mindset when management does not have a "how can we stay open minded and rise to meet the challenge" mindset. It's not just not a good fit for you, but it will be damaging to your career to be at odds with superiors who will feel threatened by this mentality and approach you have. It will be obvious to your peers this is the case, and it will make them look bad. When your authority is based on optics and politics, people like you are a threat to the company.
the other and only red flag you need is when the company doesnt see people as its most valuable asset, it sees large amounts of funding, and pretty buildings and initial investment as it's most valuable asset. Stay away.
and as a last note on this big red flag, again, all the things the companies I worked for did, was cool, fit my skills and interests, experience in school and previous jobs. If I tell you "hey I worked here developing cutting edge technology and heres some metrics of our stats in the market" people would say wow thats cool.
And it was cool, and it could have been cool, but people ruined it. It's really about the people, no matter what you are working on. If you don't have high quality people, then you can't have high quality products or services. Period.
I have never regretted it and only feel relief whenever I think about it. I walked straight into another job.
If I were to stop freelancing and get a job again, I would just leave it off my CV.
I've done something similar twice, except there were no interesting technical challenges. Both were government jobs where I was lured in to do all this cool work and then get told to sit there and do nothing. The pay and hours were awesome, but for my 20 something self it was a terrible fit.
What I'm actually doing could be considered a cross between 'IT guy' and 'generic office staff' (I go to tons of meetings, write lots of system-engineering-esque documents no one will read, and because I am 'a computer guy', I'm bombarded with annoying IT technician-level questions all the time). I'm extremely overpaid for what I'm doing (I'm bored out of my skull most of the time), but the local job market is such that I'd probably spend several months unemployed if I were to just up and quit.
Just keep looking for something else. It's easiest to find a job when you already have one. That's because there is no financial pressure to take whatever comes along. You can take a little time to find a good fit. Don't feel that this reflects in any way on your attitude toward your current job. Do your best at that, but when you go home spend at least a few hours a week looking for something else. If you stay in your present job for too long (years) it will stunt your professional (and possibly personal) growth.
A few years ago, the single most powerful thing I did was knock out all our non-mortgage debt. It's freeing to know that if something happened, I could take a pay hit of $Xk/month and still have the same lifestyle.
Being unemployed for several months is way less scary if your monthly expenses are lower and you have cash in the bank.
I call this being "Dave Ramsey Debt-Free" - and everything you say is true. There's a lot more to it than that (how to properly pay down debt, how to properly use credit cards, buying vs leasing automobiles, plus buy used only, etc) - but the "debt free" part of it is spot on.
The money in the bank? That's f-u money, meaning you get tired of things, tell yer boss to take the job and shove and walk out the door. I've done this a couple of times, and both times it was ultimately worth it, and wasn't scary because I knew I had enough saved that I could keep going at my expenses level for a couple years or more if I had to.
It's a very freeing position to be in.
They pay you alot of money to be there to do stuff they don't understand, but outside of that, they don't really want you interfering with their day to day life with all that "tech stuff".
Definitely find a better job, and don't underestimate the value increase in you quality of life by being around better people who challenge you. Nothing is worth more than that. So outside of minimum financial obligations, make plans to move elsewhere even if it will take a while. If you are the breadwinner in your situation for yourself and or other people, they will have to deal with it.
It may take even 3-4 years to move if you have long term commitments and get ready to go and do it without being risky financially, but honestly its worth it. If you are the one providing for people and you are the one donating half of your waking life and you are the one smart enough to be dissatsified with the lack of mental stimulation then you deserve to have a job you enjoy.
Being around people at work who challenge you and being on a good team will without a doubt increase your personal joy in life as well. Being emotionally isolated in a company who designates you as the computer guy and wants to drain your brain more by asking to create documentation to make the integration of technology in the company appear more valid than it really is, or save them if you don't show up work one day, is an abuse to your mental situation as much as you allow it to happen.
If you are already that smart, rising to the challenges you wish you could will only result in more income later, so don't let the current financial benefits/perceived location limitations stop you from pursuing a more rewarding career.
A couple years may seem like a long time but...what are you going to do, rot in a n IT office for the next 40 + years of your life? Make the difficult decisions/sacrifices now and even if you are in your 30s or even more, still youll get decades of happiness and challenges you won't if you throw your hands up in the air now.
Exactly this. This is my number one job here.
The rest of the time at work, I spend inventing projects to helped me learn some interesting technology. My bosses were happy because I stopped bugging them for work to do.
Out of curiosity, in what direction?
(Also in the process-driving-me-round-the-bend camp, but concerned that a lot of alternatives might be a case of "out if the frying pan, into the scrum"...)
The agile bits were standups before we'd even got anything to do, card votes on how long features would take and I was saying months and everyone saying days, but I was the only one with any significant experience. Lo and behold 4 weeks later when I left it still wasn't done. There was some nonsense around the kanban board when they'd move things when nothing happened, tasks were really poorly split up so some bits would just get stuck, etc.
Never be afraid to fire a bad job. If you don't it will potentially screw your life up the same as bad management can a company.
The key for both ends I think though is "Sparingly" and make sure you have other options first. (Unless the situation is just so bad it outweighs lack of options.)
Point being, if you are company who is firing a lot of people, or an employee who is firing a lot of jobs, the problem may just be you!
This taught me that businesses are out for themselves no matter how nice the people are. It then taught me that if I don't like somewhere, I will just outright look elsewhere and bail.
After being let go from my second workplace, I left my next one due to him promising me more money and then going back on it with another deal which sounded great, but actually sucked when I thought about it. He is a really nice guy, but such a shady businessman, so I looked elsewhere and then handed in my notice.
The workplace after that one wasn't any better, they wouldn't use GIT, worked on each site whilst live (no dev environment). I hated it, so I took a week off to search elsewhere, found something better and handed my notice in.
Also, I tried to push for better practices which the other devs loved, but my manager and boss just wouldn't listen and refused any of my input.
There's actually a guy in that workplace who is super nice, but has never been let down like I have so he feels he owes the company everything and won't leave. Whenever he tries, the boss will offer him more pay and then he stays. It's sad, because he deserves so much better. :(
Don't take the bait.
it's an admission that they know you are more valuable than you are being treated, and an acknowledgement that your misery in the situation is not going to change, which is exactly why they are hoping you will be ok with continued frustration in lieu of more money.
However, if a company has gimpy organization and technical APIs for many complex pieces of software and or processes in which making mistakes is costly and expensive, it is economical to raise someones salary $15k than have to invest in a newb to spend the next 7 months being able to operate as quickly as you do. It took me about 7months to be up and running efficiently with everything and be able to train other people. I still had to perform at full capacity on day one, but I was less efficient and because mistakes were so costly, I would have to wait 30-45minutes to find someone else to confirm an operation before making one, instead of making a mistake in production, until I knew how to do it myself.
In the manufactoring line, bottlenecks for tools being down was calculated by the millions per hour, because linear bottlenecks in product production actually cascade down a 4 months timeline for meeting product deadlines, which have payment associated with them, and significant penalties for being late.
Additionally, metrology tools to check errors sometimes cannot, based on chemistry and physics, detect errors in production until multiple steps down the line. So if there is a mistake in a base design, it won't get picked up for 3 weeks, and the entire line has to be restarted, so it really helps to have people know how to not screw up even if there isn't an official process for it.
They kept me on because I worked hard, and because I knew how to use over 18 different independent horrible pieces of software with no APIs, and run them simultaneously in realtime in production while operating a team of 15 people.
Losing me was uneconomical for them.
This is about hiring/firing very senior, well paid people with lots of prior experience.
If you are hiring and then firing junior people fast, you are the problem.
I'm going to challenge this point of view. It is absolutely, and obviously, expected that junior people have a ton to learn, and they should be given leeway for that learning process. So yes, if you fire a junior person because you're not willing to put in the mentorship necessary, then I agree, you are the problem.
However, junior people really shouldn't have any problem with motivation and drive, and in those cases where I've had to fire people, I've always wished I had done it sooner. More importantly, their peers wished I had fired them sooner, too. A bad or lax attitude can be an absolute killer for team morale if the person in question isn't dealt with quickly and fairly.
Being a bit naive, making mistakes, and needing ramp-up time is to be expected, especially from a junior hire. You absolutely need to give time to correct that sort of thing, and firing fast is not a good move. Some of the best devs I've worked with needed a few months to ramp upbefore they hit full stride.
On the other hand if someone is dicking around instead of working, being insubordinate, refusing to try to improve, upsetting coworkers, etc., then you've got behavioral problems on your hands. And those are absolutely good reasons to fire if they persist beyond an initial stern warning.
Heuristics and rules of thumb are incomplete by definition, and a deep understanding of these dynamics is incredibly difficult to acquire :)
Sometimes juniors have a hell of a lot of trouble admitting that they don't understand something. Consequently, they won't be productive because they not only don't understand what they're doing, but they don't want to demonstrate their ignorance.
If I were in your shoes, I would do a couple of things:
1.) Make improving documentation a big part of their improvement plan.
2.) Make it very clear that you value clarity above all else and actively encourage them to tell you they don't understand something.
That termination taught me a lesson to: * Only bite what I can chew.
* If I am not confident in doing the job, I should not take it.
*If I can chew very little, then I focus on expanding to take on more.
True Entrepreneurial Spirit followed.
Most common causes I can think for this problem are: an indiscriminate hiring process that fails to keep out poor candidates, either defective operations or hostile work environment that results in excesive burn out rates for employees, irrational expectations from management teams (specially founders who struggle to make the transition to later stage startups).
How are you going to determine if that really was the problem?
Every time I've heard a colleague say something like this, (s)he is just utilizing a model in his/her mind to explain the behavior, and pretty much never attempts to validate/falsify. Pretty much always post hoc justifications.
These are all fine and measurable. Jumping from those to "lack of motivation and drive" is a leap.
One time someone said "Yes, I am surprised you fired me." I can't even tell you how destructive that was to my team. To be honest that person should never had been surprised nor my leadership team, but it happened and it caused havoc. It took years to fully repair the damage. I think he just really liked the job and didn't want to leave. Also the person ended up going to jail for unethical practices just 18 months later. I actually fired him due to being full of excuses or on the line of disaster and never asking for help.
Also for reviews: no subjective remarks without concrete examples in writing.
People leave managers and not companies.
I wholeheartedly agree with this article, when it comes to execs you cannot get rid of one that does not fit fast enough. But that is the funny thing, you can take a person with proven results, stick them in a different company culture and they just don't produce. They can leave that company, go to another with a different culture and succeed all over again. With senior executives it really is all about fit.
I also agree with you, if you are burning and churning thru the bottom you have a serious culture problem and probably have some bad mid/senior management.
A minor point. I recently had to let a junior level person go after "giving them a chance" for around 5 months. I did everything I could, extra mentoring, warnings, gentle pressure, lighter work and finally, an opportunity to shift into a simpler projects so that they'd get more comfortable. This was, as the article mentions, emotionally draining for me and unfortunately, the dislike split over from professional to personal. I let the person go and that's that.
Now, the relevant part of this comment, I hired someone else and because of the baggage from the previous person, I very quickly started getting dissatisfied with the new hire. This would have ended in a disaster if one of my other employees didn't tell me that this new person has only been on for less than a month and was doing okay.
Prompted me to re evaluate myself. So yes, hiring and firing junior people is a problem usually with the hirer but it might be due to things that you have to watch out for.
I know people say to keep ramping up the testing and difficulties of interviews but we've started to create a culture where all you end up with is people who are good at that, not creating value for the company. I once had to fire someone because they absolutely refused to fill out an annual self review that would have taken 10 minutes. (There were other similar events that lead up to this). Technically they could do the work just fine but didn't want to live in the real world. I had many conversations about attitude and working with the team. I don't know how an interview process would capture this. Incidentally, I see him at local meetups and he recently told me his is thinking about quitting his current job because their office moved 5 miles away and he didn't want another 5 minutes of commuting.
Firing for typical junior mistakes? Yeah, that's a problem. But, junior people are usually not just technically raw, but also employee raw. Not showing up to work or lying about causing issues will get someone fired.
To all the juniors out there, when you screw something up (and you will), be quick to raise your hand and say it was you. Then, shift gears to fixing and mitigating for the future. It's a lot like politics in that it is the cover up that almost always gets a person.
Yeah? How so? What is fast?
If I hire a junior dev, and I say "Hey, I do expect you to know how to program. Not well, I'll teach you, but you need to know how to code. Do you know how to code?"
And they have problems for the first 1-2 months, it's not my job to teach them something I expected them to know.
They shouldn't get through the interview, but they do, sometimes.
Because he was a friend who had left his job to work for us, we didn't fire him and he continued undermining the company with his poor performance for a year. I think this was the worst mistake I did. In the end, he left the company and screwed us over on some account.
So, I've learned from this:
- do not hire friends as senior executive
- if you insist on hiring friend, have a clear backup plan if things don't work out so that you can both end the relationship. Be prepared to lose your friendship in doing that.
- never let an underperforming senior employee fester in your company. It's like rot, it will drag down the entire company by devaluating the work your other employees do
This may well be true but how do you know? The only way I can think of is if the employee went on to become such a rock star at some other place that you actually hear about it. But that's not the only situation where they might have been valuable to you after a while.
Lars is focused on the fact that keeping a senior employee who gives you a bad feeling that things are not working out is actively harmful to your company. Whether they turn into a rockstar later in a different context that big of a deal if you replace them with somebody who is at lest not causing good employees to leave.
This also forces companies to filter out "possibly good" candidates and only hire "probably good" candidates.
If it were normal to get fired after a day or a week, you could get hired at 10 different companies over a span of two months and likely find a really great position, where you're a great fit.
My next company will have explicit rubrics for what it takes to get fired, and your status will be tracked daily. You'll know at all times exactly how close you are to getting fired with how much severance. It will never be a surprise, unless it's a reaction to an acute event (sexual harassment, etc). We'll hire pretty much everyone who walks through the door with a plausible story for how they add value. Anyone we fire we'll sit down in the exit interview and write a plan for how they can get re-hired in a few weeks or months if they're interested. We'll also try to spin off a separate business with the fired person at the head, instead of just firing, whenever possible.
Contract to hire at temp agencies doesn't afford this level of flexibility (at times)? Maybe not 10 companies in two months, but I can think of multiple cases of contractors brought on for one-off jobs lasting two-ish sprints being retained beyond that.
That said, I applaud your proposal to have a very high level of transparency with employees about their performance and their future prospects with your company.
That might work well for people that are unemployed, but it'll be hard to attract anyone that has a secure job with such flimsy offers.
And your comments feel noble but a bit unrealistic to me as far as general employees go.
First, there's a cost to bringing people into an organization. Letting everyone in and then having some or most of them flame out seems like a huge drain on resources -- including emotional resources.
Second, the idea of being tracked daily against some firing metric sounds a bit hellish for employees. It seems like it'd breed a lot of negative reactions ranging from gaming the system all the way to nasty politics and back-stabbing along the lines of what apparently happened because of Microsoft's stack-ranking system.
So, again: I respect the ideas. But I'd be concerned about how they'd play out in real life.
>You'll know at all times exactly how close you are to getting fired with how much severance
Good luck getting anyone to stick around! People want job security, they don't want to feel like they're walking on eggshells every day. You seem to think the only thing people want out of a job is money.
>Anyone we fire we'll sit down in the exit interview and write a plan for how they can get re-hired in a few weeks or months if they're interested.
I don't think you know what firing means. It's not a mutual decision and you really don't want that employee working for you at that point. It's a serious legal risk to re-hire fired employees.
That's interesting to hear. Could you explain in what way?
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
You're correct in spirit, but no one ever uses the phrase "laid off" to mean "fired". "Laid off" usually means you were let go because of say, financial problems in the company, no need for your position, etc. "Fired" implies cause.
You're right. "laid off" would tend to mean "made redundant".
And "let go" subsumes all forms of involuntary termination, both layoff and firing.
* Fired with cause - gross reason: sexual harassment, illegal activities, etc.
* Fired - incompetence, laziness, other ineptitude related specifically to the employee, but nothing illegal
* Laid off - financial reasons or business direction reasons for the company. (Some people who are borderline performers get swept up into lay offs, which helps the employee save face.)
In the latter 2 cases, people generally get severance arrangements. In the last case, people are generally eligible for re-hire should conditions or direction change.
Surprising as it may seem, I am going to have to disagree with you here.
If someone is performing poorly, the most likely explanation is that they are unhappy with their job, for whatever reason.
And the best way to handle the situation is to figure out what is making the employee unhappy.
And sometimes the problem might not even be solvable for your company. And in that situation, the best outcome for both of you is to end the business relationship.
Interesting, I'd never heard that before. Could you possibly expand on that?
The valley has enough volatility - we don't need more.
So, you have solved the "how do I track a developers usefulness to the company"-problem? Without that I don't see how that plan could work (and that ignores all the other problems others have already pointed out).
Note: The problem exists for other positions too, developers are just an example.
I can't imagine wanting to be an employee with the level of risk you're proposing.
Is this something out of Dilbert? Sounds like a quantification-obsessed culture -- the very opposite of ensuring qualitative assessment. Will probably just run to the ground as people flee the hell-hole as soon as they can find better pastures.
Yep, it was a line spoken by Dogbert. /s
It was just downright awkward to go for the 4th or 5th interview. Everything was really good, but now the cto needed to meet me as wel etc etc...
I'm used to one interview (2 tops) to get started one week later. I've never been let go, but I think there is less taboo about firing contractors.
One wonders if the company you're talking about has so much trouble making any decision, or only this sort.
Things might be different if everyone was doing it like you say, but as it is right now there's a lot of work and friction involved with changing jobs. Getting hired is an ordeal during which you're not getting paid. If someone receives an offer from A with which they can be 90% sure that they'll have the position in a year or two if they want it still, or from B where they will most likely have no job again next week, why the hell would they ever choose B? Let alone common scenarios that come with job change such as moving a family, buying a house in a different city, intentionally leaving a specific position elsewhere to gamble on this one, etc.
I'm almost certain you'd be signing yourself up to employ the worst the labour pool has to offer, which is going to suck no matter how quickly you fire because you're still going to have to be on boarding them.
Things are sometimes done more quickly at smaller places, but even then it's fairly common for employers to offer termination agreements, typically for a few months salary, to avoid even the possibility of litigation.
> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
That's my prediction. But I haven't run a company myself so who can tell.
Hi, I'm whatshisface, and unscrupulous team lead from the 1970s, when metering code seemed pretty workable. I can write 100kloc of code a day (my editor is set to convert spaces into line breaks) and commit once per typed character. Also, I'm a great team player who can work with QA to file and fix thousands of trivial tickets every week. If those numbers aren't what you're looking for, I'm also a social butterfly who can ace any peer ranking on charisma alone.
When can I start?
Maybe firing means something different in your company/mindset, but I understand it as as an instantaneous cessation of reciprocal obbligations, or (allowed by the Law of course) one-sided termination of a contract, the one in which you give me money in exchange for my work, i.e. for my time.
Maybe it is just me, but I won't be sitting anywhere for no [insert strong word here] "exit interview" nor write down any "plan" the second after you have fired me, or you'll have to pay me really good money to have me sitting down for the time needed to hear your re-hiring plans and write my own ...
"So hey, listen, this isn't working out, so for the next few months you're going to have to worry about feeding and clothing your child unless you find a new job real quick. Please sit down and write a plan with us about how we can rehire you in a few months if you dedicate all your energy on providing free work for us instead of getting a job!
Oh, by the way, would you want to start a business instead? We value your work low enough that we'd like to fire you, but if you can pay a few of the people we deem low performers out of your own pocket and provide that work for us for free? Even better."
I've had hundreds of employees under my direct or indirect supervision. Other than pre-career fast food type gigs, I've had to fire 2 for cause. Even in the fast food/retail gigs, I think we canned like 5-6, for attendance problems or pilferage... most problem people there came down to needing a frank discussion about showing up on time and could be addressed without termination.
People aren't robots. Your supervisors, managers and leaders need to know how to hire and manage people effectively.
it is possible if you offer employees a lot of money. some financial companies do things like this (fire 5% every year) and manage quite well but i doubt it works in sectors where personnel costs are significant.
If you have been fired in a week or so then you know the psychological impact of these practices.
That is priceless. A true gem.
You're right that firing is hard for everyone. It creates an environment of chaos and uncertainty, which if it is not properly managed, may precipitate scores of top employees to shift to job-search-mode.
FWIW, however, I do think a lot more high-level execs (which is what the article is _really_ about rather than juniors) need to on the chopping block earlier and more often. At the very least it may help to promote more empathy about hiring people that have been laid-off as these people climb their way back into leadership positions.
He clarifies the provocative title in the section titled "How long should you give people a chance?"
For anyone that didn't reach the end.
Startups do not have the same level of people experiences to draw conclusions based on interviewing thousands and thousands of applicants and tracking the success of accepted applicants based on a large portfolio of information.
Probably the best thing you can do in a situation like this is GET someone from a company like that who has had years of experience interviewing candidates, and they will be able to bring along that experience of identifying potential false positives from the get go. That is honestly the biggest asset to these companies, their ability to hire and maintain high quality people.
in addition to the countless benefits and opportunities for varied career trajectories in multiple and evolving technologies for smart people once getting into these places, is the fact that they highly value the social network of these work places, and they cannot be duplicated in many places elsewhere, further incentivizing them to stay and internally recommending other high quality friends from elsewhere to interview.
They have documented people who can do this in relation to the people they hire, and even have internal portfolios tracking employees by age, experience, major, and schools, as well as how they performed on interviews. This is a fact.
Everything is subjective. But ultimately a company decides based on its own subjective priorities how an employee meets up to their subjectively defined needs for the position that person fills, and they can pretty onjectively within that context evaluate whether the person can do the work or not, and even track commitments, errors, time to cdoe to completion, amount of bugs, amount of time team has to spend fixing their bugs, etc, and parse out a pretty good idea of performance.
Thats why theres multiple books written by these companies designed to help you pass their interviews, as they have identified indicators of low performance in interviews....
All companies can do this, but many don't, and many arent based in software and therefore do not have embedded ability to track performance metrics the way code commits can.
small companies can do it too, but big companies who also have this system in place can take advantage of larger sets of data for more accurate indicators that seem to correlate with low performance.
Because Tesla and SpaceX are doing really cool things...
http://www.autonews.com/article/20151009/OEM02/151009806/tes...
Sometimes it's easier to just give the person another chance, than to fire him and have no one to do the work.
It might not be causation but correlation, but nonetheless, you are wrong. Marriage is definitely a long-term win. For the short term, there is Tinder.
Doing so can work out in the long run, I suppose. But it very often doesn't.
I can't reiterate this enough. Once company I worked for fired the COO that had built the operations when he had serious personal issues that bled into the working environment. I knew it was a serious company after that, I could imagine how difficult it was and he created a great operational culture and working environment before his issues.
Fast forward a few years after an acquisition. The new owners have so many Bozo's in executive positions the place is toxic.
Someone once summarized that as "The fish rots from the head".
That is a sign of a poor hiring process. It's a common mistake but it's the number one thing I try to figure out when hiring. I'll have to write a blog about it some time.
And yet, I look back and I can't think of a single example in my own life where "listening to my gut" seemed to lead me astray. But I also don't trust my own brain to remember such instances...
the whole thesis of this article ("you can never fire someone too soon") reeks of selection bias
For example, this happened to me a few times, but as I am 1 in 25 people in the country that can do what I do, it takes that company 12-18 month to find a replacement, if at all.
Which means that just because someone was successful doesn't mean they were directly responsible for it. Like being on a team where you may have even been the manager but the team players were what made it truly successful. If you were successful on two different teams then the odds of you being a key player in that success are much higher.
> you’ve realized that what sounded like their “experience” in the interview and even confirmed in reference checks, turns out to be things they observed but they didn’t really drive (or truly understood from within) and therefore can’t replicate
Had a client who was a 24-year-old startup founder, one of his investors got me involved to help him hire some folks and help define project process.
We hired a great developer, who freaked when he saw how sloppy the code was. Rightfully said, "We can't maintain this..."
Anyway, the founder had written a lot of it, so it wasn't a shock to him that the code was bad and needed to be re-done. Hew knew it was all quick and dirty and hacked together. By the time I got inovlved, we had issues doing deployments (deployments would take half a day and a lot of stress around testing once code went live), we had issues around infrastructure being unstable (lost 2 days worth of customer data once after a bug caused the DB to crash), and of course, nothing would have scaled. No code review, not much of a QA process, just a million things that needed to be done better -- you can cut some corners as a startup, you can't cut every corner.
There were a handful of paying clients, but most had been sold a promise of feature A-through-Z, and really the tools did like A-through-C... the moment one of them complained the young CEO lost it because he hated criticism, especially from customers, and he didn't want people to think he had lied to them... even though he had pretty clearly over-promised.
The dev I brought on wanted to re-do a lot of things, write unit tests, set up a CI / CD process, proper backups, basically do all the stuff that should have been done day one to ensure we could work fast and have confidence the wheels wouldn't come off. The founder had been on board with trying to reduce outages and crashes, but about a week into it, when one of the customers complained about something, the young CEO freaked when he couldn't simultaneously have new features and a re-done core codebase on the schedule he wanted.
So even though a week before he had said that he liked the idea of reducing a lot of our technical debt, and giving the new dev a chance to work on clean good code... since he was young (not sure if that's the best excuse) he flip-flopped. And three weeks into the overhaul (that was supposed to take 5 weeks), he was furious. "This dev is costing us time and just doesn't get our culture and isn't aligned with our goals and just isn't working out!"
I got called in, looked over what the dev had done. Nothing short of a miracle he had accomplished so much so fast. I said as much. Later that day I get an email from the founder, "I had to let [the dev] go, he just wasn't working out." I left the project shortly after, and the founder burned through another $300k in seed money (his parents') before shutting down.
Anyway this whole "trust your gut" thing... and "don't ask around before firing" -- that's only good advice if you've got some experience and a cool temperament.
If you're a new CEO, ask around. Figure out what's going on, and if you tell people to zig, and they zig, don't get mad at them for not zagging -- they aren't mind-readers. Flipping on decisions like that are extremely demotivating to everyone who works for you, and flipping on a hire (firing someone) is the potentially most demotivating thing you can do if it's not done correctly. You hire smart people, if you can't trust their expertise, don't hire them. Since you trust their expertise, don't micromanage them, or expect the impossible from them.
One of the biggest and hardest jobs a startup exec/founder/whatever has is having a steady hand in the face of serious fucking freakouts.
It's a natural tendency to blame juniors for shit being all fucked up, even though a) shit being fucked up is your natural state of existence and b) shit being fucked up is all your fault. You fucked shit up.
My cofounder and I have talked each other down from the ledge many times. I'm maybe less patient with junior cats naturally than I should be, but I know my tendencies towards Jobsian ass-chewing and I am mostly successful in suppressing my bloodlust when things go wrong and I have to fix them.
About firing fast and easy, it is a bad idea.
I work in Sweden. I don't think I have seen ever anyone fired. What I have seen is some of the best hiring processes. The process looks at the candidate values, and skills. And there is a discussion about what we expect from her, and what she expects from the job.
I worked previously in Spain, I saw a lot of people fired for no good reason. And they were also hired without too much attention. Shorts interviews, no real testing, are part of a process that ends consuming a lot of effort from everyone after hiring someone that is not the correct person. Other times that people is good, and leaves, because was not the job for them.
Both seem related. Cheap and easy firing produces careless recruiting. And that is more expensive that people realizes.
I don't think we disagree that the reason the hiring process is so involved in Sweden is because it's so hard to fire someone. This results in a situation where the company does everything they can to minimise the risk of hiring the wrong person.
The downside of this is that companies will not take any chances when it comes to hiring people. I believe this is the reason why I have seem some really bad diversity (both cultural and gender) in the Swedish tech industry, compared to other countries where I have worked.
If it's easier to fire someone, it's also easier to take a chance on someone that might night be the "perfect candidate" at first glance, but perhaps he or she will shine if given the opportunity.
Permanent employees are basically impossible to fire. It's a mixed bag I think. On the one hand, there is a large social benefit to having such gov enforced job security. On the other hand, it drives down wages, and hurts companies that get stuck with a really bad employee. At least as workers we can choose to earn more money and take the riskier route via contracting.
Dont agree with the direction, not something they are familiar with.... they like things just the way they have been used to these last few decades.
Which is why I am now a contractor in London. No theater. They can let me go on short notice ethically and legally, and I am fine with that. Mostly as I am financially fine with it.
That really isn't true at all - you can be fired for pretty much anything in the first two years and after that the process is pretty straightforward.
I've never seen a company fail to get rid of someone they didn't want working there - one way or another.
I have come across American managers move straight from Silicon Valley to Europe and not understanding that firing people in Europe (well in the parts I know, UK & Scandinavia) is rare, and not expected. Not understanding that there is a limited pool of potential new employees, with a busy grapevine, and you do not want a reputation as a hire and fire company. Not understanding that internally people no longer want to move to that team etc.
My naïve Scandinavian background balked when seeing the behavior of these managers over and over again. And made me very wary of ever working for a US company even if located in Europe. The culture clash from senior management would be too much.
Though to be fair I have met several very good American colleagues and managers as well. Obviously it is not ubiquitous.
This is such an important idea that Ireland advertises it as a perk of doing business there. In addition to tax breaks and all their other incentives, the government works hard to promote Ireland as a "stepping stone" to European business. EU rules, Eurozone finances, with an intermediate, English-speaking culture to help get past the pain points of leaving the US.
It sounded a bit silly to me at first, but on reflection I'll bet it's a pretty good move. Picking up a bad reputation in a new market is hard to recover from, and I expect a successful move to Europe would require either careful planning or a totally autonomous branch.
Well put but doesn't address context.
If I just got gas-fire funding, intending to blow up my company, I will need to hire a dozen people a month.
It is a risk. But so is taking 200 hours to hire 1 person.
We are in the business of balancing many risks with many rewards.
If there is a clear need, the hiring process should come about naturally, as in tests to see if people have a certain set of skills and if they are a cultural fit.
I suspect the race to adopting whatever is hyped at the moment (known as "let's rewrite in...") is partially due to this hastened hiring process.
I have worked for a few years in a company that is based in Sweden but also has a very large U.S. presence. Couple of points:
1. The recruiting process is involved in Sweden is more involved than in the U.S, agreed. However it is not perfect. False positives do enter the system. Folks there have started getting junior candidates intern/contract as a way of evaluating them. This unfortunately has its own bias.
2. Yes, I think it is impossible to fire people in Sweden. What is typically done in those rare situations is to shuffle you in such a way that you don't do any work. Imagine a head of a team suddenly head in title but with no reports.
3. On the U.S. side, interviews are way easier but then at will employment takes care of that in those rare situations.
....in software? So Sweden has figured out the software engineering hiring process?
And the hire process can be more elaborate, my father's company used 7 rounds of interviews before anyone was hired... But in "our sector", developer roles etc it was mostly just 1 max 2 face to face interviews and no different than the UK and elsewhere I have worked.
And in Norway (at least in Oslo) there is no hesitance in hiring people due to the severe drought of qualified people and near 0% unemployment in cities means companies are desperate even if letting them go will be difficult.
But there is a proliferance of contractors via consultancies everywhere as they are easy to fire.
Steve Jobs may have been but then again maybe he did need time to cook in Next before coming back.
You can fire jobs.
You can fire friends.
You can fire customers.
Makes life so much easier!
how about when the board fired Steve Jobs? (Specifically, stripped him from all responsibilities, removed him from the head of the mac division, gave him an office with nothing to do). No?
After all, he didn't code, was kind of a weirdo, and the board had every reason to have some doubts.
Was that a "wrong" decision?
But the Apple story makes the point - most CEOs are mediocre. Sculley and Amelio (and Spindler, whom almost everyone has forgotten) were all competent in their previous jobs, and usually also in subsequent jobs.
But you don't want to settle for competence in the C-suite. You want outstanding - a genuine 10X CEO.
There aren't many of those around. But there are plenty of 0.1X pretenders, and you'd better hope you don't end up hiring one, because no one will do more damage to a company.