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Comment by muzani | Hacker News Reader

I'm in a company that didn't. Basically we have an aggressive schedule and not enough candidates, because nobody wants to join a startup. A few bad eggs slip through the filter, but probation contracts make them easy to root out. I'm not sure why more companies don't just adopt a 'hire fast, fire fast' system.

Lots of programmers in the industry are already good enough anyway. I've seen programmers who can't reverse a linked list who can still output decent code. Similarly you have some extremely technically skilled ones who can't build a feature in reasonable time.

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> I'm not sure why more companies don't just adopt a 'hire fast, fire fast' system.

Because it will vastly limit the number of skilled developers you can attract.

Let's consider two scenarios. In the first, a developer performs a coding challenge. The company is fairly sure that the developer is qualified to work there, and the developer is fairly sure she has the talent to stay employed there.

In the second, a developer is hired for non-technical reasons, and she quits her current job knowing that if things don't work out, she'll be looking for another job in six weeks.

Fuck that. Job hunting is stressful, and there is no way I would join a company if I didn't think I would be there for at least a year. I wouldn't even send my resume to a company with a reputation for that kind of fast turnover.

Hire fast doesn't mean no coding interviews. There can probably be 1-2 coding challenges, but the whole process shouldn't take more than a few hours total. They should be just hard enough for an experienced dev to pass without having to study, but it should filter out the people who spend all their time studying and yet can't build things. What happened to the days we were happy with FizzBuzz as a filter?

I just think there's a lot of waste going from 90% confidence to 95% confidence.

Lots of companies do this, but no one calls it "hire fast, fire fast." It's called "contract-to-hire." If you're talking about enforcing a bell curve on your existing employees, then that's called stack ranking and it's a despised and discredited practice.

"Hire fast, fire fast" is something I used to think was a good idea but it relies on management having the balls to fire, in the case I saw they never did grow the balls and the competence of the team cratered as incompetence became the new team culture

I wonder if there could be a sort of “hard” probation zone. You get to work cranking out low priority bugs for a mmmm Chung few days, but no real interaction or maybe even like a 14 day contract. Seems like something culturally you could create, though the social implications might be quite rough.

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