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Comment by OnlineGladiator | Hacker News Reader

> But as you grow, that ten percent of underperforming people becomes large in absolute numbers, and is very painful to deal with.

I think you could reduce the 10% to 1% simply by actively firing bad employees, and the easiest way to do that is with a probationary hiring period (let's say 6 months, maybe a year).

I am fully aware of how systemic rot can be, and how hard it can be to remove. The real problem is when you hire a bad manager, because they will not only let the rot fester but encourage it to grow.

I think you could wildly relax hiring standards for ICs and be incredibly successful. What we need are better practices around hiring managers more than anything.

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Alas, for all of the focus on the interview processes to "prevent" false positive hires, those same companies suck as actually getting rid of the bad hires. Some is rational risk aversion to lawsuits and the like but that clearly bs when you see just how fast people that aren't liked by someone high enough up the food chain are shown the door.

The effect on morale and real productivity of getting rid of the toxic and worst performers is amazing.

The first job I had there was a probationary period - it was good and bad. It was good because you knew everybody there was extremely talented and you could rely on your coworkers. There was a bit of an understanding about the cut throat nature of the place though, and obviously that's not for everyone. But at the end of the day, when it came time to just get shit done, there was never any problem.

I can't name that place without doxing myself, but it sounds like Netflix has a similar culture. Some people love it. Some people hate it. But I don't think many people would say they have an issue with employing less-than-stellar employees.

Of course this is only "solving" (it's certainly not perfect) the problem of hiring for engineers, which most of us are on HN (at least I assume, but certainly more engineers than engineering managers). It does nothing to address the issue of hiring bad managers. I have no solution for that, other than to make sure the first manager is excellent. A players hire A players because they want to do the best work they can, and will go out of their way to hire people better than themselves. B players hire C players because they just want to make themselves look good. Once you have a bad manager, the assumption is everyone beneath him will be as bad or worse (obviously there are exceptions).

Unless you work in a crazy place like Germany with the extremes driven by the work councils, probationary periods are an HR gimmick. If people aren't working out, they can be let go. Have simple, clear, legal policies and simple documentation, WIPs, and most importantly managers who actually care, communicate, and help their team members succeed. The fact is that most companies and managers don't fit those criteria and so create their own hells.

Note that I'm also not talking about companies doing forced rankings and nuking the bottom X%. That's a different form of systemic toxicity and, alas, plays into the technical industry's huge problem with toxic "geek machismo" culture.

As I mentioned in a sibling comment, the toxic (and incompetent) manager problem is fundamentally a leadership problem. The single biggest responsibility of the founders is the culture of the organization -- everything stems from that, one way or another.

Leadership, from the top down, is absolutely responsible for the mentoring, training, and environment created by the management. None of the systemic problems with & induced by management is new. It comes down to: does leadership actually care enough to do anything about it? Companies institute all sorts of formal stuff like internal surveys and NPS scoring and so forth but it always comes down to trust & communication and then follow through. And the follow through is the clearest way to create trust. All of the things that even well intentioned leaders spout, if not followed through, quickly erodes and ultimately destroys trust. So, just like with kids, don't make promises you won't keep.

Just out of curiosity, why do you make multiple replies instead of one larger reply?

Because you made a variety of specific points and it's easier to address them specifically.

And let's not forget how scant real mentorship and training of managers is in this industry. Nor, how we've setup the power/money hierarchy that many people feel the only career growth path is to become a people manager (even if they aren't any good at it). :-(

Those "bad" managers are correctly following their incentives:

- More headcount is always better for the manager's prestige and career prospects, as long as those people contribute to project success at least a little bit (and most low performers do, just less than you'd hope). Managing infinitely many people each producing epsilon above breakeven is much better than having 1 rockstar.

- Headcount availability ebbs and flows with the business cycle. It's important to take everything you can while the money is flowing in case you might need it during a contraction. It's important to have nonessential staff on hand during a contraction so you can satisfy your X% cut requirement without compromising effectiveness too badly.

- As a manager of a high-performing division at a growing company, you will be given an integer multiple of your current headcount, and expected to deliver proportional results with it. If your strategy was "employ only high performers" you will fail, someone will be brought in immediately above or immediately below you to "help out," and within six months you'll be "spending more time with your family."

- The hiring process is hard to mess with. Recruiters put your ICs onto the panels directly; systematically leaning on them to change their votes will probably get the ethics hotline involved. But the decision to retain year over year is entirely yours.

Stack ranking was invented for this exact case, cutting the rot out when it's already metastasized.

It has a bad reputation as it's often used year on year - it's meant to be done just once or twice to get back on track after years of over-hiring and reluctant firing.

I’m a pretty good engineer, and I’m never going to join any job with a probationary period. It could turn out to be a bad manager or something and I would end up with a messed up resume. Why would I accept some kind of second-class status when Google etc. are willing to hire me with normal employment terms? I think you’d have a serious adverse selection problem if you only hire people who are willing to take such a job.

I can honestly say the place I worked that had a probationary period had the most talented team of anywhere I have ever been, and I have worked with FAANG before, as well as unicorns.

Like I said, it's not for everyone. A bad manager can ruin your experience anywhere and fire you regardless. That place was just very forthcoming about the fact that you need to demonstrate value if you want to keep your job.

On the manager side, I can't upvote that enough.

Toxic systems are always the responsibility of the managers and that's from the top down. The systemically perverse issues created by people "managing up" is one of the most critical problems that people higher up the food chain need to correct for.

> the easiest way to do that is with a probationary hiring period

How often do you actually boot someone though? For juniors we have pretty low expectations so they never fail this.

People got booted from my first place of work a lot - probably something like 1 in 5 didn't survive the probation period. The idea is to make the probation period long enough that the employee can demonstrate value. If they can't demonstrate value in that time period, they are let go.

This was not the practice where I worked, but you could have different probation periods for different roles. So someone who is primarily focused on technical debt might have a longer probation period than someone focused on rapid feature development.

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