How much does a bad hire cost?

- Effect on good performers. If one person is not pulling enough weight, it's generally pretty evident to others and feels demotivating to do good work.

- Bad code and long term effects of maintaining it. In the short term, it will create a lot of code review burden. As much as we desire to be thorough in code reviews, bad code will slip through cracks and owning it long term is pain

- Attrition on the team

- Based on anecdotal evidence, low performers point fingers at other not so perfect things like peers not helping, things are complex etc. It raises the base level of negativity on the team. It spreads through 1:1s

- As a manager, you should covering their back and because of that, you won't scale as a manager

- Bad outlook for the team when they work on cross team / cross functional projects. It takes disproportionately more time to change that bad outlook perception. It comes into play during things like calibration, promo etc. Though you can trust that right decisions will be made based on each individual's impact, there is a burden on the manager to discuss at length.

(edit: formatting)

Why not cut the crap, stop playing head games -- and get to the point? Just have - you know - a regular conversation with them:

"We've been talking a lot about how things have been going the past few months -- and I'm sorry to say this, but by this point we just don't think it's going to work out for you here. We could put you on this thing they call PIP, but honestly, to me that feels patronizing (and a waste of your precious time, to boot). And seriously, it's much better for your career and your next job hunt if you were to resign on your own accord, than for us to have to fire you. We'll give you a week or two to think about it - but if you're willing to resign voluntarily, we'll give you X dollars as severance" -- where $X is a non-trivial amount, basically on the order of what you would have spent on the 2 months going through the pointless, soul-crushing, and fundamentally insulting charade that -- as you say, everyone knows -- is PIP.

I know what everyone is about to say at this point: "because legal", "because temper tantrums, sabotage, etc". But in reality, the risk here is very, very small. The one time someone (from that precious breed of a "kind, high-empathy manager") went this route with me -- and from the few times it has happened to close friends of mine -- sure, it stung for a few minutes -- but ultimately we saw they were completely right course, and after the fact, we were nothing but grateful for their honesty, and for the pure courage and humaneness of the path they chose to take.

Your "reality" may differ of course. In a lot of companies (especially very large ones), no one really knows, or can really trust anyone, fears of sabotage (or a reaction substantially worse than a temper tantrum) are, shall we say, part of air you breathe once you walk through door.

But if that's the case, then you have far greater problems on your hands than the slightly awkward problem of firing a person that you just aren't clicking with.

Don't do that. Pick out the top few résumés, maybe 3 at most, interview only those people, and hire 1 of them if they seem good. Companies make hiring way harder than it needs to be.

5. Start getting nervous. Employee not batting it out of the park like you’d hoped. Maybe still onboarding, give it another month (and $12,000 in payroll expense).

Here's the problem already. A month of "onboarding" is already too long. If you see a problem, act quickly. Talk with the employee, and if it's not working out, cut your losses quickly. It's the company's own fault for prolonging it 9 months. If your onboarding process takes a month or more, you need to work on simplifying that. You probably have way too much bureaucracy and red tape in your company. The new person's coworkers should be able to help get someone up to speed quickly.

It's a business. Make business decisions, not personal decisions. The boss's job to make the tough decisions. If you can't, then you're the one who is losing the company money, not the job candidate.

The claim is "the team is currently short-staffed, and has been for a long time. That’s why they’re hiring!" If that's true, then there can't be several months on onboarding. You need the new hire to start making valuable contributions ASAP, and your processes should be set up to allow that.

It's hilarious and ironic that all of these so-called "Agile" shops you see in job postings are actually extremely sluggish.