Preparing To Fire an Executive | Hacker News Reader

Preparing To Fire an Executive

bhorowitz.com

104 pointsjayliew33 comments

This is right on - particularly the part about you screwing up the hiring process, not the exec being at fault. I made assumptions about a level of professionalism that I never assessed properly. I went through this a year+ ago and I hired the wrong guy. Unfortunately he took the legal language in emails during the termination process personally - another symptom of the root cause for which he was fired.

>This is right on - particularly the part about you screwing up the hiring process

really, I think this attitude is the best way to look at it when you have to fire anyone, executive or not.

Yes and no - it's a case of asymmetric information, and while you can do your best to obtain more information (hiring process), you can't know exactly how a person will perform until they're actually there.

I said it was the best attitude for an employer to take, not that it was 100% the employers fault.

All this makes me think is that I never want to run a really large head-count organization. The kinds of thinking and "work" he had to do at Opsware are exhausting just to read about.

Very informative post. I (and I suspect many others reading this) regularly have to fire executives at multinationals with several thousands in staff and 100's of millions in turnover. I'm going to bookmark this and the next time I need to, I'll be sure to re-read this blog post - because every time I do something like this, I rely on blog posts to instruct me on how to do it.

(yes yes I'm a snarky asshole - I liked to read it too, I guess in the same way women like to read in Cosmopolitan about cocktail parties where super models wear designer dresses and party all night every night drinking 1000$ / bottle champagne and have affairs with billionaires, but really, when you look at it critically, what is the value of this to anyone but the top 1/1000th percentile of the population?)

Where does he imply that this is only for huge companies? Even small start-ups have executives, staff, and a board.

The lesson is the same no matter the scale. If you hire a CTO and then have to fire that CTO, it's most likely your screw up.

I'm not sure why the exec is less at fault than another class of employee. If you hire a programmer or designer who can't deliver, how is that any different?

Because the executive's performance depends on the team he's working with. If there's mismatch between the executive's leadership and the team, that will result in difficulties regardless of his skill.

so if his performance is bad, it's the fault of his team. but if his performance is good, it justifies the huge bucks they make. i sense a discrepancy.

in my world, with greater reward should come greater responsibility.

Severance packages are often quite generous too. :-)

But the important point is that it's not about blaming people for things they can't be expected to control. Firing incompetent executives is, as the article pointed out, hopefully rare. But if they can't meet performance goals they should still be let go: if a company was in this position with regard to firing their employees, I'd be equally concerned if they were disparaging.

I totally agree, but how do you find a match between an executive & the team during the interview process?

Conveniently, Ben has also written on how to hire executives:

http://bhorowitz.com/2010/10/14/hiring-executives-if-you%E2%...

I guess Ben has a thing for lyrics from rappers about N*&$!s

On another note, is it a bad idea to have a successor lined up (or at least prepped) prior to the firing?

I think the same thing can be true of highly qualified professionals as well. If you are hiring good developers and designers, it may make sense to take the same approach: Did we not screen for the right technical fit? Did we make a mistake in assessing the cultural fit? Professionals and managers can have a lot in common in this way.

On the other hand, a large organization has many other kinds of staff. When you hire other types of employees (call center workers, loading dock workers, bookkeepers, etc.), you don't necessarily have the ability to do the same kinds of screening in advance, and you won't always be able to find workers with the same level of commitment and professionalism to staff lower-tier positions. So you're more likely to fire someone simply because they couldn't or wouldn't do their jobs correctly than you are with professionals and executives.

My takeaway: Executives get fired, but N*&$!s get capped & bagged.

The contrast between his super-PC usage of she/her instead of he/him (or even they/them) and the Dre song makes for some lovely cognitive dissonance.

This particular contradiction runs deep. The last bastion of unapologetic masculinity today is gangsta rap. A CEO is nothing if not competitive, a traditionally masculine trait. Yet a modern CEO must also be uber-PC. Thus the contrast.

my email is zackster@gmail.com - feel free to contact any time

It's funny in a screwed up way because he uses the 'she' form for a person to be fired. So in a weird PC way I thought 'man, why is this guy harping on this poor woman being fired - as if guys can't screw up and be fired'.

So to be really PC he needs to step it up a notch - prefer to 'he/him' when somebody is doing something wrong, and 'she/her' when doing something good :)

His attempt to be PC and make the firee a "she" backfired--it sounds sexist to have the failing executive be female.

Give it up, folks--just use "he" as a generic pronoun. No one thinks it means you think one gender is better than the other.

There's nothing wrong with "they" as third person singular.

Except that it sounds terrible if one was brought up according to a different light. English already has a third person personal singular.

Many languages have unexpected pronoun usage that newcomers must get used to. Many Indo-European languages have a formal 'you', for example. With French, it's the same as 2nd person plural (you). With German, it's the same as 3rd person plural (they). French also has the odd case of 'on' which, although it's a 3rd person singular (e.g., one goes = on va), is very frequently used as 1st person plural (we go = nous allons).

Where there is a missing component in language, there will be a cognitive need to fill it somehow. It can be done with formations like y'all or with more acceptable usage such as they. I think we English speakers worry too much about this sort of thing.

In Dutch, there is 'jij' (colloquial 'you') and 'u' (formal 'you'). There is a trend to replace both 'jij' and 'u' by 'joe' (pronounced as the english 'you'). This eliminates the dilemma whether to address someone formally or not. The word 'joe' was popularized by Wim T. Schippers both on the radio and in his plays and TV series.

Singular "they" goes back centuries. Shakespeare and Jane Austen both used it. Its comeback as the solution to the gender-neutral conundrum seems to me a pretty good answer to changing social conditions. It does stand out too much sometimes, but "he" and "she" stand out way worse, especially the dreadful overcompensating "I'll just self-consciously regulate my gender distribution and make sure that at least half of the time my programmers and executives are a she" business, which is based on a misunderstanding of how language evolves. You don't get to pick and choose your own usages - not without sounding pompous and stilted.

None of these options are perfect because language, like society, is in a transitional period. But I'd be surprised if singular "they" doesn't end up winning. To my ear it has already very much pulled ahead. Not that it matters what any of us thinks. Language will evolve however it does. Usages are incorrect until they hit critical mass and become correct.

Unfortunately, when one makes use of "one", it gives the impression that the writer has his or her nose aloft (complete with a monocle placed in one eye-socket).

I'd say he's going for being contrarian rather than PC. It didn't sound sexist to me, likely because the CEO was also female.

It did not backfire. It should not be given up.

Ben always uses 'she' in his posts.

Very interesting. One point on firing senior executives - in many cases it's the first time the executive ever failed. Silicon Valley is perhaps the only exception, but this is precisely because exits are handled well. Being good at separations increases a company's ability to take risks on hiring.

Why is the rationale for preserving the reputation of the fired executive first making yourself look good and only incidentally that it's the fair and decent thing to do. The fair and decent thing to do should be reason #1.

At some point when the statute ends I have to do a post about firing yourself. I did that in January (in a sense).

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