I'd straight up not work for a place that took this approach. Seems like a great way to fuck over the folks who made a big life change to join you. Though this philosophy is probably super effective, as long as you're willing to not think about the effects it has on others. Yikes!
Personally, I would jump at the chance to work at a company with this philosophy, even if I ended up being the one getting canned. I don't think I've ever worked at a company that fired "too fast", if anything it was clear that some folks were clearly not going to succeed, but hard decisions were avoided, which took down the productivity of everyone involved, and when the folks were eventually let go or left on their own they usually ended up still being super bitter. A reluctance to fire, in my experience, just really translates into a company that has difficulty making hard decisions.
But I've more frequently heard stories of others who see "fire fast" solely as a way to save money and also avoid having to ever train or mentor. That's bad for the employee, and not a place I'd work, if I knew it in advance.
If you're looking to structure your employees' comp with a heavy equity component that takes a while to vest, "fire fast" becomes especially dangerous for the employee.
1. provide more value than you cost the company
2. make sure the boss knows (1) for you
Candidates should try to be aware of companies that won't give new hires much of a time window to prove their performance level or value creation. Especially if large amounts of their compensation depend on going at least 12 months without getting fired.
At Boeing, the accountants managed to pin down the cost of one pound of airplane weight. At the time, it was $250,000 per pound. This made it easy to point out to the boss how much money you'd saved the company by doing weight reductions. I.e. if you saved a pound, that was the equivalent of 6 years salary. Time to bring up that raise you deserve!
Look at Google for example. I'm quite sure that a very large percentage, if not majority, of the employees at Google produce net negative value. The problem, of course, is that it's impossible to know which ones. I know a bunch of people (brilliant people, mind you) that worked years on products at Google that never shipped, or worked on products that shipped but were discontinued long before they were ever profitable. But Google is willing to make these investments because they believe that, one day, one or two of them will pay off spectacularly.
I mean, Waymo has certainly never been profitable (heck they've barely had any revenue) - what do their employees argue?
The employee needs to be profitable, not the aggregate of all the employees.
As for speculative research projects, nothing succeeds like success (making money). Researchers who produce loser after loser projects I expect would be much more likely to be fired than researchers who had a win big enough to cover their losing projects.
> possible
The whole field of cost accounting is devoted to figuring this out.
Back in the 70s, I attended Caltech when Feynman was on the staff. It came up in conversation that Feynman was making a salary of something like $55,000 (a lot of money in those days). I said what could anyone do to justify paying him such a salary. A grad student laughed and said "you don't understand. Feynman doesn't need to do anything to be worth that salary. He just has to be on the staff, which attracts donor money and draws top talent to Caltech."
Of course, he was right.
But also, Feynman being Feynman, did do an awful lot as well.
In many universities and companies, you'll find such "prestige" staff.
The first thing you have to remember is that Netflix pays a lot (a lot lot). The idea of expecting high performance only works when it’s accompanied with substantial benefits.
Second, Netflix does “fire fast” but not in the sense most people interpret it. New hires are given enough scaffolding to succeed. It’s not like other companies where they expect people to come onboard as revolutionaries and create impact in a month.
Third, high performance isn’t a constant like most people pretend it is. Netflix has managers who understand this fact and support their employees when things go down. They aren’t ruthless maniacs who fire you the first week you take a breather. And most managers who try to copy this elsewhere, miss that point.
But I do think it means that when it becomes clear that it's not working out, and the reason for it not working out is pretty fundamental to the employee's personality or aptitude, that you make a decision to let them go quickly and fairly.
It's really easy to have this attitude when you don't really think it will ever happen to you. I'm also guessing you've never been the target of harassment. I don't think you're going to like it as much when you're really excited about the job and on your first day you find out that the superstar developer on the team Gill just doesn't like you, never did. He was the one person who said they shouldn't hire you and is now pissed that he was overruled. Turns out Gill doesn't like not getting his way. You find yourself socially isolated because everyone knows what Gill is like and that he doesn't like you. Being seen talking to you isn't worth getting on Gill's bad side.
You get the shit assignments and code reviews are really rough. Especially the ones where Gill's around. Then you get hauled into the office about some problem with something you did. It isn't clear if it was something you did but it seems to be related to something Gill's working on. Gill's the super star and you're just the new guy so you can guess who caught the heat. It didn't go well when you suggested it might be Gill's fault. Turns out Gill was in the office right before you and he's telling a different story and they let you know what a superstar he is and everything he's done for the company over the years. It's clear that Gill's just going to grind you down as your quality of life decreases, you start losing sleep, acting out from the stress, you snap at your wife, children, and friends because you're still upset about something Gill did to you at work.
See the problem now or are you just imagining yourself as Gill?
On the flip side, firing people around Gill, who he doesn't like, fast will make it apparent that Gill is the problem much more quickly than just keeping everyone around when things aren't working.
The structurelessness & lack of a system, pressuring someone out, is no favor for Gill, but it seems like how it usually works.
i've seen 1 person in my career put on a performance improvement plan & let go. i've seen 5 fall out of general favor & get driven off. feels very lopsided & hard to see, grapple with.
dont appreciate your malice.
Most companies are motivated by profit, and will, therefore, gladly pay someone to fill a role that earns them more money than it costs. I don't see severing a non-mutually beneficial relationship as fucking someone over.
If you are in a position that being let go would be horribly detrimental to your personal and financial goals, looking for a company that is very slow to fire may be a good way to go. However, that is for your benefit, not the company's. I was targeting my advice at employers.
The relative risk for an employee joining a new company is WAY higher than it is for that company.
For example, that may be due to any combination of age, skin colour, geography, ethnicity, visa/citizenship, neurodivergence, gender, family dependents, or other factors outside the person's control, helpfully summarised by the umbrella word "privilege".
After all, as is often said here, hiring is broken. It's not enough to be highly skilled.
I stand corrected, thank you.
I had to re-read both your comments carefully to understand them from that perspective.
Though you didn't intend to generalise, your refutation can be (and clearly was) parsed as an assertion about a whole category of people not having the high relative risk, rather than a singular counteraxample to say not everyone in the category has that risk. Your followup comment could also be parsed that way, unfortunately.
I think what motivated Bud's reply, and then mine because your followed appeared to entrench the position, is that it's common around here for people to talk as though virtually all software professionals are paid well and can easily slide into great new jobs as and when they want to, when really there's a huge "underclass" of software professionals who feel shut out of that nice world.
> I think what motivated Bud's reply, and then mine because your followed appeared to entrench the position, is that it's common around here for people to talk as though virtually all software professionals are paid well and can easily slide into great new jobs as and when they want to, when really there's a huge "underclass" of software professionals who feel shut out of that nice world.
I get it. I was once in a similar boat, so I understand the feeling.
The cost to someone in their early 20s to take a job for a month or two and then hop to another one isn't very high compared to someone far enough into their career to likely be making changes for their family and possibly face more judgement for a short stint from future interviewers.
that's "quitting fast"—quitting before you even take the job. impressive, you're hired.
What if instead of "fire fast", the idea was re-framed/restructured into the new employee initially working as some sort of consultant with a short term contract? Use telecommuting/work-from-home or other temporary workarounds to defer expensive/disruptive things like moving to live near the company until after the defined "trial" period. Instead of "firing fast", you either let the temporary consulting contract expire or you proceed with the actual hiring process and the deferred tasks.
Maybe this isn't possible in practice, but it seems like we could design a workaround to this problem if were sufficiently creative.
> think about the effects it has on others
Unfortunately, that takes proactive effort. Unless there is a mechanism to actively incentivize spending time and energy to protect others, most of the time that effort will be spent on "more important" things. ~sigh~