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Comment by jjmorrison | Hacker News Reader

Well I can say in my experience firing people is such a pain nowadays that I feel a need to be a lot more careful in hiring. I've seen a bit more than half of fired employees come back with some form of discrimination lawsuit threat after being fired.

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This is my answer as well. The two rational pairings are:

hire fast, fire fast

and

hire slow, fire slow

If for legal or cultural reasons you can’t fire fast, that leaves you with only one choice.

Managers should be honing the hiring process. If your team is clear about what they're looking for and thoughtful about how to get at it, you should be able to figure out if a candidate is a good team and technical fit in a couple of hours.

Not really. You can do your best to figure it out, but (almost) every single candidate will be trying to game the interview to get hired at all costs. No matter if I'm interested in the job or just treating it as a throwaway practice interview, I will always say exactly what I think the interviewer wants to hear in order to hire me. This doesn't necessarily correlate with what will actually happen in reality.

Perhaps. But even with the current 6+ hours everyone medium size or larger still makes a fair number of bad hires. Between driving the false positive rate down and driving the time to decision down the value maximizing next move seems to be spending even more effort on the false positive rate.

It's a false assumption to assume that more interviews is going to drive the false positive rate down. Increased volume or difficulty are not the keys to driving the false positive rate down. Better preparation is the key to driving the false positive rate down. Your team has to be crystal clear about what they are looking for in a candidate. That will allow you to create better job descriptions and create better interview questions and processes.

Increasing the difficulty and frequency of interviews is a bandage for bad processes. It's also going to increase your false negative rate. In a job market like this, you just can't afford to do that.

Maybe this is the honed hiring process.

Choice two: get a job

Can't comment on the lawsuit part, but of the handful of people who were "it's an open secret you need to work around them" bad, only 1 was fired. Even if they can be convinced to leave, they'll usually stay through their next annual bonus (which I don't fault them for, even if I fault them for other things). So, starting from the point where it's obvious they need to go, everyone who depends on their role needs to wait at least half a year before they can start looking for a replacement. It's a ton of damage, especially on smaller teams.

Paradoxically enough, that sounds like a warning against hiring anyone but white males, the only group that can't credibly claim discrimination.

Unless they’re old or gay

Good call! (Edit: or young!)

My understanding is that in most states, you can legally discriminate against younger candidates.

I dunno, the rise of whole jobs specifically for increasing "diversity" which increasingly seeming to be "anybody but white males" the lawsuit criteria is starting to seem credible. If the company has one of those positions with any authority it's at least circumstantial evidence.

Protected groups in the US extend beyond just sex and race. There's age, religion, national origin, sexual preference, and disability status just off my head.

> I've seen a bit more than half of fired employees come back with some form of discrimination lawsuit threat

That's crazy. I have literally never heard of anyone actually doing that irl, only ever in the media (and then mostly English-speaking media at that). Half of them? Do they ever win those? Don't they need to pay for the company's lawyer costs if you can convincingly argue this claim is entirely baseless opportunism? Is there ever even a slight basis for this, any colleagues that treat them just a little bit less nicely or anything?

Edit: upon re-reading to add the citation I noticed the word "threat". Additional question: anyone ever follow through on that, or were the threats ever credible?

The challenge is that in some states, employer suits attorney fees are paid by the employer. So employees can hire an attorney on spec to threaten the company, and say "pay us less than the cost for you to defend this suit and win, and we will go away". So you put the company in a situation where: - if they win they are out maybe -$100k - if they lose, they are out maybe -$250k

(Assuming the dispute is about $50k).

And in many areas companies must hire attorneys to represent them. They can't represent themselves.

I'm all for resolving actual issues, and I think the solution here is: - make it so parties do not need to hire attorneys - use things like fairclaims.com to arbitrate (must faster and cheaper)

Or just give everyone you fire $10-50K in non-disparagement/severance/hush money to go away. That's what I've seen that worked fairly well.

> things like <brand> to arbitrate

Having commercial companies sit in a judge's seat is so dystopian I haven't even read the idea in any fiction yet. This is the second time I come across it, previous time was when someone pointed out that the Epic Store has such a clause in the TOS.

Maybe you have to stop the discriminatory firings.

I don't think that's the reason, I am a contractor and sometimes I take up to 7 "interviews".

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