Comment by matwood | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matwood | Hacker News Reader

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If one's idea of how to deal with personnel issues is to just fire people,

I don't really think that's what I said. People who show time and again that they are ineffective at their jobs should not be there. I'm certainly not advocating firing someone for a single mistake or even for many mistakes as long as it's not the same one over and over again. Hell, making mistakes means the person is actually working and trying to get things done. That's not the kind of worker I'm talking about here. I'm talking about the worker who does little and consistently gets in the way of everyone else who is trying to push the boulder forward.

I also blame management because they need to be proactive in explaining to people that they are not cutting it and need to step up or will eventually be let go. I know if I was not meeting the needs of my job, I hope my manager would tell me.

it often is significantly more cost effective for a large company to keep them than to go through the expenses entailed in the hiring and training processes.

The cost effective you're thinking about is likely only in the short term. If you keep someone who is mediocre and consistently slows down other teams, and burdens other team members to make up their slack, then long term it is cost effective to let them go and get a quality person.

Rockstars may be 10x more productive individually, but anti-rockstars can be a huge minus on the productivity of the entire team. IMHO, it's much more important to not hire (or keep around) mediocrity than it is to hire rockstarts.

With five people, you might be able to be more selective in hiring talent. With 30 people, unless you are Google, you will probably be less selective - half of all teams are below average.

On occasion a come to jesus talk might be appropriate with some types of employees, but once one starts threatening people with the loss of employment, bad things often follow - particularly in the US where such threats often mean loss of access to healthcare for the employee's family.

BTW, when the job is pushing the boulder forward, smart people recognize the sisyphean nature of the task and respond accordingly.

half of all teams are below average

If you only look at your organization then yes 1/2 of the teams in your org are below average for your org, not necessarily below average for all software developers. I'm not talking about trying to hire only the best of the best like Google. I'm talking about avoiding the worst of the worst.

On occasion a come to jesus talk might be appropriate with some types of employees, but once one starts threatening people with the loss of employment, bad things often follow - particularly in the US where such threats often mean loss of access to healthcare for the employee's family.

So are you arguing to just fire them outright? I thought that's what you were against? And since when is a frank review of performance a threat? This must be where 'everyone gets a trophy' day has led us. Unless people are told their true performance and how it stacks up to what's expected they will not be able to improve. It may be that they are simply unaware how bad they are performing, or they simply need to be motivated.

BTW, when the job is pushing the boulder forward, smart people recognize the sisyphean nature of the task and respond accordingly.

Huh? Are you saying all work is useless? That's certainly not what I meant by the term. Pushing the boulder forward is what I consider advancing the business in a given direction, one that I certainly hope doesn't have to be backtracked.

In business there are people on the boulder deciding where it should go then there are people on the ground making it happen (I'm including all the support people here). Finally there are people standing on the boulder doing neither, and instead provide dead weight to be carried.

In small companies the people who decide the direction and make it happen are often the same. This is what makes small companies so nimble. Those deciding where to go also know directly of the challenges of getting there. Small companies also rarely have much dead weight just standing around.

In big companies there is often a huge divide between those who decide direction and those who make it happen. Big companies also tend to have lots of people just standing around on the boulder. Now, standing around isn't so bad until these people start getting in the way of the job of advancing the business. When they start actively trying to make things harder for those pushing because they feel some odd sense of job security by doing it that way.

>"If you only look at your organization then yes 1/2 of the teams in your org are below average for your org, not necessarily below average for all software developers."

If you look across the industry odds are most or all of your organization's teams are below average given that Google, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, IBM, etc. are able to retain a significant fraction of the top talent and entrepreneurship claims many as well.

In a large organization, smart people realize that those distant people who decide what to do with the boulder are often motivated to move the boulder because they must do something and moving the boulder is something.

Occasionally, moving the boulder improves things, often it doesn't. A good manager musters resources to the former and gives lip service to the latter. A good manager listens to the whining of those compelled to demonstrate needless nimbleness by pointing to the degree to which others are not participating in the fire drill of the quarter, while retaining adequate staff in a pleasant workplace to move the boulder when it actually needs moving.

Half of all teams are below the median.

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