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Comment by fatnoah | Hacker News Reader

I was an exec at a smaller company acquired by Salesforce and met a few of the C-level and President level people a few times (not Marc). All impressed me with their intelligence and humility.

Parker just felt like a smart regular guy. He showed up at our small office (15 or so people) with his Starbucks cup, grabbed an open desk and got to work. I wasn't even sure it was him until I saw "Parker" as the name on the cup. We ended up chatting a bit and grabbing a conference room and doing both a product and technical deep dive. He grokked things quickly, asked good questions, and was super chill. I can't imagine him firing anyone.

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Do you think of firing someone as something mean or unintelligent? He sounds like someone I’d love to meet but your comment interests me because I’ve never really thought of these characteristics as relevant to that kind of decision.

> Do you think of firing someone as something mean or unintelligent?

Unjustified firings, absolutely. I’ve seen plenty of horrible, vindictive managers fire talented folks simply because it wasn’t “one of their guys”. I can’t say I’ve ever seen a good manager let a good person go unless it was due to company mandated force reduction.

I've definitely seen good managers drop employees that made environments toxic

I guess I used “good person” as a catchall because I’m on mobile and didn’t want to type out the various criteria of people you want to work with.

  I personally don’t consider someone who makes the workplace toxic “good”.

Oh, I didn't notice the "good" selector, my bad

Yes. Firing someone should always be a last resort; generally it means either that the person is hopelessly, irredeemably unfit for the job, or that you are incompetent at leading people. If your hiring processes are worth anything, the former is exceedingly rare.

I agree firing should be the last resort, but I very much disagree that "it means either that the person is hopelessly, irredeemably unfit for the job, or that you are incompetent at leading people."

This is why I say that often times the worst people to hire are those that are "just below average mediocre". Reason being that, as you point out, it is not hard to fire people who are blatantly incompetent. And of course many/most people can be coached to improve, but I've seen cases where, despite lots of coaching, people chronically underperform.

I consider it a mark of bad management when these subpar performers are only let go during layoffs. Conversations should be open, ongoing and constant, and people should be given lots of coaching, time, and plenty of heads up, but it does nobody any good to essentially string people along when folks aren't cutting it.

Yes I am struggling with this exact situation. A person on my team fits this profile. They can do the work. It's just that their output is below average except for the times when we've had serious discussions about their performance. They will improve for maybe a month or two before regressing back to their previous level.

Fire them. They are wasting your time. Their yo-yo output will be something that is noticed by the rest of the team which is demotivating for them. You gave them a chance.

I find this a very naive view point. Hiring is exceedingly difficult, and the reality is that no matter how well intentioned your process you never know whether the person you've hired fits with your organization, or isn't an outright liar. If you hire people, you will fire people (or be stuck with people who for whatever reason don't work well).

Also, people change and might not be the same person they were a few years ago. People become jaded, among other things.

I got fired from a startup for “not learning rust fast enough.” I had more professional experience than the rest of the team combined, had built a very similar product to theirs over the previous 5 years, and the part of the product I did work on had the most complete functionality, most test cases, and most complete customer facing documentation of all the features being worked on.

In the previous 3 months there hadn’t been a peep about my productivity despite weekly 1:1s and my frequent solicitations for feedback of where I could improve.

In the exit interview, I strongly suggested they may want to look into some professional leadership training programs. The founders were both 26. I was 42.

Since their founding 8 months earlier they had hired 4 and fired 2. I told them that probably would be a bit of a red flag to their investors.

Never hiring anyone who isn't a good fit or will become a poor fit is a very high bar to set.

Regardless, Salesforce is large enough that if they're not encountering your hypothetical rare scenario every now and then then it seems unlikely that many companies on planet earth meet your criteria for good hiring processes.

Not at the VP Product level.

EVEN MORE true at the VP level because the stakes are so much higer.

Or just that the market is down, or you over hired, or your strategy has changed, or a million other reasons that you may have employees you no longer need.

There is a recognized difference between firing someone (which in common parlance means someone's employment was terminated for underperformance or other cause) vs. having a layoff, which is what you've described.

The article implies that the VP was fired for disagreeing with the company, and Parker didn't really give off a "my way or the highway" kind of vibe. You never know, though.

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