Firing
cdixon.org
cdixon.org
This is a question that no one seems to get right, unless its fairly obvious. If they stole something, no brainer. If they sexually harassed an employee, should be a no brainer. And if the company is in a financially distressed position, it may be unpleasant to fire someone, but atleast its understandable. What if the company is healthy and employee did nothing obviously wrong?
Then I guess, you look at the quality of their work. But judging quality is subjective, and you're likely to have a sliding scale depending on employee's past experience and delta to their start date. And what about periodic reviews? What about quarterly objectives? What about what other employee's think? How long do you warn an employee before you go ahead with it?
I think one of the better ways of dealing with firing is how it was handled in grad school. At my school, you had a series of qualifying examinations and you had a committee. The rules were pretty clear: 2 chances to pass and if not, goodbye. One of the tests was an oral examination in front of the committee of 5. There weren't any clear answers, but the committee would convene and in an hour they'd have a decision with lots of feedback. I failed my first attempt. But guess what? After that, I honed in on their feedback, worked my fucking ass off and passed my second attempt with flying colors.
I don't see this happening at many (or any) companies. I'm not sure why, but IMHO employers use the "at will termination" too liberally. Either that, or they let the bad employees stay far too long. Sometimes I wonder if a second chance would help bubble good employees to the top when you had previously mis-classified them as bad or vice versa. Firing scares the shit out of people...why not make this process less of a surprise than it has to be.
Outside of the obvious cases you cite, firing should be the end of a process, not an isolated action. As soon as you start having real doubts about the performance or fitness of an employee, have at least two meetings with them to discuss the issues and create improvement plans and actions, before resorting to firing them. Those meetings are hard to approach correctly, but not as hard as actually firing the person, so please do not wait to have them, and make the most out of them. They will not just benefit the employee (clarifying your expectations of them), but often also yourself (understanding your own mistakes as a manager).
However, let's not overlook the fact that there are a proportion of managers who view termination as both the start and the end of the process with no conversation taking place. I think that's the "at will" part of the "at will termination" clause everyone signs. And I have a sneaking suspicion that this proportion is much larger than we might hope to think.
Sure, as long as you understand that the need for improvement is as likely to like with management as it is with the employee. Shitty morale because of management political shenanigans, lack of engagement because nobody bothers to share the big picture or any information about what's going on, or boredom because the employee's skills aren't actually being utilized, are all management fails which can look like an employee problem. If management is going to sit with a "problem" employee, they better be prepared to look in the mirror a little as well.
In the end, we all deserve each other. Those are the only relationships that last.
I agree that that is true in the long-run, but there may be temporary circumstances where someone will bear some pain longer than they might otherwise... maybe they don't want to create a "job hopper" look on their resume, maybe they feel dedication to (some) of their colleagues, maybe it's a down economy and jobs are scarce in their market, etc. In either case, I contend that management should, ideally, be willing to accept that sometimes the required change is on their side.
That said, my experience is that poorly run companies usually don't seem to improve, and that the best option for an employee is usually to just leave, depending on any mitigating circumstances.
Any good employee would be out the door as soon as they were handed a "second chance". They would use that chance just long enough to find a better job, if they didn't quit outright. Truly "bad" employees would likely stick around (lack of motivation to move, inability to move, spite, etc) and wreak havoc on your business.
Firing is sometimes a business decision, sometimes due to someone actually doing harm to your business but often the last in a series of management failures. It's a last resort but if you've reached that point just get it over with.
Telling someone to "improve or else" is a completely different animal. If you want that employee to focus on doing their job (and improving their performance) they have to not be wasting energy looking for another job. From their perspective, moving to another job before they're fired is much better for their career (and ego) than sticking around and possibly getting fired.
I've only been in the situation once where I had to "reset expectations" and that was because the employee was not hired at will and we were hoping that person would resign (they did).
I'm not sure why you'd immediately jump to the conclusion that employees would be looking for another job. That's something which may be completely out of your control (whether they're bad, good, happy, or disgruntled at their job) so why worry about it?
You're also making this hypothetical "improve or else" conversation more negative than I see it happening. Like I said, in grad school, when I failed my quals the first time the committee gave me constructive feedback. Sure, I could have been like "fuck this" and went to a different school, but then again, I knew the rules when I signed up and I chose to honor them. I also felt like their feedback was reasonable. It was nothing personal and when 5 people agree on something, its easy to see where you came up short. I also had a chance to rebuttal if I thought their grading was wrong.
Secondly, failing my quals gave them a chance to help me. Previously I thought I knew what to do on my own, so I never bothered them with questions. Afterwards, I clearly saw the mismatch in expectations, so I pestered them until I was sure the answer they were looking for was the one I was spending my time on figuring out.
If you're envisioning a one-way "improve or else" conversation taking place, then yeah, I agree with you. But this should be a dialog where both parties are willing to admit they were in the wrong.
Then whose job is it?
Any good employee would be out the door as soon as they were handed a "second chance". They would use that chance just long enough to find a better job, if they didn't quit outright. Truly "bad" employees would likely stick around (lack of motivation to move, inability to move, spite, etc) and wreak havoc on your business.
That's not been true in my experience. The good employees tend to appreciate the heads up, and work with you to either fix the problem (which may be as much your problem as theirs) or move out in a productive way.
The bad ones tend to realise the jig is up and move themselves out ASAP, or rapidly foul up again giving you the evidence you need to shift them out without the decision being seen as arbitrary by the rest of the company.
Do you really run a business where you threaten employees with termination as a form of motivation? I've built three companies and have managed, hired or fired dozens of people. Under no circumstances can I see what the OP proposed working for me.
Absolutely not.
Putting an employee in a defensive state (where they're either looking for another job or trying desperately to keep their current one) is not sound management technique.
Agreed.
I've built three companies and have managed, hired or fired dozens of people. Under no circumstances can I see what the OP proposed working for me.
I think we're both reading different things from the OPs post. I don't see it as threatening. I see it as transparency. Making it clear to everybody - employer and employee - how issues around continual employment are resolved.
This is not something that's introduced at the point of "I want to get rid of this person". This is something that's a part of how the company is run, and is made explicit right from the start.
This is not something that's done with the aim of firing somebody. This is something that's done with the aim of fixing the problem. Fixing the problem doesn't always mean firing the employee. That's just one outcome of many.
Perhaps it's a cultural thing.
I'm in the UK and pretty much every company I've worked for, and every one I've run, has had a structure to how employees leave a company in the same way that there's a structure to how they come on board.
The "fire you for any reason at any time" thing that seems to be the general rule in the US seems a far more scary and demotivating mechanism from my perspective.
Do keep in mind that it goes both ways: employers who often exercise that right for reasons that appear arbitrary suffer from it in the long run, because even the good people aren't happy with management like that.
In this last group of people, those unable to leave are the really poor souls. I don't speak about those being to bad to find something else easily but rather those willing to leave but who either stuck for being to old, to sick, being the only employed person in the family, unable to move elsewhere for whatever reason.
The result for you as a company will be unmotivated (aka pissed) and unable workforce. Welcome to big company hell.
The Ribbonfarm articles on the Gervais Principle (a rather long 5 article series with part 6 in the making) provides stunning background on this. Thanks for the HNler to bring it to my attention and thanks to the author to formulate that good.
My attitude at worked had declined immensely. My communication with coworkers suffered and important pieces of information from clients was lost lost on my desk.
I was given a list of behaviors of mine that were frustrating my project managers.My first reaction was flippant. But after an hour I knuckled down, read the list thoroughly, and drafted a personal action plan for each item. The next day I went onto my review, handed the 3 man management team copies of my plan, took control of the review and went through each point one by one and how I would correct it. And then, after all their concerns were addressed, I told them that they were failing me too, and gave them three actionable measurable goals for improving my career there.
It is like a marriage. There is a power balance. Each party needs to know what they want and be able to communicate it in clear actionable measurable goals.
If I had more than one upvote to give you'd get it :-)
If an employee truly is a good employee, is underperforming enough to have it formally noted, and would quit rather than step up the game once he was called out... he was already lost to the company.
Sometimes it's clear who to get rid of. Sometimes managers are forced to throw perfectly decent workers under the bus in order to protect other workers. It sucks.
see GE share holder notes from 2000 http://www.ge.com/annual00/letter/page4.html
It's exactly how the process works in the UK, at least below executive levels. Not least because it's the easiest way to obtain the proof of incompetence required to demonstrate that the firing was done fairly.
As of April this year the limit has also increased to 2 years.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2012/apr/06/unfair-dismissal...
[NB It only applies to new employees who were hired since this was brought in, everyone else is still on one year].
The plant-closing people generally fair better: the idea is that the market/future employers infer that the firm used their discretion when making regular layoffs (using it as a chance to get rid of the low performers) but that no negative inference is warranted in the case of plant closings.
Incidentally, how the heck does one "bounce down"?
"At the time, I thought this just made him feel better about himself. Over time, I’ve seen the wisdom in what he said."
No, you were right the first time. "The good ones" and "the bad ones"? I feel sorry for the "ones", period.
However, I still don't see how you can back up your claims that good employees seem to recover better than bad employees. I don't see how you could know!
You'll be surprised at the number of times you encounter folk you've worked with again. I suspect you're also more likely to stay in touch or hear more about the "good" employees.
Many of the people I've let go fit this pattern. I always tried to do what I could to help them use the firing as a way of "bouncing up" (although I don't think I was very successful).
FWIW, I used to follow the careers of the first few people I let go. Not sure why exactly - combination of guilt and curiosity. I bet doing so is pretty common with younger founders / executives.
As an employer you should do what best for all the people at the company, but do not kid yourself into thinking "good people" will recover and move on to a better place. It might happen and they will go on to fortune and fame. It might also be the final brick in the wall. That is just a nice way of making yourself feel better in this situation.
That's tautological if you're judging by the future result.
But that's just a nitpick. Nice post. #4 is a great way of framing a bad situation.
Then I read:
> 4) The other choice is firing everyone.
When you look at it this way, rest of the reasons don't really matter. It is indeed possible for just one person to bring down them morale of their department, direct reports, or immediate team members. That in turn infects the rest of the company over time, slowly lowering the bar for performance, quality, and enthusiasm. And that can most certainly bring about 4) in the not-too-distant long term.
In many cases, will we even know if it was mutual or just an understandable need for a change of scene? Contrast the departures of Bret Anderson from Facebook, Naveen Selvadurai of Foursquare and Marco Arment from Tumblr [and these are just CTO/co-founder examples]
In that case, I'd question if that person is truly unproductive. More likely management just doesn't understand how to properly value their actual role, which may not be reflected by their job title. In that case, instead of firing them, it might be better to either:
A. understand the actual value they deliver and leave well enough alone
or
B. create a new title for them, which reflects the value they produce and then hire somebody else for their old position.
Are you allowed to sue for misrepresentation (if such a thing exists) or is it pretty much deal with it? For example someone claiming to have been with the company for a year longer than they really were in a role they never held (eg: someone working in customer service at Facebook from 2008 - 2009 then claiming on their resumé they worked in the engineering department from 2008 - 2011).
The hiring person can certainly sue somebody for lying on their CV e.g. after calling your company and finding out they misrepresented their position.
If the wage you're being paid is high enough, it could be worthwhile taking someone to court to claim it back, as they're effectively defrauding your company.
Of course, there are people that say that Github is a special case[2]. Which I believe is a nice way to deflect the hard question: "how can we do better?" Which, as it seems, is the very question that Chris Dixon is tackling.
[1] https://twitter.com/timanderson/status/178093828111208449
Github is a product for geeks (few of those take off), build by a founder team consisting exclusively of uber-geeks, with the exact right timing (wasn't possible before, and someone else would have done git hosting later - and did, but less well), in a winner-takes-all market (which, to be fair to them, they engineered - source code hosting didn't use to be a winner-takes-all market, but github's social features made it so). Moreover, Github lent itself very well to a viral spread model (doesn't work in most cases, and is hard to bolt on to an unsuitable product), and so had less need for sales efforts than most B2B products.
I'm not putting down Github's team (they executed brilliantly), or even the lessons that they garnered - those are worthwhile lessons to pay attention to and learn from. However, be careful when translating those to your startup, which is probably a very different beast and may crash and burn if you just apply Github's lessons directly!
I have spinned up the contrarian touch a bit in order to exactly get this kind of reaction, and to raise this conversation, which I don't think we have enough.
Hey, you don't have to agree to read my articles :-) Disagreers are welcome too ;-)
They just make some people use svn, and they go and quit by themselves
If the goal of a company is to keep all of it's employees, then it by assumption the employees will have no motivation to do well in their jobs, if it is known in the company that there is no threat of firing.
While firing sucks, it is always there looming. In a startup, this forces people to push themselves, work hard, strive for good results. It is the role of a manager to determine the extent of the hard work, but it is also his role to say when enough is enough.
Bottom line, if a company never fired anyone it would have no implicit motivational pressure of it's employees.
This list is mostly about the first kind I think - because of the line "Some people who get fired react by fixing their weaknesses". The wrong person doesn't have "weaknesses" to fix. You hired a round peg, when you should have hired a square one. Its your fault - not theirs.
(Okay - the "bad" employee hire is your fault too, but it's a different kind of mistake.)
We, as a species, are afraid of rejection, and we hate being the ones to reject another person. I don't know if it's evolutionary or so ingrained in every culture as to be effectively evolutionary, but somewhere in our caveman brain, we're kicking someone out of a small tribe and leaving them to die, something to be taken very seriously.
Further, we've told these people to quit their current stable jobs, or start making plans with the income they have, rather than thinking of it as fleeting or temporary. It feels like an awful human thing to do, especially to a likable person.
Many of the firing advice columns I've seen are as simple as "it's not the end of the world for either of you." And that's a lesson that takes more than one link on HN to get.
(I think it's also a lesson that's hard in most of our dating lives, from what I've seen..)
On the other hand, it's time and labour intensive process, and at some point, you really need to cut it.
So, in the article, I basically have issue with point 2, "doing it early". No, you need to try to make it work, and make that process beneficial for both parties. Work it up to a certain point, of course.
Just because people are over you in an organization doesn't mean they are wise and mature. Of course, if you are in the position to hire and fire then you get to make reality to some extent because you have more power. The employee has to pretend the boss knew what they were doing even afterward on penalty of being blackballed. It's not so easy to get an employer blackballed because somebody else always needs the money. And the culture says that a complaining employee is a liability, and if someone was fired or not hired then there is probably a good reason not to hire them.
Hiring and firing are just another job, and they are done by the same smart, average and stupid people doing other jobs. Let's not pretend that these decisions only ever depend on sound, objective calls completely grounded in consideration of facts and business.
I'm curious about employer/business owner and worker relationships going forward. There's major downsides to full-time employees: it's difficult to hire someone that's skilled and gets along with others and firing a full-time employee is not a pleasant experience for anyone. There's also additional overhead associated with benefits and hr departments.
The modern tech ecosystem has eliminated much of my need to hire other full-time employees. Github takes care of version control. Mixpanel takes care of analytics. Even Airbnb simplifies traveling to the extent that I don't need any help. I can just pay contractors and freelancers for the work where I do require help.
The point is that full-time employees are looking less and less attractive to someone like me who's starting a new company. The path of least resistance is to just adjust my business structure or model to minimize the number of full-time employees I might need in the future.
There are certainly upsides to having full-time employees. And many companies require them. I think the extent to which I'm avoiding full-time employees long-term is interesting. I doubt I'm the only person considering this. So I'm curious how the employer/business owner and worker relationships will change in the next decade or so.
In 'the nature of the firm'[0] Donald Coase asked himself why there are businesses with employees at all when an entrepreneur could instead contract the work, a la Hollywood model. The ultimate answer is that the transaction cost of having to go to a market every time you need to get something done outweighs the inefficiencies of having employees. He got the Nobel prize for that.
I got acquainted of those notions trough the book 'Here 'Comes Everybody' [1]. It talks about the way the internet reduce transaction costs and allow new forms of sharing and collaboration that weren't possible before.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase#The_Nature_of_the_...
Definitely an interesting idea. I wonder how it varies across different businesses? Also I wonder if it will be as true in ten years as it is today?
I don't know if this is generally true. But it's something it's a behaviour I noticed in myself, and others, over the years.
People starting their first company don't like hiring full time employees. They see a lot of extra responsibility - and a loss of control that they get from working with contractors.
People starting their Nth company positively look forward to the time they can hire full time employees. They realise that they can't control or manage everything themselves, and the quicker they can move from being the keystone that holds everything together the better it's going to be for the long term survival of the organisation.
What's interesting to me is how much things have changed in the last 10-15 years and how much they could change in the next 10-15 years.
Whether this is to be flexible around seasonal demand or scaling up for particular projects, this can avoid long term costs involved having full-time employees. I've seen that larger organisations are far more willing to bear the short-term costs of flexibility than smaller ones.
As things grow, the problem with contractors is that their stake is limited to their contract. Good employees have the best interest of the company in mind.
One thing that caught my eye though was in the comments. The user claims that the article could be put another way " why hiring right team is crucial for startups". I don't agree with that at all. Someone may look good on paper and interview great, but they may not be a good fit for the company. It may be anything from conflicts with other staff to consistent lateness. You can't find these out in an interview. You also can't find out by checking references as many employers will give glowing references to staff they want to get rid of but can't.
Too bad employees can't think this way about the companies they are at.
Several of the interesting comments here ask what connection there is between how someone is hired and whether or not someone will be fired. Even if it's not possible to guarantee that you'll never hire someone whom you'll later need to fire, it sounds like all of us want to reduce the risk of making hiring mistakes that will lead to unpleasant experiences later with employees who just don't fit. With that in mind, I'd like to ask some questions.
What hiring procedures are you using now? How structured are your hiring procedures? How much looking ahead to reducing the probability of future firing is built into your hiring procedures?
Hacker News readers who haven't seen it recently may be interested in a FAQ document about hiring employees, based on suggestions I've received from several participants here in previous discussions of how companies hire. Many hackers think many companies hire based on crazy procedures. Research suggests that most companies in most places don't use the best available hiring procedures. I'd appreciate comments about the hiring procedures FAQ below.
There are many discussions here on HN about company hiring procedures. From participants in earlier discussions I have learned about many useful references on the subject, which I have gathered here in a FAQ file. The review article by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings," Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274
http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...
sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews for job experience, checks for academic credentials, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations.
The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well (but only about at the 0.5 level, standing alone). One is a general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general mental ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than any other single-factor hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes.
Because of a Supreme Court decision in the United States (the decision does not apply in other countries, which have different statutes about employment), it is legally risk to give job applicants general mental ability tests such as a straight-up IQ test (as was commonplace in my parents' generation) as a routine part of hiring procedures. The Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196...
interpreted a federal statute about employment discrimination and held that general intelligence tests used in hiring that could have a "disparate impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." In other words, a company that wants to use a test like the Wonderlic, or like the SAT, or like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ tests, in a hiring procedure had best conduct a specific validation study of the test related to performance on the job in question. Some companies do the validation study, and use IQ-like tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like tests in hiring and hope that no one sues (which is not what I would advise any company). Note that a brain-teaser-type test used in a hiring procedure could be challenged as illegal if it can be shown to have disparate impact on some job applicants. A company defending a brain-teaser test for hiring would have to defend it by showing it is supported by a validation study demonstrating that the test is related to successful performance on the job. Such validation studies can be quite expensive. (Companies outside the United States are regulated by different laws. One other big difference between the United States and other countries is the relative ease with which workers may be fired in the United States, allowing companies to correct hiring mistakes by terminating the employment of the workers they hired mistakenly. The more legal protections a worker has from being fired, the more careful companies have to be about hiring in the first place.)
The social background to the legal environment in the United States is explained in many books about hiring procedures
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6...
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6...
Some of the social background appears to be changing in the most recent few decades, with the prospect for further changes.
http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full
http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_R...
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWl...
Previous discussion on HN pointed out that the Schmidt & Hunter (1998) article showed that multi-factor procedures work better than single-factor procedures, a summary of that article we can find in the current professional literature, in "Reasons for being selective when choosing personnel selection procedures" (2010) by Cornelius J. König, Ute-Christine Klehe, Matthias Berchtold, and Martin Kleinmann:
"Choosing personnel selection procedures could be so simple: Grab your copy of Schmidt and Hunter (1998) and read their Table 1 (again). This should remind you to use a general mental ability (GMA) test in combination with an integrity test, a structured interview, a work sample test, and/or a conscientiousness measure."
http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/prepri...
But the 2010 article notes, looking at actual practice of companies around the world, "However, this idea does not seem to capture what is actually happening in organizations, as practitioners worldwide often use procedures with low predictive validity and regularly ignore procedures that are more valid (e.g., Di Milia, 2004; Lievens & De Paepe, 2004; Ryan, McFarland, Baron, & Page, 1999; Scholarios & Lockyer, 1999; Schuler, Hell, Trapmann, Schaar, & Boramir, 2007; Taylor, Keelty, & McDonnell, 2002). For example, the highly valid work sample tests are hardly used in the US, and the potentially rather useless procedure of graphology (Dean, 1992; Neter & Ben-Shakhar, 1989) is applied somewhere between occasionally and often in France (Ryan et al., 1999). In Germany, the use of GMA tests is reported to be low and to be decreasing (i.e., only 30% of the companies surveyed by Schuler et al., 2007, now use them)."
Looking at previous work experiences, you sometimes wonder how some people ever got through the interview process.
No. It assumes that the "wrong" people now were the "wrong" people from the start. Your business changes. People change. The combination of those two factors mean that sometimes you have no choice but to fire somebody.