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Comment by aaomidi | Hacker News Reader

> Companies just need to fork the upfront $13-1500 dollars for a set of plane tickets for their hiring team and rented conference rooms for a week. It's a whole lot cheaper than spending 50k because you hired the wrong person for half a year.

There are very few companies I'd fly out for TBH.

IMO Make firing easier, pay people a massive severance if you're firing them for a mistake you made in hiring, and initially start them out as remote so you're not forcing a lifestyle change for them if you realize you made a mistake.

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I thought "fire fast" was a viable strategy until I joined a company that did exactly that.

They didn't fire many people quickly, but it had a deeply chilling effect when someone was only at the company for a month or two before disappearing.

One of the unspoken difficulties of firing fast is that the person does a lot of relationship building with people who don't work with their output. It was often the case that someone would become well-liked by people who never saw their code, who would then become distraught when the likable person vanished one day.

This seems like a case of not managing expectations. The following should be clear: 1. We fire fast. 2. We don't want to fire people and will do our best to help you succeed. 3. Here are the bars you need to clear in order to stay with us. (They should be reasonable.) 4. We will provide frequent feedback to let you know where you are.

Not sure about everyone else, but to me it's often obvious who wasn't going to make the cut within the first 1-2 months of their employment.

You should be giving constant feedback; firing should not come as a surprise. And if someone is not delivering, the people who depend on that output will know. Totally unrelated people should reserve judgment.

There were 30% layoffs at a company I worked at and one of the 'survivors' was so traumatised by it that they took their own life. It's a known phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_guilt

Layoffs are generally random firing. Especially when we talk about % points.

What's your point? The thread is about how other people being fired is stressful.

> firing should not come as a surprise.

The surprise was for the people around them, not the person being fired.

> Totally unrelated people should reserve judgment.

In the real world, they don't.

You might be surprised how many totally oblivious and un-self-aware people there are out there.

Excellent points. Building on that, if the people who are bothered by that leave or withdraw, won't the workplace come to be dominated by people who aren't bothered by that?

If so, a question is why they aren't bothered by that. Is the culture then cold-hearted? Mercenary? Sociopathic? Oblivious?

People who stayed long enough adjusted, but it didn't mean they were cold-hearted. They just realized that there was more to the story that they saw.

The real challenge was when recent hires would see it and get spooked. One person would get fired and then two people around them would panic and start looking for other jobs. Several people panicked and jumped right back into their previous jobs.

It was also tough when we'd hire someone and they'd discover their predecessor lasted for 2-3 months.

There were also problems with the hire fast part: Often teams would "hire fast" and then lose 3-4 months because they had to deal with someone who lied through the interview, had to be fired, and then another hiring cycle restarted.

I feel like we're working at the same company. Not just this comment but your others on the same topic. I've seen all the exact same mistakes over the last year. The company wants to grow fast so hires quickly, but then the people hired quickly underperform, so then they're fired quickly, but firing people quickly results in fear, grief and guilt for everyone who hasn't been fired "this time". The top talent never feel comfortable in this cold mercenary culture, so they don't settle in and soon move onto somewhere less cut-throat.

Yikes!

That sounds like a vicious cycle: when people are stressed out, they are less likely to be able to learn successfully, setting them up to under-perform, get fired and then further stress out everyone else around them.

Cortisol has never improved a line of code.

Doing an explicit probationary period could at least reassure people who have been there longer, but it seems like it would be hard to regain trust at that point. The company should probably be praying its employees are unionizing behind the scenes & can save them from the mess they are making.

Interesting.

What kind of sense of working as a team, and loyalty to the team, developed there? (Among the people who lasted, and how they related to new hires.)

Do you think the hire&fire practices influenced that?

Maybe? But the idea of being on probation for a few months is basically how employment works in most countries of the world.

So I think what I’m suggesting does have precedence and from my research there’s not that big of an opposition to it.

If you won’t fly out for an interview you’re probably not that interested and the company probably shouldn’t be either. Pre-COVID this was absolutely the normal way interviews were conducted.

Yeah. I’m not interested in a company that values my time so little that they demand that from me.

You’re absolutely right this would filter out candidates like me.

What an arrogant, ableist thing to say. I hope you're not involved in recruitment. The world has changed. Location is not the barrier it was five years ago.

Location isn't. Verification that you aren't a North Korea agent or just plain fraud is.

Mostly the latter but still. What some people on this thread don’t get is that unless you’re a known industry luminary, companies are not going to accommodate odd preferences without a legit reason like a physical disability. The resume probably won’t even make it out of HR. One key is both the company and candidate making requirements like travel clear up front. Saves everyone a lot of time.

If I'm not that interested in a company, I won't waste my time to contact them (or pay attention to their efforts to contact me). Having interest in them does not imply that I have an interest in travel, however. If I had an interest in travel, I'd have become an airline pilot or something like that instead.

But if they think they need someone who has a secret desire to man a ship or be a touring musician – cool. A good fit isn't a good fit.

It’s fine to have quirks. And yes that is largely a quirk. And it’s fine for others to decide that’s it’s more trouble than they want to deal with. I would probably be one of those people-/absent compelling reasons.

> It’s fine to have quirks.

Of course. If a company wants to be quirky, that is their choice to make.

> I would probably be one of those people-/absent compelling reasons.

Agreed. A job isn't usually all that compelling – there are jobs everywhere – but for the right business deal you can look past certain things.

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