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Comment by Esophagus4 | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the article. Sadly, I have seen candidates cheating, and have hired those I suspected were cheating in hindsight.

It is a horrific drag on the team to have the wrong engineer in a seat.

If we can’t sus out who is cheating and who is legitimate, then the only answer is that we as a field have to move towards “hire fast, fire fast.”

Right now, we generally fire slow. But we can’t have the wrong engineer in a seat for six months while you go though a PIP and performance cycle waiting for a yearly layoff. Management and HR need to get comfortable with firing people in 3 weeks as opposed to 6 months. You need more frequent one-off decisions based on an individual’s contributions and potential.

If you can’t fix the interview process, you need more PIP culture.

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Unless your firm is offering a solid paycheck and a 6 month severance package a la Netflix, no rational candidate is going to bet on a place that'll boot you in 3 weeks because they felt "the vibes are off". You'll be self selecting for only the most desperate candidates in the market trying to get a job.

Not once did I say that happen because the vibes are off. You’re seeing what you want to in my comment.

If you’re really off the pace and we made a bad hire, moving slowly hurts everyone.

And moving quickly lets us hire the candidates who really deserve the position, not those who game the process.

3 weeks!? Man, I'm still figuring out where a decent sandwich joint is by my work at 3 weeks. There is no way that I could be up to speed on a code base in that short of a time.

Look, I know what you're getting at, and I know that you can feel that a hire isn't good in less than a month. But buddy, you got to give them at least a few months here.

A few months with the wrong hire is detrimental to the team.

Your stars will get annoyed that you have someone not pulling their weight, your team will have to clean up the mess of bugs and incomplete stories, and the mentors will spend more of their time supporting an engineer that will not come up to productivity no matter how hard they try.

If it’s really a bad hire, you can’t be afraid to move quickly. If it’s not going to work out, I’d rather it not work out in a month than not work out in six months.

A mentor of mine once said, “You will never regret firing somebody, but you will regret not firing somebody.”

Part of being a manager means having a bias for action and being able to back your decisions once you’ve made them.

Admittedly, you’re not just shooting from the hip and firing at random. But by the time you get to the point where you have to thinking about getting rid of an engineer, it’s probably past the point of no return and you need to move.

“You will never regret firing somebody, but you will regret not firing somebody.”

Dumb over generalized piece of advice.

Man, I wish I could downvote this knee-jerk, reactionary comment.

I’m guessing you’re neither a successful founder nor executive from your comment?

If your comment is really good faith, why don’t we try this exercise: you tell me why it wouldn’t be “dumb overgeneralized advice” to make sure you understand it fully.

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