The author might as well be a sociopath. The only reason he pays severance is because if he doesn't, then society will realize he is a dick. Most people have empathy for the people they fire, and that is reason enough to provide severance.
It's more the thought of paying someone more than you're legally required too when you know they don't deserve it.
And yes, the first thing you should do post-firing is examine your hiring process to see if it could have been foreseen and prevented. But in some cases it does come down to someone just not having the experience, the talent or the work ethic to meet the performance required. It's those cases, especially with tech workers, where founders are apt to ask "do I really need to provide severance to HIM (or her)". Writing at $20K check to someone to walk out the door is never an easy thing to do especially at a startup where that $20K could go a long way. That's what I was addressing here.
This is all predictated on "some" cases? "On Severance (in some cases)?" From the way you describe it, some cases are those in which the employee was able to rook the entire hiring process despite their inability to do the job, but how did they get an offer in the first place?
This brings up a secondary point: is "the performance required" something that changed between hiring and the decision to fire, i.e. a leadership issue?
Without having illustrated these scenarios, it sounds more like "Ready, Fire, Aim," sweeping employees to the side when it turns out a little-informed guess was wrong.
There are many reasons an employee could be underperforming. It could just be a bad fit / poor communication prior to starting. If you're hired to do X and you end up doing Y (maybe the company changed directions), the employee may be "incompetent" (another loaded word) at that task, or might not be interested in that work.
I'm incompetent at lots of things. It doesn't mean I am incompetent.
If a business owner lets paying severance "burn [him] up inside", he's going to be pinching pennies to an early grave.
I've been fired for poor performance(or bad attitude as they said because i disagreed with their decisions. No one would disagree with my level of technical ability), only be promoted within 2 months at my next job because I took intuitive and had my own ideas. I've introduced a lot new processes, and ways of doing things. They've liked that here.
What i'm trying to say is another mans bad employee could be a good employee somewhere else. It's very subjective, and depends on what they are expecting. A short order cook to implement the managers vision? Or someone with a vision of his own?
Oh phew. Some random person on the internet said a vast percentage of poor performance is the fault of managers and provided no context, information or stats to back it up. Glad we can finally put that debate to rest.
Remember everyone. 10, 50, 100 years from now, none of this work is really going to matter. How you treat people? That's what matters.
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I think he's just making an effective argument. If Richard's position is "you should always pay severance" and he wants to convince everyone of that, he needs to beat the other side's best argument. That best argument is something like "Capital is scarce in a startup and this employee was fired because they were incompetent. You're telling me that some of that capital should go towards paying a severance for someone I regret hiring in the first place?"
He's trying to convince everyone, not just "most people" who "have empathy for the people they fire." Those folks don't need much convincing, if any, and even they might have a hard time paying severance when they fire someone who made their blood boil.
If you ought to pay severance in the worst scenario imaginable then you ought to pay severance in every scenario. Case closed.
Otherwise, we should just keep our commentary to the argument as written rather than what's going on in the author's head.
Which would be proving a negative. Charitability has nothing to do with an effective argument, which depends on actual words engaging the actual subject at hand. If you have to clarify by saying "I was only talking about some people," it wasn't an effective argument, because you left out the entire scope of the subject you're describing.
If you misunderstood what I was doing, well, c'est la vie. I'm not actually interested in convincing you so much as not having a friend of mine called a sociopath in public without sticking up for him. ;)
(In that role, you may come to classify some as founder-type people like you, while others are meant to be used.)
To build a successful corporation, it can be helpful to be able to see (and act) as an ideal, rational sociopath. (That is, having that as one perspective.)
And programmers have it easy. Consider people in food service (or even adjunct profs or something). Their bosses often cheat and screw them bluntly. No need to actually be a sociopath. Their bosses merely have to latch onto some half-baked reason to justify their behavior. In this sense, sociopaths are less pathetic.
2. How does not liking to pay off people who trick him into hiring them, make him a dick?
So not paying someone a severance he's not contractually obligated to provide is sociopathy? That's like saying not tipping the contractor who installed his cabinets is sociopathy because you think it's a nice convention to tip people, regardless of the contract both parties agreed upon beforehand. Skipping on severance isn't sociopathy. Cutting people's throats because you enjoy the look of panic on their face is. Get a grip.
My guess is he is actually a fine guy with fine character, but was making an argument on a mailing list along the lines of, "even if you totally lack empathy, it is still rational to pay severance".
"I hate severance. Hate it." - Assuming he is of good character, it is more likely that he was also hyperbolic. Surely helping someone land on their feet provides him some emotional satisfaction.