Firing and being fired
philosophically.com
philosophically.com
In our experience, the overwhelming majority of potential employees either have jobs already (and so don't have time to work on contact for you while you determine fit), are getting a job soon (and understandably don't want to turn down a full time position so they can contact for you and maybe get a job later (or not)), or just are offended that you won't commit to them and wasn't too try before you buy (which may be silly, but I admit I felt exactly that way when someone wanted me to do contract to hire).
If we were digging ditches, how likely would it be that you would fire an above-average ditch-digger, for "cultural fit"? I mean, maybe it does happen (I've never worked that sort of job) but it seems to me there's a cleaner separation there between work product and the contents of one's mind or one's personal associations.
It seems to me this is an unacknowledged downside of software jobs; despite our apparent autonomy, our minds have to be very open to being molded and harnessed.
But it is an upside as well. It could be a sign that the team and the position is not at the same level as a ditch-digger. Because it is a creative position, relating to communication, and working with others, unable to work with others for whatever reason (language, culture, different approaches to solving problems personality) matters. Flipping burgers, digging ditches, picking apples, selling cars, culture fit amongst the group of workers matters but not in the same degree.
On the other side of the argument, places shoot themselves in the foot, because of this. Because ultimately what matters most if whether the person is a net benefit for the company. Maybe their personality or age or gender or religious beliefs, or sexual orientation doesn't match the average there but ask yourself this, is that more important than the benefit for the whole company. Young start-ups get all gung-ho on culture fit and by that I mean they want to hire 20 year old something that dress, walk, talk and think just like themselves. Each one of them hasn't asked themselves whether they can manage to work with someone of a different gender or different age because of the experience and perspectives they bring, they take the easy route and say "well they are not like us, and we are awesome, so they don't fit".
Anyway, two sides of the story. When it comes to things like this no matter how much we hammer at the issue there is not one clear answer. It always depends.
That's not the entirety of cultural fit. But that's also a good reason for getting rid of someone. Being a programmer isn't just about the code you right.
Too many people see "cultural fit" and feel it's a way for them to get shunned. I'm sorry, but if this is a continuing problem for anyone, they should look at themselves as the problem.
My experience with startup founders and those who wish to be startup founders suggests to me that this is more likely, but I recognize that my experiences are different from yours so you may not feel the same.
"Cultural fit", when it isn't an excuse for various kinds of discrimination, seems to be more of an issue with stuff that's not so easy to quantify. If there's a guy who likes going off on long expeditions into learning new tools, and the rest of the team are PHP meat-and-potatoes guys. Or if you have a place where cultish worship of the CEO is the norm, and one person don't exhibit any outward signs.
And the definition of "asshole" behavior can even vary. In one job I worked at, replacing someone's code with your own that works better made you a hero, and it was incumbent on the other person to have no ego about it. In another job, that was tantamount to insubordination, and not respecting the blood, sweat and tears that had been spent before you got there. (Full disclosure: I did the former behavior at the latter place. It wasn't the only reason things didn't work out, but it was a factor.)
But there are going to be people who are going to totally click with them. So is it better, as a boss, if I tell them to shut the fuck up? That they make me want to kill myself on a regular basis?
Now, for me, that means I'd have to personally pair program with everyone I interview for a half day. (If this irritates you, this is the wrong cultural fit for you.)
I've worked with people who got the job done but wouldn't follow UI patterns in the rest of the application. People who thought it was fine to modify the database in an integration test without rolling everything back. People who, no matter how much you asked, ignored the logging framework and checked printlns in everywhere. Who thought getting the job done quick was more important than getting the job done right. People who thought a copy and paste was better than generalizing the code and not repeating yourself.
Are they not doing their job? It depends. For people who were like them, they probably would get along swell.
But that's not a good cultural fit for me, for the kind of work I do. And I wasn't a good fit for a job where the boss knew every piece of code like the back of his hand and so tests weren't necessary. I was so afraid to make any changes that I froze up -- a bad checkin could mean hundreds of dollars an hour lost until someone notices.
I should have left, but I thought the problem was me, and that I'd eventually get it. I know better now, but it was about personality. I need to be around people who write tests. Some people don't. These types of people shouldn't work together.
The studies I've seen say that it also produces better code. I'm not convinced that 40 hours a week is necessarily the right way to go, but many places I've known do 0.
Other people hate pair programming at all. Those people would not be a good cultural fit for the kind of place I want to work.
I think the reason managers don't tell you to do pair programming is that they thinking two devs on two different tasks is more productive than 2 devs on the same task. Though i'd argue that when two people are workign on the same screen, there's a less chance of them drifting over to HN every once in a while (like i am doing right now)
Perhaps, if the above average ditch-digger never gets around to digging ditches because of the way the shovels are distributed.
- You are cautious and methodical but the company needs to experiment and swing wildly.
- You excel at focusing on a project but the position requires you to multitask frequently.
- Your understanding of the company's goals has become more complete and it turns you don't find them as motivating as you expected.
- You don't adapt to some general work practices re: hours, remoting, scheduling & tracking, deployment, meetings.
- Personality clash with other team members due to age, personality, lifestyle or (dare I say) some demographic factor.
However, 'culture fit' is a reason for low performance, but low performance should still be the reason why the employee is getting fired. If the company has not identified the problem and tried a recovery plan before actually firing the employee, that company has a serious HR problem.
Yes, I recognize that my refusal to accept that we must all have the identical motivating factors is a prime example of why I would be a poor cultural fit with many start-ups.
> Why not simply stick with the observations of (non-)performance rather than offering your judgements of the cause(s) of the non-performance?
Because I expect any decent manager & company to at least try to (a) identify the reasons for low performance, and (b) discuss possible correction plans together with the employee. Actively identifying and correcting causes for low performance is in my opinion essential to maintain perspective on how and why your company works. This perspective is necessary to understand and strengthen the practices and pillars that increase your team's performance.
"Not a good cultural fit" is such a passive-aggressive way to justify firing someone. It's basically saying "You can do the job, but we're stopping you from being able to do that job, and we're going to justify it to ourselves by invoking 'cultural fit'".
> When you’re in a job that you’re not a good fit for, you’ll start feeling things like “nobody listens to me,” or you’ll notice that your manager doesn’t seem to appreciate your work or your work ethic. Sometimes your manager seems to be acting weird around you. Sometimes your manager asks you to change your attitude, and you do change, but it’s like they can’t see it.
In such a situation, I have to question whether it's the employee who's doing something wrong or whether it's the company that's doing something wrong. I mean, if your manager gives you feedback, you take their feedback, and they don't notice the difference, it certainly sounds to me like the manager wants you to fail.
I'd recommend the OP read about "Set Up to Fail syndrome": http://hbr.org/1998/03/the-set-up-to-fail-syndrome
> We’ve let go of half a dozen employees and kept only as many, and in every case where we let someone go, that person has gone on to work on things that they are more passionate about and where they have excelled and been happier at.
Wait, so you fire half of your staff and they're happier afterwords? Again, I have to question whether it's the employees' fault or the company's fault. If half of your staff is leaving to places where they're happier, what does that say about the company?
> Sometimes you can detect a cultural mismatch within the first two months, sometimes in the first two weeks, and perhaps even on the first real day of work. It can be so easy to justify keeping the wrong employee on staff that a decision to fire an employee can drag on unresolved for months or years.
It can be so easy to justify firing someone when all you have to do is throw around the words "bad cultural fit". How about giving concrete reasons why the employee wasn't working out? That way, you don't have to sit around and guess when you're actually going to "detect" a "bad cultural fit".
I've known people who were laid off or fired, and of course they were pretty unhappy about it at the time. But I know some who took it as the kick-in-the-pants they needed to fix their lives for the better, and find a better job, start the business they'd been talking about, etc.
A year or two later, and they'll freely agree that being laid off was good for them.
It strikes me as dangerous to conclude too much from this. In fact, I worry that this particular sort of statistic could be completely meaningless. People often try to find positive interpretations of events which are too painful for them to accept. It's a very powerful form of cognitive dissonance. Being fired from a job you enjoy can be a nearly traumatic hit to your perception of yourself, and it is necessary to reconstruct your self-image in some way. Most likely the person will exercise some creative freedom in this reconstruction process.
I got fired a few months ago and it was the best thing that could have happened to me. Until then, I'd changed jobs every so often because I never liked where I worked. But when I got fired, I thought long and hard about what I needed in a job. Only after acting on some well thought-out conclusions did I find an excellent job that's absolutely a perfect fit for me. I probably wouldn't have thought that hard about my next step if I wasn't fired.
So while that comment is true for me, I can't imagine that it's always true. If I was a dumbass and took a job exactly like the previous one, I'd hate that one too. I might not get fired - I might quit before they fired me. Honestly it doesn't matter which happens first. If you don't put in the introspection to find a place that fits you and vice versa, you'll hate it in no time.
Figure out what you need, figure out what you can do well, and find a job that matches that.
Meanwhile, your dissatisfaction of your job results in poor job performance, and you get let go.
Now, with the easy path no longer there, one starts making the changes one only daydreamed about before.
Of course, this doesn't always happen. But I've seen it happen several times.
I agree with a lot of what you've said, but that bit struck me as unfair. It's natural for employees to be fired, and for those fired employees to reflect on the past in order to find jobs that make them happier -- what a depressing world it would be if that weren't the case! -- so I'm not sure I'd conclude that their personal growth necessarily implies a systemic problem in the company (especially at n=6). And it's entirely possible that someone might get fired from a different company and end up happier at the OP's company, no?
But that's the thing. You never read blog posts like these that are about "How I fired someone and then learned from that firing" or "How I saved someone from being fired by examining the results of my actions". Crap employers never seem to consider the possibility that they're doing something wrong.
So instead they make up some narcissistic BS about "cultural fit" and use it to expel people who don't conform to their narrow ideas of what their company should be.
It's a way of saying that they couldn't find anything specific to use against the employee, and are invoking the much more vague (and impossible to act upon) excuse of not being a good "cultural fit."
Think about it. Why aren't they being specific? They could give a hundred different reasons. Maybe you come in late everyday. Maybe your code has too many bugs. Maybe you dress inappropriately to work. Maybe you made a sexist/racist remark to someone and they reported you. Maybe you failed to deliver a project on time. Etc. etc.
But the reason they aren't giving these as reasons is because they aren't true. You are actually a stellar employee, but they don't like you, for whatever reason. So you're being let go. That's what it means to not be a good "cultural fit."
To me if you think that someone isn't a good cultural fit you need to dig around and work out what you mean by that. In most cases there's something there and it's not something you can realistically change, but in some cases you'll find something worth working on.
Not all problems can be solved, not all problems should be solved (companies often "stop people from doing the job" for good reasons - a company can't be all things to all people and what is right for person X may not be right for everyone else) but "not a good cultural fit" is a bad because it's not a specific problem anyone can address. At the very least if you're going to get rid of someone (or not employ someone) it seems fair to let them know why.
As an aside in the UK "not a good cultural fit" is also potentially going to get you into legal trouble because of the possibility that it's hiding racial or other discrimination (for instance if "not a good cultural fit" means "we all like to go drinking, you don't drink because of your faith so we're worried you won't fit" that could well be considered discrimination).
At other companies, I noticed some others who were technically great at their job, not thrive due to the way the company worked, while I and others did thrive.
I've left some companies because of that lack of cultural fit. But if an employee doesn't recognize the lack of cultural fit or is too afraid to leave of his own accord, it makes sense that at some point the employer fires him.
And of course it sucks to be fired, and it makes you question all sorts of stuff. And the article addresses that. But it can still mean that you eventually end up at a better position where you do thrive.
That doesn't mean every case of firing someone is justified, I'm just saying that "cultural fit" can absolutely be a real and valid thing.
Most people don't want to settle for slightly below average, and it takes a shock to get out of complacency. It's happened to me in the past. The only regret is not getting better severance, but even there it lights a fire.
This poster even laments the great friendships with his coworkers which he felt were wasted upon his firing; how did he have such great friendships if his cultural fit were evidently so terrible as to be fired over it? It's for reasons like this that I always feel these articles are fishy and are leaving out important details.
Some people go to work to work, not to hang out with friends. They might not consider it to be such a terrible thing that their coworkers don't want to hang out with them, as long as they can communicate well enough to get their work done.
Also, if you have a mortgage and a family to support, you may be less likely to leave a well-paying job just because the culture is suboptimal.
This implies, though, that their lack of "fit" isn't actually a problem. Are companies really firing very productive developers who are just as technically competent as their peers (if not moreso) just because they aren't socially popular? We're not talking people who are assholes or who never shower or who have obvious and universal social issues; we're just talking people who don't happen to really hit it off, on a BFF sort of level, with their coworkers. I don't see how that practice could be sustained in the long run at all. It seems almost certain, in fact, that the company would hit a hard growth barrier rather quickly if it doesn't overcome this fairly fundamental problem.
Whenever I hear that someone has been fired due to culture fit issues, when I really try to question the motivations behind it, it almost always comes down to a politically correct version of "we didn't like hanging out with him/her". It is such BS.
For instance, somebody who is only productive in absolute silence and prefers working from 6am to 2pm, will have a very difficult time working with somebody who needs to listen to heavy metal at full blast and likes working from 1pm to 9pm.
Especially if they have to work on the same team and need to closely collaborate to get their work done.
Startups run on morale. This is a pretty important feature of a startup employee. Even if that's what "culture fit" means that doesn't invalidate it as a reason to fire.
A bit of team members competitiveness is ok, and perhaps good. But when it ends up divulging into fighting, back stabbing and lack of communication, the atmosphere turns toxic, and it hampers the whole team. Also, when you have engineers trying to user work time to play with their favorite framework/tool/whatever else that might not actually help other team members to get their stuff done. (usually a trait of more junior devs). But this is easily fixable. People issue are harder to fix.
Few things to do:
1. Set up straight rules, and expectations for the people that are having problem fitting in.
2. Allow them to express their point of view, but also let them know that what the team expects of them. Try to see if you can accommodate their requests. Often they are ways/desires to do something in a different way, which might not be compatible with company's way of doing things. Sometimes you can learn from it, sometimes the employee's request and point of view are unrealistic or just don't fit with the company's goal.
3. Move them to a different team or setting, and see if they get along/fit better with different team dynamics.
4. Firing them is a last resort only, if nothing else works. If you let go somebody too quickly it sends a bad message to the rest of the team as well (the company looks too cut-throat). Also letting people not getting along well for too long hampers the productivity of everybody else.
However I do think the phrase is valid. Culture fit encompasses all of the intangibles outside of skill and experience. Team cohesion is a very real concept and not everyone works harmoniously together. Especially in startups and small companies, one overly "negative" influence (however that's defined for your particular team) can bring down morale and productivity across the board.
We're social creatures. When it comes to an interaction between people, do not underestimate the social angle. If it's not working on that level it's going to be hard to make it work in other ways, too.
The truth is, those people had given up and became toxic to everyone around them. It was time that they move on.
Anyhow, whenever I hear the defense of "professionalism" I become fairly suspicious of the circumstances.
The point I am trying to make is that if someone says "he/she is capable and behaves professionally, but the culture fit is just not there", that's when I become fairly suspicious of the circumstances.
I personally would never work somewhere that I was forced to listen to other people's music.
It will just make the hiring process more strict. I know France has these sorts of rules in place and many companies didn't want to hire anyone without experience because it was very difficult to fire someone once you hired them.
Have better management processes so you can solve problems of "cultural fit" rather than just firing people.
It's as if the hiring process is really two-fold: first, is the formal interviewing process - during which your suitability for the role is determined - and second is pledging the greek-letter organization/start-up - during which your suitability for hanging-out is determined.
For example, at Google we place a big emphasis on "Culture fit" during our hiring process, but we have a very diverse workforce. My team and I share few common interests outside of work, but we're all able to get together in a room, communicate effectively, and generally enjoy each other's company.
In the past, I have worked with people that I can't wait to get away from. With these people it was a really challenge to get good work done, because to work effectively requires good communication. It's a lot easier to communicate if you actually enjoy talking to the person.
None of this has anything to do with musical taste, hobbies, or drinking habits. It's to do with attitude, courtesy, patience, and other character traits. Each workplace is different and different kinds of people will thrive or fail depending on whether they fit the culture of that workplace.
Like I said in another comment making a similar point, I completely agree. It feels like the industry has been hijacked by people who were actively ejected from all cliques in high school, and now they create their own cliques around them and eject people arbitrarily because "they are not like us".
It’s also true that the wrong person can disrupt a team that was previously running smoothly. So, yes, “we didn’t like hanging out with her/him” is a perfectly legitimate reason to separate someone from a team.
> To paraphrase Hanns Johst...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Johst#Role_in_Nazi_German...
The concept that we should shoot those who hold ideas we don't agree with rather than engage in debate is exactly how we end up with horrible totalitarian regimes.
And your form of argument is ad-hominem. Not exactly the moral high ground.
You're actually accusing me of making an ad hominem attack, when in fact I'm simply trying to point out that he's opening himself up to such attacks by using the quote he's using. Clearly you must agree that he's inviting such attacks, as you seem to be jumping to his defense even before such an attack has taken place.
That said, you have every right to write what you want to.
Best of luck.
You (seemingly) are an example of everything you argue against, tho. Shoot the messenger is not a strong or attractive argument. Neither is failing to (properly) understand a literary reference, have a sense of irony, history, humor, etc...
Lighten up and argue your point, properly. With trasnparency, not FUD and oblique credibility attacks. This is also a good time to think about whether you are a cultural fit with HN.[1]
__________
[1] <sarcasm tag> Be Glad I'm not your boss. Oh, wait, that would be an asshole comment. OK folks. Carry on. NOthing to see here.
Wowzers. Firing every-other person you hire? Leaders should be ok to break big-problems down into simple ones, with the purpose of expanding the funnel of people who can be effective at solving the problems. This is the basis of leveraging resources. While it's legitimate to require a threshold tests of quality for building a team, a failure rate is this high with onboarding staff indicates something else is a problem. Imagine any sports team who mistakes talent at this percentage? While the players may get traded, the coach would be likely getting fired. There has to be more to the story?
A true artist never complains about his tools.
At one of my previous jobs, where I had worked for a year or so, my employer had to let me go due to cutbacks. I was the first in a wave of about 20 that were made redundant in the following two months. This equaled about half the company.
It was a pretty intense 30 minutes.
He called me into his office, and told me he would have to let me go; today, without severance or pay for this month. By the time I got back to my desk 5 minutes later, my work email account had already been blocked, which rendered me unable to say goodbye to about half of my colleagues, since they weren't in that day. I was stumped. After cleaning up my computer I made a round in the office, saying goodbyes and telling everyone I was made redundant.
As my employer showed me into the photo-studio next door, where I wanted to say goodbyes to the rest of our team, I told him I'd be having a long hard look at my contract, because I didn't believe he could just let me go without pay. 15 minutes later, still in the photo-studio talking to my colleagues/friends, I got a phone call. My employer had looked at my contract and found that he: - had to give me a months notice; - had to pay me my severance (a month's wage); - owed me my un-used leave; - already revoked all my access to all internal/external processes.
That last one meant that I didn't have to come back in again.
The other employers that were made redundant, were told they had the choice of leaving that day (and get paid for a month), or finishing the month of work, all receiving their severance normally.
My bet, is that it was the first time he ever had to make someone redundant. He seemed genuinely upset too. I never blamed him on a personal level, even though I disagreed with many of his executive decisions.
He did end up giving me a glowing recommendation when I applied for a new job, so there's that.
The ideal situation is for both employer and employee to come to an agreement that it's not working out. An employee that understands why they are leaving and why it's a bad fit will often remain a vocal supporter. Unfortunately, in my experience, this takes time and energy far beyond the point of noticing the issue... I wish I knew of a solution!
Why? Why is this more "the way to go" than "hire with deliberation so you don't have to fire half your employees"? 'Cause from where I stand that hurts less people. Your "fire fast" hurts them inequitably, it hurts them much more than it does you or Your Important Business--it deprives them of their previous job, it magnifies the opportunity costs they incurred to trust you to come work for you.
Firing for "culture fit" means you fucked up. Your judgment failed. It's on you and the hurt and pain you cause is your responsibility. So it strikes me that it's being a minimum-level human being to hire carefully and with deliberation to minimize the times you fuck up and the people you hurt. Because they're people, and in every case--even the asshole ones--they deserve better than to be hurt because of your poor judgment.
Hiring processes optimize for people who are good at getting hired. Working with someone (if you're willing to prune the bad coworkers) optimizes for people who are good colleagues.
In those circumstances, when yes a fundamental mistake has been made, I believe that in theory it's best to end the relationship quickly, for both parties involved. In practice it's obviously not that easy or simple.
I've heard of companies instituting mandatory work days or even work weeks for prospective hires to vet how they will fit into the workplace. That sort of thing is attempting to solve the issue but how on earth do you convince anyone, especially someone already gainfully employed, to go through with that process? I suppose I'd do it for a company I absolutely, positively, had to go work for (very few if any)... realistically it seems hard to accomplish if not rude to request.
Ultimately I think the hiring process is one in which mistakes can happen. What's the most equitable way to resolve them when they do?
The office had all the stereotypical 'bad' co-workers: the guy who turns every discussion into an hour-long argument, the guy who's never in the office, the guy who doesn't check or reply to emails, all backed by the boss who doesn't make anyone accountable.
I got along with the rest of the staff great. Graphics, sales, customer service... But the developers were just un-socialble, bad at communicating, and full of bad habits.
I felt so frustrated, there were a few times I almost walked out the door. It'd take me 2 days of chasing something around a product (that could have been answered by myself, a year later) to find a fix or answer a 'why?'
But I stuck it out. When we hired our next developer, I was put in charge of getting him up to speed. The boss was impressed with how much information I had prepared from him and that he knew I started with 'nothing'.
It may have backfired because he never really go to the point where he didn't need handholding, but at least he didn't feel as frustrated as I did for the first 6 months.
As for the "strange" boss behavior. That is "always going to happen" in smaller companies or companies where managers where promoted from within. This is mainly because those managers tend to have little to no experiencing managing people. Managers that have years of experience and have worked at a few companies should not have these behaviors. They tend to "curve" the ball a bit early in the process. Meaning, if they see a problem they address it immediately.
It is on "you" the manager to make sure the person does a great job and succeed. If they fail, you failed to identify the person you need to complete the task at hand.
On the otherhand, people who do not show for work, do not do what they are told repeatedly, are candidates that I believe fall in the "fired" category.
Currently I have a boss that pretty much fits the description that would give me red-flags that maybe im not a good fit. However, I am very engaged in the projects, hitting all milestones, and well liked by all the people I interact with including my boss. Yet he is still "strange". And I believe this to be because he has no experience prior to being promoted within to be a manager.
Ok, I believed it until then. B.S. No way he knows that. Plenty of unmotivated developers out there. It is not all roses when you get fired, even for a boss that "understands your pain and wants what's best for you". The fact is- if you fire someone, you want to feel like you are doing them a favor. Well, you aren't. You likely made a hiring mistake, and your mistake as a manager is going on that person's permanent record. It may be 80-90% their fault, but the employer shares in the blame for failure. Admit you fucked up, and try to help the person if you can. Then improve your hiring and early evaluation process.
Agree with the overall point, but I think that's important to stress. My experience with people who embrace this "fire fast" thing has generally been people who don't understand the difference between their perceptions and objective reality; likewise I don't think that all (or most) understand the ramifications of their actions upon other people.
> We’ve let go of half a dozen employees and kept only as many
Of all the departures I know of from software companies, much fewer than half are firings. That is to say, the vast majority are employee-initiated.
On the other hand, it is valid for a person to say a group is not a "cultural fit". For instance a company that is full of greasy nerds who work 10 houra a day and play video games the other 14. Thats not my bag so I'm not going to work at that company because its not my culture.
For the company to say to me "you're not a cultural fit", is like Germany telling me I can't visit their country because I'm not "german enough".
in large companies which are really lots of small companies in same buildings this did not look like firing / hiring on the cv but generally was the same thing..
Although technically, CS degrees are for learning about computation rather than how to use a particular language or how to develop software.
That said, it's better to find out if there's a fit based on casual (usually paid) work, contracts and eventually FTE. The goal being giving everyone an out, because the world's a small place.
This sounds like the worst employer I've ever heard of. A 50% chance of being fired? There's no way I'd take an offer if I knew that statistic.
IMHO firing, especially early on, should be viewed as a failure of the recruiting process; it's expensive and time-consuming to hire an employee and then fire them compared to just saying no before an offer is made. I find it strange that the author seems to think that a high firing rate is something to be proud of.