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Comment by yalogin | Hacker News Reader

First off a link on Quora did not bug me about a login - weird.

Second, all this talk about hiring "rock stars" and retaining them but I heard no one talking about bad hires. Does any one want to share stories about bad hires and why it was a wrong decision? I believe companies put too much emphasis on hiring the correct person. I understand if its the first few employees but after that does it really matter? Unless the person is a real asshole (and he did not care enough to hide it during the interview) does it really matter?

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> I believe companies put too much emphasis on hiring the correct person.

You literally can't put too much emphasis on hiring the right person. Not because of you. Firing someone, at least in the U.S., is easy. But you hurt people when you hire the wrong people. You turn their lives upside-down because you made the wrong decision. If you have a shred of a conscience, you'll hire scrupulously because doing otherwise makes you shitty.

"Hire fast, fire fast" is immoral. "Hire slow, fire fast" less so, if you compensate the worker because in almost every case (that is, this isn't true in cases of criminality, harrassment, etc.) it's your mistake, not theirs, and you owe them.

You literally can't put too much emphasis on hiring the right person.

You (almost) can't put too much emphasis on not hiring the wrong person.

Which is not the same.

Suppose your interview process has a 5% false-positive rate. Do you get more incompetents (say, bottom 5%) by looking for people in the top 50% or the top 5%?

This only applies if you actually allow people to assume that "hired" means "staying." If you "hire" people on a tentative basis, and tell them that you're doing so, then this can work. (And you don't tentatively hire people who would have to relocate, etc.)

Why would an employee who is not desperate for a job give up their current job in exchange for a position that's probationary? Setting up a situation where the employer can bail out with no cost to themselves indicates that they have zero commitment to making the relationship work.

How about an employee who is not desperate for a job, but who also currently does not have a job? This would be the situation created by a Basic Income Guarantee.

As per TFA, we're talking abot 0%-unemployment industry here. Such situations happen, but they're the exceptions, not something to base your policy on.

Seriously, even all the quality 2nd year undergrads I see are working already, at least here if you want to hire people who don't have a job then most of them are seriously incompetent people or extremely young.

I guess I'm thinking of a different definition of "unemployed" than you are. Maybe replace your mental definition with "independently wealthy." E.g. "I'm happy just spending all day coding my own projects, but if you give me the right incentives, I'll join your company... tentatively. With the tentativeness going both ways."

Which doesn't exist...so what's the point of this subthread you well-actually'd me about?

You're overselling the basic income. Most software developers have grown used to the lifestyle their income affords and would have to uproot their lives to live on a basic income. The average San Francisco rent would probably eat up all of it.

Why wouldn't you just prefer someone more desperate - who you could therefore get more out of for the same money?

Sure, if you're looking for a random developer to exploit, and the only requirement is that they can code fizzbuzz, go for desperate. But if you're looking for a highly competent and experienced developer, chances are that they'll already have a pretty good job and you'll need to work very hard to convince them that your job is better.

What remotely healthy environment in this industry does not assume a hiring without specific contract length means "staying"?

If I wanted contract work, I'd do that instead.

It depends what sort of life you're turning upside down. For low level jobs I can see hire fast fire fast being a fairly good thing, it lets people have a crack and maybe prove themselves, where they wouldn't be able to pass a more risk averse setup.

Both sides gamble. What's kind's going to depend on what they're putting up.

1) If you want to be able to view Quora posts in general, I'd recommend installing https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quora-unblocker/pc... for Chrome or https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quora-share/ for Firefox (I recently made the latter since it didn't seem like an equivalent to the Chrome plugin existed).

2) In addition to eropple's point about treatment of the new hire, I think it can be disruptive to the existing team to have a bad hire. For one thing, existing staff always have to spend a least a little time teaching a new hire how things work at the company, and that time is essentially lost if they don't work out. It also frequently means you'll have some mediocre/bad code sitting around when the employee leaves, or in the worst case they could inadvertently cause some major security/stability issues for your product. That can be somewhat mitigated by proper process and permissions, but it's still a risk.

1) You can add "?share=1" to any URL to view Quora posts w/o logging in.

The single worst thing you can do in my experience in a fast growing start-up is make a terrible key hire. I wrote about how making a terrible hire as my first VP Sales almost ruined EchoSign ... The Year of Hell: http://saastr.com/2013/11/06/if-your-vp-sales-isnt-going-to-...

Sorry to nitpick, but I could not resist:

If it's your start-up, the worst thing you could do is BE a terrible key hire.

Just because it's yours doesn't mean you're doing well.

The only advice I can give on bad hires is to recognize the mistake and let them go as early as possible.

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