firingtest

If you are great at .NET and WinForms please write your email in here and I'll email to you.

Internal releases all automated so daily, hourly whatever in every commit and it's almost forbidden to keep your code more than a day at home! even if it's broken I force people to commit to keep it alive. If one code takes more than a day there is generally something with (design, task splitting etc.) unless we are introducing a big feature.

However based on comments I think focusing on important couple of features and try to deliver them in weekly of 2 weekly periods makes a lot of sense and should motivate people better.

Tell me about it, IT industry (I know from myself) is so spoiled because generally it's rather easy to find jobs.

> are they getting any equity? Do they make more (meaningfully more) money if they do a good job?

No, I understand this can be a problem but at the same time I don't see a good reason to give them equity. I might give them equity and then get the bad performance again then I'll be a total idiot.

> Are you sure of the reasons why their performance is bad?

No I'm not but I've tried hard to figure out and so far couldn't pin point.

> because they don't want to anger you and risk getting fired?

I don't think so as I openly discussed the matter and tried to change how we work to fix this problem by their suggestions. So they know if they think something will work better I'll go with that. For example with one of them we were doing daily reviews then he wanted to weekly and thought it'd be better. I agreed and didn't bother him for a week. Result same.

I think it's likely due to telecommuting because as far as I've seen telecommuting can do this to you. Unfortunately opening up an office is not something I want to do due to financial overhead and geographical limitations.

Either way that shows that the employee is not good, if a person can't handle to do his/her own tasks one by one that person should not be work as a developer. BTW generally assigned person decides how long will it take to finish a task (a task can't take longer than 4+ hours if it's needs to be split into smaller chunks)

Some of them know, couple of them quite new hires who started with a very bad performance (I've no clue how the hell this is possible! - maybe my fault)

Also I openly discussed all these issues and invite them to find a solution all together. So far not going well.

In some cases after being informed of possible serious consequences their performance got back to normal for a month or two then cycle repeated itself. So maybe every 2 months I should remind them that they very close to getting sacked.

To be honest numbers are slightly less I put 8/5 by scaling the current technical team to a little bit more to keep it anonymous (I might be paranoid but my team mates reading HN as well!)

But still it's clear that my management skills are not top notch and I didn't hire right people.

We are building a (fairly expensive) desktop software in a quite niche area, releasing about 4 updates per year and it's been about 2 years we are doing this.

I used bad performance to define:

Not doing their job which is tickets assigned them (coding, testing, building, buying groceries etc.)

So we do have a clear definition of what needs to be done, and it's also clear that who's doing it and who's not. Only question in here might what's the accepted amount of tasks done. Like does this ticket takes an hour for X and a day for Y. In either case (Y is slacking or it takes a day for him) he's an incompetent employee and needs to go. Am I missing something?

We got clear visions and mottos such as "Be the best technically advanced tool in the field", that's our edge being technically better than other competitors.

But well it's a software and not like we are saving the world or ending war in Middle East, or poverty in Africa. All we do is making a cool software and making something new in the field.

What sort of shared values and clear goals we talking about? To be honest other than obvious clear goals for many startups -make great software, be fresh, be better- (I think) we don't have anything stand out.

Different countries.

I'm a bit lost though, I thought in HN many people thought that telecommuting was way to go and there are cool companies such as 37Signals rocking by telecommuting.

Am I missing something? Are those all lies, or do HNers generally love telecommuting because they can slack off as an employee? Or maybe that was only me and pretty much everyone thinks telecommuting is a bad idea.

We are tech company, we don't even have sales or marketing department. We do awesome products and people love it. That's how we do and sell.

Normally I'm not a manager just an passionate engineer however setting up your own company generally makes you an instant manager.

Can't I find 5 more people who can work without nudging instead of hiring a useless person (read: manager) to just nudge people?

Or do you think finding 5 new people who fits the bill is harder than finding one manager who can nudge people.

Actually I wasn't considering this but you and many others in here pointed out mass firing would be very bad with very good reasons. Now I changed my mind about this, even if I finalize my decision on firing it'll be worst to better in every 2 months (unless they change in the middle).

We do many of these, however we don't focus on weekly tangible results which is a really important point and can motivate the team a lot. One of the problems that we don't do web startup which means whatever we do, it'll be generally delivered to the end user at least 2 months later, but still seeing something get done is a good way to be motivated.

I hope not :) and AFAIK they don't.

> If I do projects alone at work for more than a year, I start to hate my life.

I know what you mean, that happened to many times when I was working in companies but in my own company luckily I'm not there yet, and hopefully will never be there :)

> Regarding nudging: Ask when something will be done (with units of work that are small enough to make this viable), and get them to commit to it. If they repeatedly don't deliver, and fail to communicate the problems, then you know you have a problem.

That's what we've been doing almost for a year now and many failed repeatedly. Secondly when you give them strict deadlines and this kind of tracking I noticed that they might not deliver the best but they'll just fix/do something quickly and in a dirty way. Stuff like programming and Q/A testing is not easy confirm. Generally this sort of stuff bit us in the ass after months and ended up clients to be unhappy.

Thanks, but one of the problems I've got talented guys they just don't work properly, when they do (read: when I nudge them) I've got to give it to them, they are indeed pretty good.

Stuff I've tried is mostly about talking, trying different systematic models (time tracking, semi-micro management, constant reporting or leaving them more space, trying to get excited with new technical bits, giving them bonus, cutting their salary etc., pep talk, pissed-off talk)

Many things, not done in exact science although it was obvious what slightly works and what definitely doesn't.

> Also it is hard to work remotely and many people just can't do that.

That's exactly my point, maybe these 5 guys can't handle remoting but I might find new 5 guys who can (just like I already got 3)

> If you've not introduced automated systems to track what's being done and /help/ them

I'm not quite sure why you think we don't have these but we do have all. So everyone knows what's been done, what's need to done and what are the deadlines. (although generally we don't have strict deadlines).

> Why would you think it'll be different with new people - because you'll just "be better" at hiring this time around? Unlikely.

Well this is fair comment, I simply don't although it was my first time hiring people for me, so I'm sure I've got more experience on that now and secondly I know what our company culture and what's the good fit, based on good employees I've got in my team. So I've good reference points this time.

So I should fire myself :) A fair point but do you really think it's a good team if the team needs a constant manager to nudge to get things done, do you think it's a good company culture to setup?

Personally I don't want such a culture in my own company.

> Before you let them go, have you analysed what makes the difference between their performance being good and bad? What have you tried to motivate them? Have you asked them if there is anything that would motivate them and if there is anything that is demotivating them?

Yeah I worked on this for a while now, and if you ask them it's all personal problems (stuff I can't help unless I'm willing to take their mother to their aunty's). I think one of the reasons we are in this shape because I don't want to micro-manage, I don't want to make it company culture. Although we do have task tracking and everything so basically everyone knows what they supposed to do. We hold regular teleconferences every week (for all the team) and as much as required through out day between individuals.

I've listened stories of other companies such as 37signals how they mange to work telecommuting, how they don't need to nudge people to work and stuff which makes me wonder whether I'm an incompetent manager or most of my team are incompetent workers.

> If your employees were good at it, they wouldn't be working for you!

Interesting point maybe you right, but to be honest I don't want to spend half of my day to keep nudging people :) Also I had these 3 guys who works perfectly fine, so what about them? Are they just exceptionally good? Somehow much much more motivated than others?