It's Never Too Early to Fire

Weirdly, I think we would all benefit quite a lot from a normalization of fast firing. Part of the reason it's hard to get a job is that companies are afraid to fire you, so they jump through all kinds of strange hoops to try to predict how good an employee you'll be based on, really, no information.

This also forces companies to filter out "possibly good" candidates and only hire "probably good" candidates.

If it were normal to get fired after a day or a week, you could get hired at 10 different companies over a span of two months and likely find a really great position, where you're a great fit.

My next company will have explicit rubrics for what it takes to get fired, and your status will be tracked daily. You'll know at all times exactly how close you are to getting fired with how much severance. It will never be a surprise, unless it's a reaction to an acute event (sexual harassment, etc). We'll hire pretty much everyone who walks through the door with a plausible story for how they add value. Anyone we fire we'll sit down in the exit interview and write a plan for how they can get re-hired in a few weeks or months if they're interested. We'll also try to spin off a separate business with the fired person at the head, instead of just firing, whenever possible.

>Don’t trigger the decay model of trust — why is management tolerating this shit?!

I can't reiterate this enough. Once company I worked for fired the COO that had built the operations when he had serious personal issues that bled into the working environment. I knew it was a serious company after that, I could imagine how difficult it was and he created a great operational culture and working environment before his issues.

Fast forward a few years after an acquisition. The new owners have so many Bozo's in executive positions the place is toxic.

It's an interesting thought, but there are a lot of practical reasons why you want to keep your hiring process selective. If people take a job with you and then get fired after a few weeks, now they are unemployed. If they choose to sue you for unlawful termination, it's going to be pretty hard to show that you made a good faith effort to help them stay employed if you just hired them. There's also a tremendous amount of overhead in bringing on and terminating employees - training, paperwork, IT setup. And, if you terminate a lot of people, it's going to end up on Glassdoor, and you'll have a hard time hiring the next round of people to fire.

That said, I applaud your proposal to have a very high level of transparency with employees about their performance and their future prospects with your company.

It takes time to build trust, at least several months, maybe even years. If you fire everyone before you even get a chance to build up trust with them, you'll never get a great team.

> If you are hiring and then firing junior people fast, you are the problem.

I'm going to challenge this point of view. It is absolutely, and obviously, expected that junior people have a ton to learn, and they should be given leeway for that learning process. So yes, if you fire a junior person because you're not willing to put in the mentorship necessary, then I agree, you are the problem.

However, junior people really shouldn't have any problem with motivation and drive, and in those cases where I've had to fire people, I've always wished I had done it sooner. More importantly, their peers wished I had fired them sooner, too. A bad or lax attitude can be an absolute killer for team morale if the person in question isn't dealt with quickly and fairly.