Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It's Never Too Early to Fire

a16z.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 189 posts

Re: It's Never Too Early to Fire

#91

Post by gommm »

In the first company I confounded, we recruited a friend of my cofounder to a senior job. He looked like the right guy for the job but he actually really wasn't. He was completely underperforming and junior employees looked at him and lost respect for both and my cofounder for keeping him on.

Because he was a friend who had left his job to work for us, we didn't fire him and he continued undermining the company with his poor performance for a year. I think this was the worst mistake I did. In the end, he left the company and screwed us over on some account.

So, I've learned from this:

- do not hire friends as senior executive

- if you insist on hiring friend, have a clear backup plan if things don't work out so that you can both end the relationship. Be prepared to lose your friendship in doing that.

- never let an underperforming senior employee fester in your company. It's like rot, it will drag down the entire company by devaluating the work your other employees do

Re: It's Never Too Early to Fire

#92

Post by usmeteora »

horsecaptin wrote: post #33

Why would anyone work in a person or company that is known to fire quickly?

the big thing here is the struggle between companies like amazon google apple who have tons of applicants, and a startup who has less applicants, and less experience from hiring false positives and identifying false negatives. They acknowledge that they turn down many good people, but also most if not all of the people not qualified. They arent worried about false negatives, they are worried about false positives. So they are willing to filter out a good portion of qualified people they aren't quite sure about who might have some overlapping results as people who are not qualified, knowing they are filtering out most if not all unqualified people.

Startups do not have the same level of people experiences to draw conclusions based on interviewing thousands and thousands of applicants and tracking the success of accepted applicants based on a large portfolio of information.

Probably the best thing you can do in a situation like this is GET someone from a company like that who has had years of experience interviewing candidates, and they will be able to bring along that experience of identifying potential false positives from the get go. That is honestly the biggest asset to these companies, their ability to hire and maintain high quality people.

in addition to the countless benefits and opportunities for varied career trajectories in multiple and evolving technologies for smart people once getting into these places, is the fact that they highly value the social network of these work places, and they cannot be duplicated in many places elsewhere, further incentivizing them to stay and internally recommending other high quality friends from elsewhere to interview.

Re: It's Never Too Early to Fire

#93

Post by [deleted] »

afpx wrote: post #24

Actually, pretty good advice in the opposite direction, too. If I had known at 18 that I could have easily and successfully walked away from teams, bosses, companies, partners, and investors who gave 'bad vibes', I would easily have (at least!) an extra couple million in the bank. I wasted countless opportunities waiting for things to get better, when I probably intuitively knew that they wouldn't. Partly, it was bec…

[deleted]

Re: It's Never Too Early to Fire

#94

Post by noufalibrahim »

wtvanhest wrote: post #5

Just a note, this isnt about firing junior people fast. That is absolutely scummy. This is about hiring/firing very senior, well paid people with lots of prior experience. If you are hiring and then firing junior people fast, you are the problem.

> You are the problem.

A minor point. I recently had to let a junior level person go after "giving them a chance" for around 5 months. I did everything I could, extra mentoring, warnings, gentle pressure, lighter work and finally, an opportunity to shift into a simpler projects so that they'd get more comfortable. This was, as the article mentions, emotionally draining for me and unfortunately, the dislike split over from professional to personal. I let the person go and that's that.

Now, the relevant part of this comment, I hired someone else and because of the baggage from the previous person, I very quickly started getting dissatisfied with the new hire. This would have ended in a disaster if one of my other employees didn't tell me that this new person has only been on for less than a month and was doing okay.

Prompted me to re evaluate myself. So yes, hiring and firing junior people is a problem usually with the hirer but it might be due to things that you have to watch out for.

Re: It's Never Too Early to Fire

#95

Post by Retric »

gommm wrote: post #91

In the first company I confounded, we recruited a friend of my cofounder to a senior job. He looked like the right guy for the job but he actually really wasn't. He was completely underperforming and junior employees looked at him and lost respect for both and my cofounder for keeping him on. Because he was a friend who had left his job to work for us, we didn't fire him and he continued undermining the company with…

Alternatively, don't recruit friends that already have jobs or need to relocate. If someones out of work to start then letting them go is arguably less traumatic.

Re: It's Never Too Early to Fire

#96

Post by matwood »

mattmanser wrote: post #82
usmeteora wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for saying this. Honestly, probably could have cut a total of four years of waste out of my life by just knowing the company was not a good fit for me. I used to stay at a place and say "Ok, maybe its me, what can I do to put the most effort in, and maybe that will change how upper level toxic management trickles down and fundamentally changes how politics over rule technology and data based decisions, or h…

As a senior programmer with a bit more life experience, I quit somewhere after only 2 months. They valued me, the pay was great, the tech challenges were interesting, but their processes drove me potty. I have never regretted it and only feel relief whenever I think about it. I walked straight into another job. If I were to stop freelancing and get a job again, I would just leave it off my CV.

> As a senior programmer with a bit more life experience, I quit somewhere after only 2 months. They valued me, the pay was great, the tech challenges were interesting, but their processes drove me potty.

I've done something similar twice, except there were no interesting technical challenges. Both were government jobs where I was lured in to do all this cool work and then get told to sit there and do nothing. The pay and hours were awesome, but for my 20 something self it was a terrible fit.

Re: It's Never Too Early to Fire

#97

Post by matwood »

wtvanhest wrote: post #5

Just a note, this isnt about firing junior people fast. That is absolutely scummy. This is about hiring/firing very senior, well paid people with lots of prior experience. If you are hiring and then firing junior people fast, you are the problem.

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

Firing for typical junior mistakes? Yeah, that's a problem. But, junior people are usually not just technically raw, but also employee raw. Not showing up to work or lying about causing issues will get someone fired.

To all the juniors out there, when you screw something up (and you will), be quick to raise your hand and say it was you. Then, shift gears to fixing and mitigating for the future. It's a lot like politics in that it is the cover up that almost always gets a person.

Re: It's Never Too Early to Fire

#98

Post by matwood »

horsecaptin wrote: post #33

Why would anyone work in a person or company that is known to fire quickly?

Because I like working with people I can count on and trust. Anytime I have fired or seen someone else fired every other person on the team said something along the lines of 'about time'. Looking back, it means those people were probably not fired quickly enough.

Re: It's Never Too Early to Fire

#99

Post by whatshisface »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #2

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 we…

>My next company will have explicit rubrics for what it takes to get fired, and your status will be tracked daily.

Hi, I'm whatshisface, and unscrupulous team lead from the 1970s, when metering code seemed pretty workable. I can write 100kloc of code a day (my editor is set to convert spaces into line breaks) and commit once per typed character. Also, I'm a great team player who can work with QA to file and fix thousands of trivial tickets every week. If those numbers aren't what you're looking for, I'm also a social butterfly who can ace any peer ranking on charisma alone.

When can I start?

Re: It's Never Too Early to Fire

#100

Post by dasmoth »

mattmanser wrote: post #82
usmeteora wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for saying this. Honestly, probably could have cut a total of four years of waste out of my life by just knowing the company was not a good fit for me. I used to stay at a place and say "Ok, maybe its me, what can I do to put the most effort in, and maybe that will change how upper level toxic management trickles down and fundamentally changes how politics over rule technology and data based decisions, or h…

As a senior programmer with a bit more life experience, I quit somewhere after only 2 months. They valued me, the pay was great, the tech challenges were interesting, but their processes drove me potty. I have never regretted it and only feel relief whenever I think about it. I walked straight into another job. If I were to stop freelancing and get a job again, I would just leave it off my CV.

but their processes drove me potty.

Out of curiosity, in what direction?

(Also in the process-driving-me-round-the-bend camp, but concerned that a lot of alternatives might be a case of "out if the frying pan, into the scrum"...)

Post reply on HN