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Ask HN: How to handle a senior hire turning out to be junior?

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Re: Ask HN: How to handle a senior hire turning out to be junior?

#81

Post by strnisa »

The real mistake is not correcting a mistake when you see you've made one.

It's always hard to let someone go, especially in a small company with a focus on personal development and a positive work environment. However, if you don't address this situation:

  1) The morale of the company will likely decrease.
  2) The productivity of the team will suffer.
  3) Employees may start questioning the leadership's decisions.
  4) Some may consider leaving as a result.
Generally speaking, the well-being and efficiency of the entire team should be a top priority for the company. From this, it also follows that having a solid interview process is crucial.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle a senior hire turning out to be junior?

#84

Post by bialpio »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #35
UseofWeapons1 wrote: post #9

As you consider the decision to let them go, consider the impact on other people in your work place too. Other developers notice someone like that underperforming and getting overpaid, and it can hurt the good climate you aim for. It may feel bad to fire them, but it may be worse to keep them.

This 100%. Whether I would fire someone depends on why I thought they were underperforming. You should consider the first month on the job a work sample and if someone isn’t measuring up within the first week tell them what your expectations are and that they’re not being met. If they don’t remediate within a month let them go. I kept someone for too long once and people on an adjacent team didn’t want to get stuck w…

How do you reconcile this advice with the fact that in both places I've worked at, the expectation was that just the onboarding takes significant amount of time (up to ~0.5yr)? Even if I personally didn't need that much time, it was nice to know that it's available -it's not easy to get into the grind and catch up to others that already have all the institutional knowledge when starting a new job.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle a senior hire turning out to be junior?

#85

Post by jetti »

the_af wrote: post #66
swiftcoder wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have those in America. Mostly because your healthcare is tied to your job, so nobody would risk taking a probationary role that could land them out of work and without healthcare at the end of it...

I don't follow (not from the US, please excuse my ignorance). I was told that, with some exceptions, in the US every job is permanently "on probation" ("at will employment"). As in, you can get fired from one day to the other, no severance and no reason needed (as long as it's not discrimination based on sex, religion, etc). Is my understanding incomplete?

You are correct, however, that isn’t the same as probation. Companies with a probation period may not grant full benefits until after the probation period ends. For example, a company may not let an employee take any time off during the probation period or the company may not let an employee participate i. The company 401k retirement savings plans until after the probation period.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle a senior hire turning out to be junior?

#86

Post by laborcontract »

bob1029 wrote: post #8

We had one of these. Excellent interview, couldn't even handle explorer.exe on the other side. We fired them within the week. No one felt bad about it. Just do it and move on. The longer you drag it out, the worse it will get.

Yes. The training effort shouldn’t be spent on the new hire, it should be spent on improving the hiring process.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle a senior hire turning out to be junior?

#87

Post by teitoklien »

ethbr1 wrote: post #55
segmondy wrote: post #3

Fire them. You are obviously paying senior money for a junior. Unless of course you tried to rip them off by underpaying them. Then I suppose it balances out. Evaluate the hiring process, how did you mess up so bad? Fix it.

It's important to take responsibility. HR and the company fucked up. The employee negotiated well and over-sold their skills. I'd sit down with employee, and present options. Start with: You're not performing at the level, technically or with leadership, that we were expecting. Some of this is our fault, for not figuring that out in the interview. So this is going to be an uncomfortable conversation... Option A: We d…

> at which time we'll consider you for promotion.

This can backfire, is this same training resource made available to the other devs in the team ? , are they being passed away for this promotion by guaranteeing it to the new entrant.

The original poster specifically said its a small tight knit personal community of devs, if they could self promote inside, they would have provided training to existing dev itself.

After demoting this person, they’ll need to hire a new senior dev, what’s the guarantee they will need 2 senior devs anytime soon ?

Guaranteeing a future promotion if training goals are met would be a disingenuous commitment and dangerous for team building if other existing devs are not given equal opportunity to compete for that promotion.

It would be even more complex.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle a senior hire turning out to be junior?

#88

Post by grugagag »

idlewords wrote: post #18

It's only impostor syndrome if you're competent.

It aint easy to trully assess a candidate at the beginning. They may be overwhelmed with on onboarding and accomodating to the workplace. But they may as well be incompetent, that’s a possibility. Firing on the spot is a rash decision though. I’m a senior myself but at times (not always) when starting a new job the amount of stress I take to feel and adapt to the new team makes my imposter syndrome spike like there’s no tomorrow. Give me some time to accomodate and I perform as expected and am very much liked.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle a senior hire turning out to be junior?

#89

Post by JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B »

> addressing the elephant in the room that they're not at the level we assumed

Your blaming the wrong guy. The elephant in the room is that your interview process massively fucked up, and you failed to understand the most basic question of this process: junior or senior.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle a senior hire turning out to be junior?

#90

Post by washadjeffmad »

It's not an elephant in the room. They misrepresented their experience and qualifications, and now they're flirting with gross incompetence.

I'm assuming you don't have an HR department because why on earth would you be handling this and asking the internet if you did (LARPing aside), but if you want to go through the motions, notify them of their under-performance, ask them what resources they need to perform to the expectation of the role as applied for (which you also make clear and document), bring that to whomever for approval, and then set progress improvement checkpoints every week to see where they're at. This could be training, additional staff support, consulting, etc. Give the employee a week to decide and put together their proposal.

If they don't get the picture and start applying elsewhere while they're still employed, then evaluate them per the agreed timeline or, if the resources aren't approved and the project can't be delegated, go ahead and terminate their employment.

Otherwise, and this is more mature, better, kinder way to handle it, just let them know they weren't a good fit, don't apologize but do offer them a generous severance, and let them go. Or if you want, you can hire me for a day, and I'll do it.

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