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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?

#121

Post by btasker »

nkmnz wrote: post #95
itqwertz wrote: post #23

Get that interview process fixed ASAP and let this lemon go. Don’t be surprised if there is pushback from non-technicals if this hire checked a bunch of boxes for other departments. A good strategy would be to have them be a lead on a minor project that requires technical chops and communication. Ensure there is a daily standup and grind them on details and timelines. Get them some juniors as direct reports to expose…

This proto-sociopathic behavior is the direct result of European employment law. It's disgusting.

No, it's the result of that poster's mindset - there's absolutely no need to do any of that. In fact, that type of behavior is against the law in a lot of countries and will leave the employer likely liable.

If someone's under-performing whilst in their probation period getting rid of them is incredibly easy. Outside of the probation period there's a bit more of a process, but it's still not particularly hard - all you actually need to be doing is documenting.

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

#123

Post by teitoklien »

oaiey wrote: post #111
nkmnz wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This proto-sociopathic behavior is the direct result of European employment law. It's disgusting.

It is not. You would fire the person in the trial period or after a year. What is expensive in most European jurisdiction to fire a permanent contract after the initial trial period/first year contract without wrongdoing. But that is typically after a year or more. The reason here is that they are trying to be a employer which focus on personell development. Which is contradictive to capitalism and obviously they hav…

> which is contradictive to capitalism

Capitalism doesnt have any 1 original author like Karl Marx, not everything can be made to fit in “capitalism” and villified.

The latest devices you’re writing code and comments on here with are devices powered by latest silicon fabrication tech made by teams of engineers on whose careers, companies greatly invested long term to get to this.

There are tons of capitalistic employers there who invest in their employees careers retain them and take their help to grow the company, even give them esops and stock options.

High skilled labour isnt a cogwheel readily available on the market churning out of colleges, they are trained, retained and further developed throughout their careers to bring value to business and build new products.

Capitalism isnt this great evil thing that wants to suck you dry and destroy you. It has perfectly healthy versions that give people a chance at Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

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

#124

Post by thinkingkong »

First off which country youre in determines what you can do and how much it will cost you. If you don’t already have HR staff who are well versed in local laws and regulations then you should engage some outside help.

Secondly, while your process might be biased or “broken” this is a situation where someone got through when they shouldnt have. Some people are slow to ramp up but others just wont ever do it. Ive hired former Google engineers who ended up being in this exact same situation. It cracked my brain to have to do it, but letting them go was better for everyone.

1. The team already knows theyre underperforming. If they know the titles and that salaries are banded to titles then they’ll easily infer they’re getting less than this person.

2. Values around personal development, motivation are noble but you can improve from all sorts of starting conditions. I believe in a growth minded environment but also that its not everyones job to invest in people. Some people just dont have it.

3. You can rescue it by thoughtfully letting them go. By adjusting your hiring process to avoid false positives (at the expense of some false negatives) and by talking to the team if it’s required.

It sucks. Its never easy but its the kindest thing to do for you, for them, and for the team.

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

#125

Post by 1123581321 »

bialpio wrote: post #84
throwaway173738 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Be sure that half a year is thought through. I’ve seen places that pay too little attention to new employees in the first few months and then surprise them with complaints about performance. Those first few months should be drilling specific institutional knowledge (through bugs, presenting on parts of the stack, talking to a variety of people, shadowing, studying certain tech/tools most people don’t know.)

You should be looking for the employee to be making good general efforts, just without taking everything into account yet. And the employee should see evidence that you are serious about helping them master specifics of their new environment.

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

#128

Post by JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B »

jenscow wrote: post #64

This is why we need to have coding tasks during the recruitment process. It helps both sides.

For seniors it’s not that easy. The best interview process I had to do was in a restaurant where the recruiter and I were both ranting about how shitty C++ was.

I got hired on the spot because the conversation we had proved that I was not bullshitting anyone.

It may be more difficult for a junior, but that’s not the topic of the post.

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

#130

Post by seabird »

rvnx wrote: post #79
seabird wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a joke, right?

It is very true, ChatGPT makes it very easy to learn all the “domain-specific” knowledge, and makes the learning-curve less steep. Linux Kernel development is a fairly organized C software, it is no different than working on Chromium or Unity, or like any other large codebase. It used to be easy to get lost. However now, for only $20 you have an expert coder, sitting by your side (and this is what ChatGPT does), then…

I get the sneaking suspicion that you don't actually do this shit. ChatGPT isn't an expert coder sitting by your side. It's not even remotely close. Go ahead and get ChatGPT to walk you through how to implement even a non-novel CFD analysis that won't get you laughed out of the room. Get it to help you port an Ada Ravenscar runtime to an exotic (or even a not-so-exotic) processor. Try and have it generate non-trivial ladder logic programs for industrial controls. Try to get any help from it at all when doing microcontroller programming that isn't just "read the manual".

My question for you is -- what exactly do you do? What programming could you possibly be doing that is so trivial that you actually believe that ChatGPT is capable of solving these things?

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