321–330 of 410 posts
It's posts like these that remind me why I quit being an employee and started my own business. As an employee, you could be working on a project for 10 years and have it taken away in an instant.
Well customers can leave too. I'd say it's a completely different kind of freedom but you are still at the mercy of forces besides yourself.
If nothing else, I'm thankful to Zach for a lot of the guidance he's provided on his blog over the years. When we did a "field trip" to Github thanks to Scott, I shared Zach's quote with the engineers here: "We’re currently at 35 employees and growing, and this approach still works great. But managers love to assign hours for a reason: it gives them the illusion that hours can measure performance. If you don’t go har…
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> Finally -- For what it's worth, people are fired all the time ( as I have been ) for all kinds of reasons, and so it's not a reason not to hire someone. Professional hiring managers know this. What terrifies me about being fired is: * I have a family to support, and even though we're well off enough to have a 6-12 month cushion, I've seen job markets where it takes longer than that you get hired * The number of unp…
That is the one thing I really don't like about the whole fire fast mentality that is starting to pop up, particularly the extreme examples of "fire for any reason as soon as the person isn't a perfect fit, regardless of overall quality". I'm fine with that, but make sure that I know it's likely coming well in advance. Make sure I understand that I'm not pulling my weight. Make sure I understand that the company is m…
I am going to hug my country's employment law. "Fire fast" sounds inherently abusive towards employees.
There are people who were at OpenDNS in the early days who were incredible, and as we grew, became less and less incredible, largely because the things that made them incredible actually started to be really frustrating as the company grew and they didn't want to change those things. So they had to leave. Usually it was a series of conversations about how the person, their peers, and the company were all unhappy, and…
In his classic book Accidental Empires ( http://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Empires-Silicon-Millions-Co... ), Robert X. Cringely wrote that if you think of a market as an invasion beach you can think of three kinds of employees at tech companies: commandos, infantry, and police. Commandos are people who love challenges and hate structure. They'll happily take on missions that other people think are crazy or impossible,…
In other words, if you swap out "company" for "product", then you can use this as a lifecycle without ever actually losing the employee.
Why getting fired is seen as so bad?
What's the difference in your view (in terms of perception) between being fired and being laid off?
How can a company know that someone has been fired from the previous company?
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Well customers can leave too. I'd say it's a completely different kind of freedom but you are still at the mercy of forces besides yourself.
Yes, but what are the chances that all of my customers will leave at one time?
There is lots of interesting information in this thread, with several references to a "Fire fast" culture becoming more common amongst tech companies. As a UK citizen, I have to ask: Are the employment laws a lot weaker in the US? In general it would be difficult to institute such a policy over here without a half decent lawyer shredding you to pieces. [1],[2] for ref. [1]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sponsored/busine…
> Are the employment laws a lot weaker in the US? Don't know about the details of the UK specifically, but, yes, employment protection laws in the US are all-but-non-existent, with at-will employment allowing immediate termination for any but specifically-prohibited (e.g., race, sex, religious, etc., discrimination, retaliation for invoking certain other protections, etc.) reasons.
This is a good read: http://www.lzwlaw.co.uk/downloads/LZW%20FACT%20SHEET%20SJ.pd...
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I'm not sure how to interpret "I have a lawyer just in case" as part of your answer to that question, but it's nonetheless there and I suppose I should acknowledge it. Thanks for your answer, at any rate, though I'm left with more questions than I had when we started.
I had another paragraph explaining the mentor/lawyer comment that I deleted. Oops. :-) What I meant is that I have a really good lawyer who has seen a ton of situations before, and usually when something is new and unique to me, it's not new to him or his partners, and I can lean on their decades of experience to help me navigate what represents a new situation for me. It's not about CYA, or "lawyering up" (quite the…
I have often said that companies rarely take it personally when you decide to leave them, so don't take it personally when they decide to leave you. Easy to say and hard to do, like a lot of things in life. Mostly it is the illusion of control, you don't have it, you only have choices you can make in the face of unfolding events. At Zach points out, companies change as they grow, they are some weird strange attractor…
I had a similar experience working with a company not quite as famous as Sun. The most important thing an engineer can do is recognize that "manager" and "person who influences/guides your career" are not the same thing at all. The best managers are usually good mentors, but conversely bad mentors are not necessarily bad managers.
Obviously other people can influence your (bigger, life-long) career, but as far as one company goes, this is the truth.
This concept is explored wonderfully in "Corporate Confidential: 50 Secrets Your Company Doesn't Want You to Know".
http://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Confidential-Secrets-Company...
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You're right, it is a very American way of doing business. But you haven't put forward any argument against it, other than basically saying that it makes you feel icky. We have a very individualistic culture in America. It has its positives and negatives. But most of the people here (software developers in America) have greatly benefited from that culture - we have a tremendous amount of opportunity in a field we enj…
> We are the center of the startup world and our big tech companies disproportionately dominate world markets. You're making a logical leap that this is because of firing people. Other small factors might include, for example, billions of dollars of U.S. government funding in high tech research, sustained over many decades, the fruits of which are directly transferred to Silicon Valley companies to bring to market. I…
Some govt research is directly given to a particular valley company and no one else, but quite a lot of it is published and free for anyone in the world to use.
As for the tenure system, firing is hard and as a result getting hired is also extremely hard.