The sunny side of firing someone
madned.substack.com
The sunny side of firing someone
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Re: The sunny side of firing someone
#2Having been demoted and fired, but never having been in a management/doing-the-firing position, it is nice to see the other side of this. I thought this was a relatively fair treatment to the employee being fired and also shines a light on what the title is indicating: sometimes there is some benefit to the people around.
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> There are jobs that are bad fits, but not bad employees.
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> Scenario 3: Summarily Dismissed
> OK, that’s not entirely true.
Made me chuckle. So did
> We were not asking for him to be fired. Except we were.
It's funny how the perspective shifts to reality given some distance and time.
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I also thought he might be wrong about Bob; maybe Bob can and did or will learn good software development principles. Perhaps Mad Ned is being unnecessarily harsh. Or perhaps I'm overly optimistic. But I remember a time when I couldn't write code very well at all. Now, I can, at least when the stars align properly... and one of the nice things about code is the malleable nature of it: get it right once, and it is in source code management history forever.
Re: The sunny side of firing someone
#3This article actually describes both reduction-in-force (lay-offs) and firing. I've had the unfortunate experience to do both during my career and I can tell you that, for me, it's very painful to lay-off someone even if it's just because they're not the strongest performance in the group. On the other hand, firing someone who deserves it actually creates feelings that are closer to relief (not firing someone who deserves it is probably the worst thing I've ever observed for a team's morale.)
Re: The sunny side of firing someone
#4Great article. Firing someone is hard. Even for poor performance it can be really hard, like heart-pounding fight-or-flight anxiety-ridden hard.
It’s worst when the person who is doing badly at their job is a nice, well-liked person like “Bob” in this article.
But it helps when you realize everyone involved in that situation (a person is dragging the team down) is miserable, and the misery only ends when that person leaves. It also helps when you realize there’s a really good chance the person who needs to leave is the most miserable of all - they know they’re operating in a low-trust environment and it sucks.
I think there’s a lot to be said for “person-job fit.” Sometimes people really excel in one job and really struggle in another, but even folks who are really struggling are likely change averse and reluctant to do the work to go find a new job. In that case, severance can actually be a blessing.
That was me once. The severance I got helped me immensely by freeing me up to hunt for a better job full-time. Once I was out from under the soul-crushing drag of the bad-fit job, I realized I didn’t even want to be in that line of work, and changed careers. I’ve been much, much happier since.
Re: The sunny side of firing someone
#5I certainly was let go under a type 3 scenario recently. I can empathize with poor Bob (and the firing manager!). It was a bit abrupt in that my second serious set of conversations was the one where I was notified I was being let go. I discussed that with the head of engineering and I think he felt terrible about that since we'd talked about a "multiple conversations" route on the way out. It was also hard and emotional for a number of us. Both the head of engineering and the head of HR came near to tears twice throughout. My (former) head of engineering was basically grumpy cat personified as a human, but a big softie inside. So the display of emotion was exceedingly rare. Also, one of my closest coworkers was completely shocked, and a number of other people I knew at the company seemed pretty surprised too.
Ultimately I think there were a variety of factors always. Our company did less and less cutting edge neural network research, and more software development. It slowly turned from informal and small to scaled and rigorous software development. I couldn't keep up, career-wise, and I can definitely say everyone of us involved gave it our best shot to make it work. Despite everything else, it was hard to leave. The employees are good employees, and I like them a lot. I'll miss that group of people.
Something I found interesting too was that there's an interesting budget trade-off between struggling in a job position and struggling emotionally when moving towards a fire/layoff threshold. I went through a rather terrible time a year or two ago when a lot of cumulative trauma came to head and opened up in my personal life. We had a pretty generous vacation policy -- 45 days a year (yes), and all of that for ~1.5 years was used to supplement my hours, though I technically swapped in FMLA for some of it. Not having vacations definitely added to things. But there was an interesting tight race that happened that as I recovered, there was some pile of damage that had built that I wasn't able to really resolve yet, but was able to just stay productive enough to keep it from triggering a letgo condition.
Then of course the present. Feeling a lot better about my interactions with self and other, but enough of a period of struggle that only actions really can show that turning around. Buoyed by some confidence, I took a few risks and fell on my face, and tipped off a signal I'd thought I was pretty far from. It was a hard process for all of us.
Of course there's the feelings of shame, etc. But I think getting to have an empathetic conversation and knowing it was a "lack of work" rather than behavioral primarily (or much at all) really salved it. Now I'm tangled in a huge mess with a very overarching IP clause that's tangling the job search, but after a long break for the burnout just to keep the job, I think maybe it's time to go part time and just travel the country or something. Make friends, focus on a garden plot, and catch up on all the life I missed. With how strict our hours were plus other obligations, I was spending 10-12+ hours on work and work-related stuff each day. Humans weren't designed for that.
Anyways, hope that was an interesting account. I think I can see the struggles, and like most things I think it was out of most of our hands despite best efforts. I still thrive in nn research, so it will be nice to really get back to that more.
Re: The sunny side of firing someone
#6I've been in the unfortunate position of having had to fire about 5 people over my career. I take it as a very solemn responsibility that requires full attention and compassion for the person being fired. I make it a real conversation, where I try to make them fully understand the position of their teammates.
What is interesting is that most of the time (4 of the 5 times) the person understands fully, gets their shit in order, and goes out and gets another more appropriate job. These firings are good for the team, and so far as I can tell, good for the individual.
One time, however, the individual didn't see it this way, and went to great lengths to keep their cushy sinecure, including but not limited to reporting random things about teammates to HR. This burned a lot of bridges, and I'm really surprised this person did this. It showed a huge lack of awareness of social convention and a startling degree of unprofessionalism.
Re: The sunny side of firing someone
#7> I remember in December of 2000 during the dot-com bubble/recession, our company had several huge 20%+ layoffs… A big downside for them was, they were all suddenly looking for jobs in a very bad economy.
This was me. The small firm I worked for went belly up during the dot com burst when all our contracts dried up. But, I ended up getting an amazing job at a Fortune 500 company where I still am this day. I have had an amazing career and it is largely thanks to losing my job back then.
Re: The sunny side of firing someone
#8The best part is you don't ever have to see their face or listen to their voice again.
By the time you have to fire somebody, that's usually a huge relief.
Re: The sunny side of firing someone
#9> Bob did well on our interviews and was hired as a software developer in charge of infrastructure components. But it soon became apparent that his development habits were very heavily biased towards the hacking end of the spectrum.
I'm primarily a self-taught developer. Can anyone recommend some resources (e.g., books about professional software engineering practices) so that I don't end up like Bob?
Re: The sunny side of firing someone
#10This is a fairly terrible article. As anyone who's run a business knows, sometimes you have to let someone go not because you're in economic trouble, or because they're an axe murderer, but just because they're not the right leader for their position. It's not so much "summarily fired for poor performance" as "wrong person for the moment".