11–19 of 19 posts
As an experienced software engineer, I did not find this to be particularly insightful. Some decent suggestions mingled into a whole bunch of bad ones. I also could not find info about who wrote this.
I for one found the bad suggestions to outnumber the good ones by a large margin, to be honest.
I'm very much in agreement with the idea that you shouldn't hire just because you are overworked. However, I would rephrase it in the positive: Hire when you are in a position to incorporate more people. Avoid hiring when you are not, even if you are over worked. Hiring someone because you are doggedly trying to hit a deadline and you think that bringing on more people will help you is one of the classic ways of torpedoing your team. Integrating new people takes time, attention and resources. You will have less capability for a surprisingly long time immediately after you hire someone. Make sure that you hire when you have the capability of dealing with that. If you don't have the capability, then focus your activities until you do.
With respect to time synchronisations, logic would have me agreeing, but experience compels me to disagree. I've never had "ship when it's ready" work. That sounds horrible, but it's true. The main problem is that "ready" usually has a very loose definition and without anything to constrain it, it often expands over time. I'm sure there are ways to get it to work (by imposing other constraints), but I have not personally experienced that. Instead, I have had great success with using time to constrain what we deliver. The trick to this is to have very good tracking and to be flexible in reducing scope as you arrive at your arbitrary release date. By having very short releases, you can kind of approximate the "release when ready" approach (to an extreme, you can have "internal only" releases and then have an "external release" when you think it is "good enough" -- but you have to be very careful of the "creeping good enough" even still).
The other stuff is hard for me to comment on because I have yet to form firm opinions (after 30 or so years on the job!) I've definitely changed my mind a lot and I suspect most other people will too, given enough time in the industry. Possibly it's hard to make a general statement because it is to sensitive to the context.
“Hire only for good reasons.” Well, yeah, that’s good if painfully obvious advice. “Fire people whenever you can.” Don’t do this. “There’s often someone to fire, but not many opportunities to do so.” I thought you were hiring for good reasons, why the bloat? “it is good to at least apply a low-frequency filter when passing along the “news”, so that good and productive people can carry on without too much hassle.” Onl…
Firing is not because of bloat, but because that person needs replacing - it takes time to detect bad hires; and also people change, even if they were a good hire a few years ago, now they may not any longer be good at that position in that company. Looking back with hindsight at the firings I've participated over the years, in all cases it would've been better if they would have been done much sooner; and most of th…
> #9 Hire only for good reasons. Being overworked is not a good reason to hire. Instead, hire to be ready to catch opportunities, not to survive the current battles. Being overworked is an excellent reason to hire. It shows that you are about to lose your team due to burn-out or extended sick leave. Good managers know that the work load has to be such that there is some built in 'down time' in the schedule and no amo…
I took the original comment to imply that when employees are overworked, it is due to a failure in planning to assure a project is adaquately staffed from the beginning. That is when you should hire, not because you just began to notice you failed to plan appropriately.
Sure, if someone is being overworked, hire to spread the load (if new person can ramp-up fast enough). But don’t put your employees in that position to begin with, because some of them won’t return to full productivity, even after you resolve the problem. Overwork for any duration comes at a cost.
This being on the front page makes me question the standards that the HN community has for managerial advice... Anyway, bad hiring/firing advice is a lot like a bad hire/fire... Really bad. And this is almost entirely bad hiring/firing advice. This is with the caveat that there are a lot of other good learnings in the original post.
What more would you expect.
“Hire only for good reasons.” Well, yeah, that’s good if painfully obvious advice. “Fire people whenever you can.” Don’t do this. “There’s often someone to fire, but not many opportunities to do so.” I thought you were hiring for good reasons, why the bloat? “it is good to at least apply a low-frequency filter when passing along the “news”, so that good and productive people can carry on without too much hassle.” Onl…
Firing is not because of bloat, but because that person needs replacing - it takes time to detect bad hires; and also people change, even if they were a good hire a few years ago, now they may not any longer be good at that position in that company. Looking back with hindsight at the firings I've participated over the years, in all cases it would've been better if they would have been done much sooner; and most of th…
When a manager takes a very skilled person and demotivates them, that is what that looks like. It happens allllll the time. Fire the manager -- or you'll just be turning skilled workers into ex-workers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firing is not because of bloat, but because that person needs replacing - it takes time to detect bad hires; and also people change, even if they were a good hire a few years ago, now they may not any longer be good at that position in that company. Looking back with hindsight at the firings I've participated over the years, in all cases it would've been better if they would have been done much sooner; and most of th…
> people change, even if they were a good hire a few years ago, now they may not any longer be good at that position in that company. When a manager takes a very skilled person and demotivates them, that is what that looks like. It happens allllll the time. Fire the manager -- or you'll just be turning skilled workers into ex-workers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firing is not because of bloat, but because that person needs replacing - it takes time to detect bad hires; and also people change, even if they were a good hire a few years ago, now they may not any longer be good at that position in that company. Looking back with hindsight at the firings I've participated over the years, in all cases it would've been better if they would have been done much sooner; and most of th…
> people change, even if they were a good hire a few years ago, now they may not any longer be good at that position in that company. When a manager takes a very skilled person and demotivates them, that is what that looks like. It happens allllll the time. Fire the manager -- or you'll just be turning skilled workers into ex-workers.