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The sunny side of firing someone

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Re: The sunny side of firing someone

#31

Post by Simon_O_Rourke »

mkl95 wrote: post #22

Back when I was a junior developer I used to think tech companies -even the smallest ones- generally had some kind of reasonably accurate performance review process, where engineers who were underperforming for a while were eventually weeded out. In my experience ever since, that's simply not true. There are "teflon engineers" out there who can get virtually nothing done and make one mistake after another, and get aw…

Unfortunately I know of one engineer right now who is basically completely impervious to getting fired, simply because they keep waving around some self diagnosis of being especially sensitive, not on the spectrum mind, just easily offended by trivial issues. Even going to the trouble of writing a blog about their challenges at work for being called out for doing no work, and then playing the victim. I think management have done the math and figured continued employment costs less that legal fees if they were fired.

Re: The sunny side of firing someone

#32

Post by kjgkjhfkjf »

IMO the world really needs a gallery of images in which people are cheerfully going through dreadful life events, e.g. being fired, signing divorce papers, burying a beloved pet. People could look at these images when they are anxious, and it would make them feel better.

Re: The sunny side of firing someone

#33

Post by geoffbp »

mkl95 wrote: post #22

Back when I was a junior developer I used to think tech companies -even the smallest ones- generally had some kind of reasonably accurate performance review process, where engineers who were underperforming for a while were eventually weeded out. In my experience ever since, that's simply not true. There are "teflon engineers" out there who can get virtually nothing done and make one mistake after another, and get aw…

Ah the “protected species”

Re: The sunny side of firing someone

#34

Post by 13of40 »

avg_dev wrote: post #2

Having 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. -- > There are jobs that are bad fits, but not bad employees. > > Scenario 3: Summarily Dismisse…

I had a "Bob" a few years ago who was a unique case: He was a very intelligent, experienced senior developer who at some point lost his ability to actually ship. Given a relatively straightforward feature, he went into agonizing detail in his documentation, spent months implementing layer upon layer of abstractions, held himself to noble standards like never testing or debugging on a production server...and the end result after a year (plus) of effort was a repo full of such high-brow code that nobody could make sense of it. Once he was gone, we got a junior developer to rewrite his last feature in two weeks.

He was moved around between a few managers after he passed the zenith of his 15 year stint at that company, but from what I was able to piece together he didn't succeed in bringing a single feature to production in the last five years he was there. He was just so darned friendly and smart that nobody was willing to do the needful and separate him.

Re: The sunny side of firing someone

#36

Post by evanharwin »

A lot of the scenarios described here aren’t “firing” someone, as I understand it, but making someone redundant.

The difference being that being fired suggests the employee did something to deserve it, but being made redundant could happen to the best of employees.

Re: The sunny side of firing someone

#37

Post by mateo411 »

higeorge13 wrote: post #16

I think the article misses the case that the manager is just an unprofessional idiot and fires someone (or usually more than one) just because he doesn’t like them. I have seen in the past. They fired promising engineers out of the blue (no negative feedback until then) and for completely random and unprofessional reasons given, e.g. we think you don’t like us.

Even if the manager is unprofessional idiot, the manager can't fire somebody without working with other people at the company, such as their boss, HR, and probably the Finance department.

They can certainly drive the decision, but they need the buy in of others too.

Re: The sunny side of firing someone

#38

Post by gkop »

ComradePhil wrote: post #11

I wish for a day when if I have to fire someone, the organization that I am a part of has the combined advantage of insight, influence and capability to find alternatives for both the organization and the individual being fired. I hope my organization has the insight to know where the person I am letting go would be a better fit in... and has the influence to recommend them there inside the organization or another on…

In some cases the experience is simply too traumatic for the fired employee, there’s no amount of professionalism, empathy, care, support the firing organization can provide to suppress a toxic dynamic to any remaining “engagement” with the organization. In these scenarios you really need to pull the band aid off and hard-terminate them; it’s best for everyone. And take your good intentions and put them into a retrospective and action plan to fix the organization, eg. modifying your interviews, eg. nipping performance problems in the bud, eg. pursuing only sustainable growth.

It’s also not easy to predict how a fired employee will react, but gets easier with experience. But big companies don’t leave room for any continued engagement for this reason- after layoffs they provide support at significant arm’s length.

Re: The sunny side of firing someone

#39

Post by tbalsam »

ComradePhil wrote: post #11

I wish for a day when if I have to fire someone, the organization that I am a part of has the combined advantage of insight, influence and capability to find alternatives for both the organization and the individual being fired. I hope my organization has the insight to know where the person I am letting go would be a better fit in... and has the influence to recommend them there inside the organization or another on…

I definitely wished for this. Sometimes I think this is well worth the additional weeks/month or two of support financially and otherwise to both keep good morale and to be pretty decent to that human being.

Re: The sunny side of firing someone

#40

Post by jtwebman »

Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #31
mkl95 wrote: post #22

Back when I was a junior developer I used to think tech companies -even the smallest ones- generally had some kind of reasonably accurate performance review process, where engineers who were underperforming for a while were eventually weeded out. In my experience ever since, that's simply not true. There are "teflon engineers" out there who can get virtually nothing done and make one mistake after another, and get aw…

Unfortunately I know of one engineer right now who is basically completely impervious to getting fired, simply because they keep waving around some self diagnosis of being especially sensitive, not on the spectrum mind, just easily offended by trivial issues. Even going to the trouble of writing a blog about their challenges at work for being called out for doing no work, and then playing the victim. I think manageme…

More likely it is just that they have a bad manager not willing to go through the process of firing them. I know as a manager firing people sucks but you sometimes need to do it to keep the rest working the best together. Companies do make it really hard sometimes.
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