The sunny side of firing someone

You can be all 3. Lots of smart people out there doing great work who are pleasant to work with.

But you gotta treat them right. Everyone becomes unpleasant in a bad environment

This is really vile. You realize the what you're doing to someone when you fire them?

Personally I think people with your style of personality aren't suited to be managers.

To the other replier: it's definitely not sarcasm.

Literally the first day I got made head of engineering for the first time (so, running a group of dev teams, instead of just one) I was tasked with firing 20 engineers I had worked with for about 2 years.

I helped about 60% of them find new jobs, and one entire team I managed to actually get hired together as a team (and they all got a pay raise), but baptism of fire or what. I got through a lot of whisky that week.

Firing people sucks. It was actually the right move for the business in this case and we are lucky enough that the market for tech in general is fairly good in any given large city, but argh. That was a shite week.

> 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.

One thing I've learned is you can't project your own morals/ideals/whatever onto anyone, even if you think you really 'know' them having worked with them for some time. You never really know what's going on, and shouldn't make assumptions. It's difficult, but after a while, you learn to just follow the process and try to placate the rest of the team.

'Yep, I know is doing that, yes, I knew it before you. Yep, I'm working on it. No, can't talk about it. How about we figure out together what crap we can give to do that won't block anyone else while that process goes?' etc.

I have been a manager and I've realized that a huge portion of it is a communication problem. Not all of it but a big portion of it and not many managers realize this.

When I was a new manager I noticed an employee that would just get everything wrong and do things with a low amount of quality.

Turns out the problem was with me. As a new manager I failed to communicate and define objectives clearly. I simply assumed such things were obvious. The employee assumed different things and as a result his work output and what I expected were mismatched.

After some time reviewing my own behavior I began spending a huge amount of time defining and planning out the scope of the project at hand. I take the time to make sure that objectives and what's needed are completely clear. When I did this the employee in question delivered beyond expectations.

Turns out this guy was a literal technical genius and that his performance problems were largely communication problems on my part. The guy can literally solve technical issues no other engineer can solve and could finish his tasks twice as fast.

Other high performing employees I realized weren't necessarily technically advanced. They were just better at predicting and meeting my expectations and that was the key. They were managing me, and I wasn't doing any management.

If I hadn't reviewed my own behavior I would've went down the wrong road of firing a technically superior engineer while only keeping the people that could "manage up" better.

I will say that there are tons and tons of managers who don't realize this and even adopt a philosophy around managing as little as possible. What these managers don't know is more than likely they are letting go of engineers who are not only technically competent but technically superior by subconsciously pre-selecting for people who are better at predicting what you want rather then people who are technical wizards. You can recognize these types of managers as they have a bias for certain types of engineers who take "ownership" of something or essentially manage a product so you don't have to. These people are good people to hire but at the same time this philosophy is not scalable.

There are places for both types of people in a company and a company does worse if it only has one type.

I hope the experience does not have to be toxic or negative. Maybe the company is transparent enough to reveal it's vision enough to the employees and it is not a random and unexpected decision... maybe those who are not needed anymore are in the position to know more or less when and why so they don't have to feel that it has to do with them personally.

>take your good intentions and put them into a retrospective and action plan to fix the organization

May be this will be the path to get there. I doubt it will happen by a political plan designed by career politicians out of popular fantacies they like to sell to the masses... which then they plan to impose on everyone. That approach will most likely backfire in unexpected ways. I believe it will have to happen organically and will most likely will come about in the most successful organizations who can afford to build it... at least in the beginning... before it becomes available to everyone.

Also, it is important to make organizations responsible for this and not end up with individuals funding this through increased taxes for the working class. Next time your favourite billionaire talks about UBI or something similar, ask them if they are willing to offer unemployment benefits or something like an UBI to people they hired and let go from the corporation itself... or if they are willing to pool in extra taxes for this purpose so that multiple organizations can offer this to their former employees. They have incentives to make it the "government's problem" i.e. just use the income taxes from the working class to make this happen... and they absolve them of any responsibility and commitment to make this work.