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The sunny side of firing someone

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Re: The sunny side of firing someone

#81

Post by stretchwithme »

exdsq wrote: post #80
axiolite wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are "teflon engineers" out there who can get virtually nothing done and make one mistake after another, and get away with it for years. That would be Wally from the Dilbert comic strips... I have seen that when the employee in question has much lower salary requirements than others, appearing to provide a sort of false economy to management, even as their actual value is entirely negative. I accidentally solv…

A company secretly screen recording me makes me shiver

"evidence a very poorly performing employee was reading articles on the web most of the day"

Sounds like probable cause for a warrant. Not that employers needs a warrant to use their own property, but to assure employees that they aren't being watched unless there's legitimate suspicion.

Re: The sunny side of firing someone

#82

Post by YZF »

stretchwithme wrote: post #81
exdsq wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company secretly screen recording me makes me shiver

"evidence a very poorly performing employee was reading articles on the web most of the day" Sounds like probable cause for a warrant. Not that employers needs a warrant to use their own property, but to assure employees that they aren't being watched unless there's legitimate suspicion.

A warrant??? I'm not aware of any country where you can/need to get a warrant to "spy" on your employees. In some countries that would be illegal. If said employee manages to do what others do while mostly surfing the web that's great. If they aren't delivering then by all means fire them (ideally with some sort of process to actually let them fix it). I don't see what the spying buys other than the mistrust of employees, the news getting out, and people not wanting to work for you.

Re: The sunny side of firing someone

#83

Post by scoopertrooper »

worker767424 wrote: post #61
andy_ppp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smart, gets things done on time, pleasant to work with. Pick any two and you’ll do fine. Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech. I think if two are lacking for a while you get fired…

> Smart...pleasant to work with Does anyone have tips for having high code standards, but still pleasant to work with? I got feedback that I have high standards, but I also go to the effort of explaining why I think an approach is better in code reviews and don't talk down to people in code reviews (and got feedback saying this), but I'm not sure it's enough.

Try and organise a workshop to set some common coding standards. Having a commonly understood standard for good is an excellent way to start the process.

Re: The sunny side of firing someone

#84

Post by humanrebar »

lumost wrote: post #68
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…

Companies rarely fire tenured staff except for layoffs. Often this is due to issues such as - Tenured staff have a track record, if they are suddenly under-performing it seems more likely that their manager is to blame. Rather than a lack of ability. - Tenured staff have institutional knowledge which can be hard to estimate and replace, the fact that a bad engineer still knows why something was done a certain way and…

Lots of good points here, but maintenance work for profitable systems seems like a valid use of time.

Now, some profitable systems are slowly bitrotting and tenured engineers can keep busy doing routine work while failing to address or escalate the bitrot. But I think people who are good at making sure boring and stable things stay boring and stable are usually underappreciated.

Re: The sunny side of firing someone

#85

Post by YZF »

worker767424 wrote: post #61
andy_ppp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smart, gets things done on time, pleasant to work with. Pick any two and you’ll do fine. Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech. I think if two are lacking for a while you get fired…

> Smart...pleasant to work with Does anyone have tips for having high code standards, but still pleasant to work with? I got feedback that I have high standards, but I also go to the effort of explaining why I think an approach is better in code reviews and don't talk down to people in code reviews (and got feedback saying this), but I'm not sure it's enough.

It might help to have some rationale or at least anecdotes.

The people nobody(tm) likes are the ones that insist on things without knowing why and/or without any relevant experience. They read it in a blog, or someone told them that's better, Google does it, cargo cult etc.

Start by assuming your coworkers have their reasons why they do something, not because their standards are lower. Maybe it's not worthwhile to spend time on making something a little more perfect when there's other more valuable things to invest your time in.

On the other hand, it is possible that your peers truly have lower standards, less experience, and don't understand what they're doing. Unfortunately there's no easy solution to that. It's possible that by being the annoying guy that always nitpicks you will be able to drive some improvement, but it'll take its toll on you. As others said, lead by example works somewhat. The problem though is that sometimes the "why" in software engineering only happens after many years.

I'll also second the idea of doing your code review with those people as a discussion vs. an offline process where you leave comments that can be interpreted in different ways.

Re: The sunny side of firing someone

#86

Post by philjohn »

celim307 wrote: post #66
worker767424 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Smart...pleasant to work with Does anyone have tips for having high code standards, but still pleasant to work with? I got feedback that I have high standards, but I also go to the effort of explaining why I think an approach is better in code reviews and don't talk down to people in code reviews (and got feedback saying this), but I'm not sure it's enough.

Comment on the code review but follow up privately and offer to pair. It’s extra work but it shows the contributor that you’re not just out to poke holes and make extra work, it shows you actually care about their development and progression as an engineer

This - hammering someone's code review with tens of comments can put people on the back foot. Part of any good senior and higher engineers responsibilities is to lift the people around them up.

Re: The sunny side of firing someone

#87

Post by YZF »

scoopertrooper wrote: post #83
worker767424 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Smart...pleasant to work with Does anyone have tips for having high code standards, but still pleasant to work with? I got feedback that I have high standards, but I also go to the effort of explaining why I think an approach is better in code reviews and don't talk down to people in code reviews (and got feedback saying this), but I'm not sure it's enough.

Try and organise a workshop to set some common coding standards. Having a commonly understood standard for good is an excellent way to start the process.

Not clear if the meaning here is coding standards as in how you name things, spaces vs. tabs, comments etc. or something else about the code. Coding standards (the style aspects) should just be solved by tooling, you don't let anyone merge code that's not to standard by having a tool verify that.

Re: The sunny side of firing someone

#88

Post by YZF »

Swizec wrote: post #51
andy_ppp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smart, gets things done on time, pleasant to work with. Pick any two and you’ll do fine. Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech. I think if two are lacking for a while you get fired…

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

I agree a lot of this depends on the environment. Are you asking people to work on things they enjoy working on? What's the team like? What's the culture like?

"Smart" is maybe something that can be measured in a vacuum (though in practice it means more than just IQ) but most of the other parameters are very much influenced by the company, team, managers. I totally agree that people can become unpleasant if they're in a bad environment or pushed in certain ways. I've worked with some people that I thought were total jerks and we eventually became great friends, often the friction at work is about something stupid/situational + the general social awkwardness of many software people.

Re: The sunny side of firing someone

#89

Post by loonster »

jtwebman wrote: post #40
Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a non manager, keeping parasites around is bad for moral.

Re: The sunny side of firing someone

#90

Post by Jensson »

loonster wrote: post #89
jtwebman wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a non manager, keeping parasites around is bad for moral.

Firing them is also bad for morale, for different reasons. Only solution is to not hire parasites in the first place.
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