[HN Gopher] The sunny side of firing someone
___________________________________________________________________
The sunny side of firing someone
Author : mad_ned
Score : 86 points
Date : 2022-03-12 14:25 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (madned.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (madned.substack.com)
| smoyer wrote:
| This 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.)
| higeorge13 wrote:
| 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.
| mateo411 wrote:
| 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.
| higeorge13 wrote:
| I was referring to small companies and startups where there
| aren't such things and founding engineers are like gods
| within the company and can have such 'professional' attitude.
|
| I have seen it happening.
| geoffbp wrote:
| During a period where people at our company were being let go,
| one of the managers fainted at work (we assume after having to do
| it). I imagine it's quiet a difficult thing to do.
| evanharwin wrote:
| 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.
| exhilaration wrote:
| We don't really use that term (making someone redundant) in the
| U.S. I've heard it on British shows so I assume that's where
| you are. It means laying someone off, right? Meaning a
| workforce reduction?
| evanharwin wrote:
| Yeah, exactly - with this context the article makes a bit
| more sense to me! :)
| burlesona wrote:
| Great 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.
| itronitron wrote:
| >> operating in a low-trust environment
|
| As someone that has performed exceptionally well in high-trust
| environments, and essentially not performed in a no-trust
| environment I can confirm that the latter is both miserable
| _and_ terrifying.
| onion2k wrote:
| Finding someone everyone likes is harder than finding someone
| who's good at their job, so the reasonable thing to do is to
| encourage the nice-but-useless person to do better rather than
| fire them and have the entire team demoralized by that event,
| and by the recruitment process, and the additional stress while
| there's an unfilled role.
|
| In my experience improving someone's work is often really easy
| too - you just need to find something they like doing. Most
| people I've worked with who are "bad" are actually just bored.
| burlesona wrote:
| That may be the case sometimes but it's not universal. Some
| people are not that motivated and don't really want to work
| hard at their job, for any number of reasons.
|
| One of the worst hires I made was a person who was an
| accomplished engineer in another tech stack and aced the
| technical interview, but when he showed up to work had nearly
| no interest in learning our stack or working more than a few
| hours a day. I spent 6 months trying to help him learn, but
| even after all that he was being outperformed by new grads,
| because they were trying and he wasn't.
|
| The person was friendly and well-liked. But nobody wanted to
| collaborate with him because they knew it would just make
| their work harder than doing things solo.
|
| When we let him go, it was a big productivity boost for the
| team, even though everyone was sad it didn't work out. The
| morale impact in the short-term was neutral, but within a few
| weeks as everyone saw there was literally no drop-off from
| his absence, everyone realized it was necessary and morale
| went up notably.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| I was in "position 3" about a year-and-a-half ago. I got over the
| shame / self-worth issues, but honestly there were a couple of
| betrayal-of-friendship issues from people I considered pretty
| close friends where it came out that what they were saying to
| management and each other wasn't what they were saying to me. I
| even asked on a couple occasions to sit down and tell me what I
| could do better... Got a huge pay increase and a happier job now,
| so it's not a sob story, but the friendship thing still stings.
| gkop wrote:
| The bittersweet aspect of this scenario in my experience, is
| that time heals _some_ wounds only. With time, the friendship
| may survive. But it'll never be the same of course. Neither
| party will want to revisit the topic of the exit from the
| organization, because it makes them both uncomfortable. On the
| sad side, there's no chance of closure. But on the bright side,
| your friendship overcame some serious challenges, which speaks
| to your character and helps restore confidence. (I'm not
| assuming your friendships will survive in some form in your
| case, but am hopeful for you)
| dccoolgai wrote:
| The guys never reached out after the fact, so I haven't
| spoken to them, which is part of why it makes me sad to think
| about. I don't lack for friends and other positive things,
| it's just sad because I really liked these guys.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I was fired "without cause" a little over a year ago. I know it
| wasn't workforce reduction because the company was hiring for my
| team at the same time. There's a chance I even was part of an
| interview for my replacement.
|
| Weird to me that I was trusted with interviewing around the same
| time, but cut loose. No warnings about performance or anything
| else of the sort. And since it was "without cause", no reasoning
| was given.
|
| I suspect I was just unpopular with my managers, and I was maybe
| too vocal about my issues with the codebase.
|
| Anyways, I got a new job and got promoted to team lead 5 months
| after starting there. My managers and even the VP of my
| department have given me great reviews.
|
| Sometimes it really just is your environment.
| avg_dev wrote:
| 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 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.
|
| --
|
| 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.
| 13of40 wrote:
| 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.
| pedalpete wrote:
| I had to look at the author's name to find out if I was Bob!
| Though the latter paragraphs about ignoring the other engineers
| requirements about reviews, etc don't fit.
|
| After a few gigs that didn't go great, I ended up at a research
| org, where my less than perfect code that would do things in a
| non-scalable way was actually appreciated and a benefit. This org
| had amazing engineering capabilities, and amazing research. I was
| an oddball that straddled the line between the two.
|
| My engineering improved slowly, and I eventually ended up in
| management, and now run two start-ups. I don't get to code much
| at all any more, but the experience has given me a new direction
| in life.
|
| It's great when a manager can recognize that even though you're
| not the right fit for that company, it's possible your weakness
| there could be a benefit to someone else.
|
| I can't remember who I was listening to on a podcast, but they
| said that rather than firing people, they would regularly
| recommend they go work for a competitor. :)
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > "This is an extremely bad thing for the people who have to
| leave, who in most cases do not even get much warning that it
| will happen."
|
| If this is the culture then the person being cut loose is the
| winner. Not much warning is bad management / leadership.
| deltaoneseven wrote:
| This is done because when employees are let go they could
| become potentially hostile to the company. That's why they
| don't inform people beforehand of the firing.
|
| What should absolutely be done is inform him of the exact
| performance problem and steps to improve. An actual well
| intended PIP and not just a way to throw someone out.
| higeorge13 wrote:
| I guess he means that they didn't have any negative feedback
| until then.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Thank you.
| tbalsam wrote:
| I 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.
| lkrubner wrote:
| On the one hand, I've previously suggested that managers should
| be quicker to fire underperforming workers, but on the other
| hand, it's absolutely true that some disappointments from workers
| are because of my own lapses in communication. When I wrote about
| one-on-one meetings, some people suggested to me that one-on-one
| meetings allow a manager to tell one worker one story but tell
| another worker a completely different set of facts, and the end
| result is that workers ended up feeling like they've been lied
| to. So when I recently wrote about this, I included this story,
| which I think shows both sides of the issue.
|
| There are times when workers feel they've been lied to when they
| have simply misread or misheard some communication from their
| manager. This is an actual communication that I recently had with
| a freelancer I was working with, putting together some
| preliminary numbers for a marketing campaign:
|
| Me: About Task 3, can you wrap this up by Thursday or Friday?
|
| Them: I'm busy on Thursday, but I can get to Task 3 on Friday or
| Saturday.
|
| Me: Are you sure you can't get this done on Friday?
|
| Them: I don't know. I've got some things scheduled for the
| afternoon on Friday. I'm not sure how long that might go into the
| evening. But I can get it to you by Saturday afternoon, for sure.
|
| Me: Look, this doesn't have to be perfect. Don't go overboard.
| Just put in what time you can on Thursday and Friday. In this
| case speed is more important than quality. Whatever you can do is
| fine.
|
| Around 9 PM on Friday I had not heard from them, so I wrote to
| them again:
|
| Me: Hey, can you please send me whatever you've got regarding
| Task 3?
|
| Them: I told you, I can get it to you by Saturday afternoon.
|
| Me: I told you the deadline was Friday.
|
| Them: You never said the deadline was Friday.
|
| Me: What I said was, whatever you have by this point, Friday
| night, is fine. I think I said that speed is more important than
| quality.
|
| Them: Yeah, but you never said that Friday was the deadline.
|
| Me: Okay, that's fine, but please send me what you have.
|
| They sent over what they'd done so far, and it was fine. In this
| case, we were both a little bit in the wrong, in that neither of
| us made explicit what the deadline was. I thought I'd been
| reasonably clear that by Friday night they should just send me
| whatever they had, but they felt that I'd authorized them to keep
| going until Saturday. It's important to be very clear about
| expectations, otherwise workers hear what they want to hear and
| then they sometimes feel that you lied to them.
|
| In this case, I simply failed to make 100% explicit that the
| deadline was Friday night. If I had invested a little more time
| into the communication, I probably would have made clear what my
| expectations were.
|
| I've previously suggested that larger, stable firms should do
| more to offer some kind of apprenticeships to novice tech
| workers. But in small startups, when the whole team is just 4 of
| 5 people, often you need for everyone on that team to be perfect,
| so if someone on that team isn't perfect, you need to be fast to
| fire people. This was one of the main conclusions that I put in
| my book "How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps."
| mgomez wrote:
| > 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?
| mtlynch wrote:
| I like _Code Complete_ by Steve McConnell. It was popular at
| Microsoft when I worked there in the late 2000s.
|
| I re-skimmed it recently, and it still held up, but the advice
| has influenced a lot of other writers so it may not feel as
| profound as it was then, but I think it's sound advice in terms
| of software craftsmanship.
|
| It's also worth noting that _Code Complete_ biases toward
| processes that work for a large company where there 's lots of
| cross-team collaboration. The advice is good in general, but
| you should weigh certain parts less if you're working on a
| smaller company and especially a fast-moving startup.
|
| Also Joel Spolsky's blog is fantastic.
| aevernon wrote:
| "Bob"'s problem was counterproductive pride and being
| unteachable. There is no room for ego in a precise profession
| like ours, and none of us writes perfect code. If "Bob" had
| learned from his peers during code reviews, he would have been
| fine.
|
| To answer your question: _The Pragmatic Programmer_ by David
| Thomas and Andrew Hunt, _Writing Solid Code_ by Steve Maguire,
| and _Code Complete_ by Steve McConnell.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Build a medium-sized project on your own, especially one with
| evolving requirements. Bonus: come back to it 6 months later.
| You'll learn about scaling a codebase past 1000 lines (and
| maybe 10,000 lines), weigh the pros and cons of hacky
| workarounds, go through the pain of refactoring, and gain
| perspective about how projects evolve.
| kjgkjhfkjf wrote:
| Code quality can be a religious issue for some people, and some
| teams have somewhat strange ideas on the subject that they've
| agreed to agree about despite the ideas not being reasonable or
| valid.
|
| Perhaps Bob was an engineer with a long record of success in
| other teams, who was surprised and justifiably defensive when
| his colleagues weren't happy with his work and demanded he do
| things differently for vague reasons that didn't make sense.
|
| He's probably much happier now that he's in a more compatible
| team. Perhaps he's the guy in the photo.
| jtwebman wrote:
| There is no book to teach these parts. Books teach some simple
| principles but there are many right ways to write code. Ask
| your manager and coworkers for real feedback. Let them know
| that you can take anything. It even set up some anonymous
| feedback method. And no matter what they tell you don't get
| defensive. Just say thank you for the feedback and reflect on
| it later. You can even get mad later but still please try to
| see it from their side. 99.99% of people really are just trying
| to help you. Last look at how coworkers are writing code and
| how they are solving problems. I still learn daily from reading
| others code.
| ptero wrote:
| There are plenty of good books, but IMO the problem with Bob
| (and the thing to keep in mind not to become one) is that when
| the company tried to help him, he not only resisted, but
| effectively sabotaged this.
|
| Books are good, but if you are new at the company or do not
| know how it works, find a few more senior folks who are doing
| well and ask them for advice. Run your architecture / solutions
| past them, ask for opinions, etc.
|
| I think a vast majority of folks fired like Bob just did not
| listen to strong, non-subtle signals from the company trying to
| prevent the firing. My 2c.
| itronitron wrote:
| Regardless of whether you're self taught or minted from a
| program, the lesson to learn here is that your colleagues can
| get rid of you if your work doesn't conform to their
| expectations.
|
| It's just as possible that Bob's colleagues were anally
| retentive simpletons that couldn't handle the truth of his
| code, as it is that Bob is a loosy-goosy house of cards coder
| whose results were always C- material (I've worked with both.)
|
| Point being, if you want to keep your job you should aspire to
| be a good 'culture fit' and if you want to be a good developer
| then work with great people and read more source code than you
| write.
| philovivero wrote:
| I'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.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| 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 <so and so> 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 <so and so> to do
| that won't block anyone else while that process goes?' etc.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > 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 assume this was part of the deal? You can't say "hey, would
| you like to head-up engineering" without knowing this would
| be your first big assignment.
| ghaff wrote:
| I've also seen people be remarkably oblivious with what they're
| doing being a complete time suck of rework. And in spite of
| this they apparently thought they were doing just fine and I
| think even resented the rework a bit.
| franklin86 wrote:
| Have any managers here been asked to fire ppl so the company
| could more easily raise another round of funding? Firing as a
| signal to investors that the company won't waste money.
| fizx wrote:
| Not at a growing young company.
|
| There are cases where a late-stage startup got into too many
| businesses and the next investor wants them to cut a line of
| business. Like I can imagine Uber having to shed UberEats if
| that was going poorly, but the investor liked the core driving
| business.
| propter_hoc wrote:
| This 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".
| acrooks wrote:
| It's a terrible article because, despite explaining many
| scenarios well, it missed one example?
| propter_hoc wrote:
| By far the most common though, and the one in which you're
| most likely to need advice.
|
| Publishing an article about firing and only talking about
| cases where someone went to jail for assaulting his wife, or
| where the company is about to run out of money, is not
| exactly helpful to the founder agonizing over what to do
| about his head of marketing who isn't scaling effectively.
| acrooks wrote:
| I agree that is a very common scenario in general, and I
| have seen it happen myself many times. But intro mentioned
| that the scope of the article was about firing engineers.
|
| > Now we move on to a completely different topic, and maybe
| not the most pleasant one: about when engineers get fired.
|
| So in context of the article's purpose I think it is a fair
| representation - I very rarely see firings related to
| "wrong person for the moment" for engineers. But I very
| commonly do see firings for poor performance in engineering
| which, as the industry's overzealous interview practices
| may suggest, is difficult to discern in an interview.
|
| Even if you disagree with my perspective, I do still think
| you do yourself a disservice by jumping to the hyperbolic
| "it's terrible" instead of writing your feedback in a more
| constructive manner, like you did in this subsequent
| comment.
| ComradePhil wrote:
| 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 one.
|
| If the fired person is fit for no place of work in the or circle
| of influence in the current state of the organization, I hope we
| would still be able to provide support for them while giving them
| the opportunity to still engage in the orgaznization until they
| find an alternative... or find a useful opportunity inside when
| things change or when they they change i.e. acquire the skills
| that may be more useful to the organization.
|
| I don't know how this can be made possible... i.e. what the
| organizational values that will be required to be able to achieve
| this while still being sustainable... or if government
| involvement is required and how can organizations fund tho
| government programs through taxes.
| gkop wrote:
| 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.
| deltaoneseven wrote:
| No there are alternatives. You support the team switch before
| termination. Termination is a last resort option and should
| only be done after multiple people managed the person
| directly to remove bias.
|
| I've seen a scenario where 2 people at anduril (where I work)
| were fired in 6 months and 1 person quit to get away from the
| manager. Statistically in this case it's a managerial problem
| and you need to place those employees in different teams to
| know that it's the manager that's the problem and not the
| employee.
|
| Simply assuming the employee is the problem without
| additional oversight is the wrong path.
| ComradePhil wrote:
| 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.
| tbalsam wrote:
| 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.
| fired_but_ok wrote:
| I was fired from my first industry job. I had been thrilled to
| find my first role as a software developer, was making more money
| than I had ever made in my life, and my relationship with
| teammates started out super-pleasant. The team, and company-at-
| large, seemed similarly thrilled to be bringing me on-board.
|
| I was woefully unprepared, having worked mostly meaningless jobs
| up until then. I was complacent and lazy and took the opportunity
| I had been given for granted. I started out strong and did good
| work for the first few sprints, but fell back on my old habits.
|
| At the same time, my supervisors seemed to have unrealistic
| expectations for a first-time software professional. The team
| also despised pair-programming (even if done occasionally), and
| the dread and resentment any time I asked for help were palpable.
|
| A couple of months in, a supervisor started dropping hints that
| they weren't happy with the quantity nor quality of my
| contributions. The 100-day check-in was a trainwreck. Half an
| hour or so of two supervisors dumping on me. The only kinda
| positive thing mentioned was that I "socialize well".
|
| I was eventually given typed meeting notes, and they considered
| that my PIP. The next few months had ups and downs but overall
| nobody was happy. I started responding to recruiters and
| exploring potential new jobs, but the company already had my exit
| in motion. After about 10 months total, I was fired because I was
| late finishing my work and "depending too much on other
| developers".
|
| The timing and manner of my firing were humiliating, as were the
| terms of my severance.
|
| I was initially heartbroken, and went through the five stages. In
| retrospect, I still have mixed feelings about everything that
| happened. I really tried to get my act together and do better
| work, but was never given any structure or support. It seems
| their mind had already been made up at 100 days, and they just
| wanted to get their ducks in a row before firing me.
|
| Fortunately, I found another job not too long after getting
| fired. I felt I had learned my lesson, and came out very strong
| out of the gate and worked harder to sustain that. There was also
| more structure and collaboration. We got more learning resources
| (we were basically expected to learn on our own time, with our
| own money, at the first company). My teammates and supervisors
| liked me, and were patient in giving me time to learn and grow.
| The salary and benefits were much better. I eventually left after
| less than 2 years because I felt I had hit a ceiling and couldn't
| grow much more within our legacy tech stack, and I didn't want to
| get pigeonholed and have to write enterprise Java for the rest of
| my career.
|
| I'm now in my third industry role, learning and collaborating
| more, using the coolest tech stack ever, and making even more
| money. I'm even playing a leading role in team-wide learning
| initiatives, and I've had opportunities to evaluate potential new
| hires. I feel infinitely more happy than I was at the first
| company (and a lot happier than I was at the second).
|
| I'm writing this partly for catharsis, but also to provide an
| example of being fired not meaning the end of the world, and in
| my case it ended up being a blessing in disguise.
|
| The first company also seems to have found devs who worked out
| much better for them, and they even got acquired by a larger
| company in their space.
|
| So overall I think it ended up being a win-win.
| sjg007 wrote:
| It's good to see that you took the situation as an opportunity
| for personal growth.
| [deleted]
| deltaoneseven wrote:
| The article fails to address when the firing is actually wrong
| and incorrect.
|
| I work at anduril and I know of a new manager who 6 months into
| the job fired 2 people and had one person quit because he
| couldn't handle dealing with him.
|
| The manager obviously is blind to see the statistical
| significance of that many people gone in 6 months. He likely
| views it as a performance problem of 3 people rather then the
| more likely 'him' problem.
|
| Keep in mind if you're fired it has hugely to do with the
| perspective and the personality of the people judging your work.
| Sometimes that judgement is valid, but just as often it is not
| valid at all. Additionally keep in mind the political motivations
| and machinations going on in the background. Along with firing
| people for political reasons... Many people not suited to be
| managers.
|
| If you find yourself in that situation where you are fired do not
| ignore the reasoning behind why your manager fired you but also
| be sure to weigh it against many other opinions because often
| your manager is making an unjustified decision.
|
| A lot of the stories in this article are justified though. One
| person was judged and placed under several people so they could
| all make an accurate assessment before piling the plug.
| irrational wrote:
| > 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.
| thrower123 wrote:
| The 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.
| deltaoneseven wrote:
| 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.
| beebeepka wrote:
| I hope that's sarcasm. Enjoying that sort of thing is not
| healthy. Unless the person being fired is a literal enemy of
| yours
| cryptica wrote:
| I wish that getting fired would not carry so much stigma as it
| does today. I got fired 3 times in my early career. 2 of those
| times I believe were completely unfair, only 1 time made sense
| because I had burned out and lost motivation (also, the company
| wasn't doing well financially). In all of these cases, getting
| fired was a valuable life experience.
|
| The 2 times which were unfair, I learned that people can be
| unjust, spiteful and irrational; I learned to recognize and avoid
| working for such people later in my career.
|
| The time when I got fired after burning out, I learned to be more
| attuned to my own feelings and to never allow myself work on
| something that I don't enjoy. It made me more selective about
| opportunities.
|
| Tellingly, none of the places I got fired from ended up
| succeeding... On the other hand, one of the startups which I
| spent the most years working for is doing quite well.
|
| Every time you get fired, you can learn something important;
| maybe you were overly ambitious and your skills don't yet measure
| up to the role or you made a poor choice when it came to company
| selection.
|
| Getting fired can mean a lot of things, not only negative things.
| Aiming high can be seen as a positive attribute. Being willing to
| step outside of your comfort zone can also be seen as a positive
| (even if it didn't work out). I always learned a lot, even if
| sometimes I was learning by counter-example; by observing other
| people's mistakes as well as my own.
|
| Also, people need to feel pressure in their lives. We need to
| learn how to fall and how to get back up. It's OK to fall. It's
| good to assert yourself and take risks, even if it means putting
| yourself in the firing line.
| deltaoneseven wrote:
| This. Getting fired is largely a perception thing as much as it
| is performance.
|
| How your manager perceives you and his ability to perceive
| things and his personality influences everything.
| kjgkjhfkjf wrote:
| 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.
| sdoering wrote:
| I might misinterpret you. But why do we need to soften the
| blow? Why do we need to appear reasonable and cheerful at
| dreadful life events?
|
| They suck. We are allowed our "negative" emotions. We need to
| allow the shame and fear and anger and bitterness and sadness.
| We need to be able to voice these. And not forced to hide them
| for the sake of a society that doesn't want to see these. Or
| for our peers and their well being.
|
| But as said. I might be tainted by experience and misread you.
| kjgkjhfkjf wrote:
| People generally are very sad when they go through awful life
| experiences. That's fine and it's often expected. It's common
| for people to weep at a funeral, for example, and it might be
| somewhat inappropriate to be cheerful and cracking jokes.
|
| I think that seeing people happily go through dreadful events
| would be therapeutic for some people because it would reduce
| the anxiety that people experience when anticipating these
| events happening in the future.
| mkl95 wrote:
| 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 away with it for
| years. While their coworkers who have only been at the company
| for a few months will be routinely called out on their mistakes,
| missed deadlines etc.
|
| Some people are less fireable than others and I'm afraid it has
| little to do with how good they are at what they do.
| axiolite wrote:
| > 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 _solved_ one of those problems, myself... having
| stumbled upon evidence a very poorly performing employee was
| reading articles on the web most of the day, only doing a few
| minutes of coding and taking some steps to hide logging of this
| fact (which was actually the part that caught my attention).
| Setting up screen recording and running it for several days
| hammered the point home. Said employee at the end of this
| period conveniently reported running into technical
| difficulties with their project, necessitating more time to
| work on it. That nicely drove the point home, putting the final
| nail in and effectively catapulting them out the door...
| exdsq wrote:
| A company secretly screen recording me makes me shiver
| stretchwithme wrote:
| "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.
| exdsq wrote:
| I think this is illegal in Europe or parts of Europe! I'd
| feel differently if you were told this would be
| happening.
| YZF wrote:
| 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.
| lumost wrote:
| 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 can help others
| is sometimes sufficient.
|
| - Tenured staff sometimes have implicit responsibilities that
| are unclear to new hires. An engineer with 10 years in the
| company might spend almost all of their time doing some form of
| product/tech leadership. The rare times they write code it may
| be deficient in some manner or another.
|
| - Tenured staff know how to read the tea leaves. The fact that
| they are still with the company likely indicates that they know
| how to avoid situations where they will get let go. Sometimes
| this is as simple as hopping on maintenance work for profitable
| systems.
|
| On the other hand, a new engineer doing their first project may
| actually not have the skills to get the project done. Or, more
| likely they were hired for new initiatives that leadership is
| fundamentally skeptical of.
| humanrebar wrote:
| 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.
| Jensson wrote:
| Companies pay for people do to maintenance for profitable
| system even if those systems doesn't much need maintenance,
| meaning lots of people in those roles don't do much. The
| point isn't that all maintenance engineers are worthless,
| but that it is an area where you often can be incompetent
| but still be kept around.
| mushbino wrote:
| In my experience, an inner circle is established at a company
| when it is still relatively small. Those fortunate enough to
| be in that protected circle can do no wrong. Any hires after
| that in group is established bear the brunt of that companies
| issues. It's very true with startups.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| 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...
| Swizec wrote:
| 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
| YZF wrote:
| 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.
| worker767424 wrote:
| > 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.
| YZF wrote:
| 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.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| Try this; 1. every PR review call out one neat thing you
| _really like_ and maybe ask how they figured that out 2. Be
| explicit in the dichotomy between "recommendations/nits"
| and "you shouldn't merge this". Weight things toward the
| former. Have a style guide for the latter things and be
| very conscious of when someone is violating the actual
| style guide or just your own biases. If you really have
| high "standards" write them down... Otherwise they are just
| whims, not really standards.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| To put a finger point on the advice above: you should
| _never_ be enforcing "your standards" but the "team's
| standards". If you can't tell the difference, that's its
| own kind of problem.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| if you want to enforce higher standards than your
| colleagues, you have to put in most of the work to reach
| those standards. For instance, if you think a section of a
| code needs unit tests, maybe write some of the tests
| yourself or at least suggest how to.
|
| also be modest, and make sure to frame your standards as
| cooperating to improve the company's code, not competing to
| show you're a better programmer
|
| the ultimate goal is to make your high standards more of an
| asset ("he's improving the code") then a burden ("he's
| criticizing us and making us do more work")
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| 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.
| YZF wrote:
| 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.
| celim307 wrote:
| 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
| philjohn wrote:
| 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.
| dudul wrote:
| Pick your battles. Try to identify cases where at the end
| of the day, it doesn't matter if the code is not "the best
| TM".
|
| Also don't hesitate to tag your comments as "nitpicks".
| kalimanzaro wrote:
| Something tells me in the anecdata above, the unfirable
| characters involved picked 1 _at most_:
|
| The teflon engineers don't seem smart and probably can't get
| things done on time if at all.
|
| While the sensitive engineer seems unpleasant to work with,
| while not contributing at all.
|
| Neil Gaiman has a knack of saying immensely compelling stuff,
| that's all there is.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| 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.
| jtwebman wrote:
| 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.
| loonster wrote:
| As a non manager, keeping parasites around is bad for
| moral.
| Jensson wrote:
| Firing them is also bad for morale, for different
| reasons. Only solution is to not hire parasites in the
| first place.
| geoffbp wrote:
| Ah the "protected species"
| jpgvm wrote:
| Firing someone usually sucks.
|
| Having your manager fire someone that really needs to be fired
| can be massive relief though, I think that is pretty much the
| only case where there is much of a sunny side.
| cushychicken wrote:
| It's a huge relief to the team to have a bad performer removed.
|
| I've been on a team where a bad player was removed and the
| whole team was noticeably better performing a month later. It
| sounds a little "woo woo" to say it, but I think a lot of
| energy was freed up by the firing. Instead of thinking about
| how to deal with our bad teammate, we could focus on getting
| our work done.
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| And if you don't fire or contain the bad apples, the good
| ones will go.
| cushychicken wrote:
| Mad Ned is the best tech writer on Substack these days, I think.
| deltaoneseven wrote:
| 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.
| marcusklaas wrote:
| Kudos for recognizing your own mistake, owning up to it and
| ultimately correcting it. That is no minor feat.
|
| But I do wonder if you're not extrapolating too much from this
| single case. Just because you made the mistake once doesn't
| necessarily mean it is very common per se.
| orzig wrote:
| That's fantastic introspection, but to give another anecdotal
| piece of data: I spent 6 months stressing about how to keep
| iterating communication and fit with an underperformer, and he
| never managed to contribute (I was the second of four managers
| he worked with over 3 years).
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