Just a note, this isnt about firing junior people fast. That is absolutely scummy.
This is about hiring/firing very senior, well paid people with lots of prior experience.
If you are hiring and then firing junior people fast, you are the problem.
In the first company I confounded, we recruited a friend of my cofounder to a senior job. He looked like the right guy for the job but he actually really wasn't. He was completely underperforming and junior employees looked at him and lost respect for both and my cofounder for keeping him on.
Because he was a friend who had left his job to work for us, we didn't fire him and he continued undermining the company with his poor performance for a year. I think this was the worst mistake I did. In the end, he left the company and screwed us over on some account.
So, I've learned from this:
- do not hire friends as senior executive
- if you insist on hiring friend, have a clear backup plan if things don't work out so that you can both end the relationship. Be prepared to lose your friendship in doing that.
- never let an underperforming senior employee fester in your company. It's like rot, it will drag down the entire company by devaluating the work your other employees do
>I have never fired anyone too early.
This may well be true but how do you know? The only way I can think of is if the employee went on to become such a rock star at some other place that you actually hear about it. But that's not the only situation where they might have been valuable to you after a while.
Weirdly, I think we would all benefit quite a lot from a normalization of fast firing. Part of the reason it's hard to get a job is that companies are afraid to fire you, so they jump through all kinds of strange hoops to try to predict how good an employee you'll be based on, really, no information.
This also forces companies to filter out "possibly good" candidates and only hire "probably good" candidates.
If it were normal to get fired after a day or a week, you could get hired at 10 different companies over a span of two months and likely find a really great position, where you're a great fit.
My next company will have explicit rubrics for what it takes to get fired, and your status will be tracked daily. You'll know at all times exactly how close you are to getting fired with how much severance. It will never be a surprise, unless it's a reaction to an acute event (sexual harassment, etc). We'll hire pretty much everyone who walks through the door with a plausible story for how they add value. Anyone we fire we'll sit down in the exit interview and write a plan for how they can get re-hired in a few weeks or months if they're interested. We'll also try to spin off a separate business with the fired person at the head, instead of just firing, whenever possible.
This post left a bad taste in my mouth. Firing can be hard on all parties involved. Your dumb startup is not that important. If you can't figure out how to utilize an employee, that's on you.
It takes time to build trust, at least several months, maybe even years. If you fire everyone before you even get a chance to build up trust with them, you'll never get a great team.
"You can never fire someone too soon" is a ridiculous statement as it is non-falsifiable.
> Of course I’m being a bit provocative to open this post with, “I have never fired anyone too early.” I have almost always given people a chance to correct course, and suggest you do too.
For anyone that didn't reach the end.
It's necessary to fire early, but investors should keep pushing money into unicorns without any business model because ...
Why would anyone work in a person or company that is known to fire quickly?
Although there are lots of these career "advices" that are perceived as "universal truth", I hardly believe they are the only truth. Life is more complicated than that sometimes, so are your workplace. Use your best judgement(s), rather than follow the dogma. Long enough you will have your own believes, perhaps from a different angle to the same dilima.
Given a shortage of supply for a job, firing early might not be a good idea. It takes months or even years to find an appropriate good fit for a job.
Sometimes it's easier to just give the person another chance, than to fire him and have no one to do the work.
>Don’t trigger the decay model of trust — why is management tolerating this shit?!
I can't reiterate this enough. Once company I worked for fired the COO that had built the operations when he had serious personal issues that bled into the working environment. I knew it was a serious company after that, I could imagine how difficult it was and he created a great operational culture and working environment before his issues.
Fast forward a few years after an acquisition. The new owners have so many Bozo's in executive positions the place is toxic.
>> After a while of trying and challenging them directly to step up you’ve realized that what sounded like their “experience” in the interview and even confirmed in reference checks, turns out to be things they observed but they didn’t really drive (or truly understood from within) and therefore can’t replicate.
That is a sign of a poor hiring process. It's a common mistake but it's the number one thing I try to figure out when hiring. I'll have to write a blog about it some time.
Is intuition infallible? I want to hear stories about people who followed their intuition on staying or going (or keeping or firing) and it ended up being the wrong decision long-term. Falsifiability is IMHO an important element of arguing for "intuition"
And yet, I look back and I can't think of a single example in my own life where "listening to my gut" seemed to lead me astray. But I also don't trust my own brain to remember such instances...
I like this sort of mentality in companies that think they are some sort of hot start ups that can fire anyone they feel like. I dunno how it is with management types, but this sort of approach is extremely amusing to me in niche skill areas.
For example, this happened to me a few times, but as I am 1 in 25 people in the country that can do what I do, it takes that company 12-18 month to find a replacement, if at all.
The way the job market works is the larger problem. It usually forces both employers and employees to make a big commitment based on deeply imperfect information. It's like asking someone to marry after the second date, usually when they're already married and can't survive long without being married.
From the last couple paragraphs this reads like a16z is still mad over getting fired years ago. They should know that being fired is a traumatic experience, and not use this as justification for their future carelessness. Two wrongs don't make a right.
From the book 'Peak: Secrets of the new science of expertise', Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool state that to be an expert you must be successful at something more than once.
Which means that just because someone was successful doesn't mean they were directly responsible for it. Like being on a team where you may have even been the manager but the team players were what made it truly successful. If you were successful on two different teams then the odds of you being a key player in that success are much higher.
Even more important is to take the blame yourself and fix your hiring process. In the example below, detect the exaggeration during the interview not after they start.
> you’ve realized that what sounded like their “experience” in the interview and even confirmed in reference checks, turns out to be things they observed but they didn’t really drive (or truly understood from within) and therefore can’t replicate
This is probably the worst advice for a young founder.
Had a client who was a 24-year-old startup founder, one of his investors got me involved to help him hire some folks and help define project process.
We hired a great developer, who freaked when he saw how sloppy the code was. Rightfully said, "We can't maintain this..."
Anyway, the founder had written a lot of it, so it wasn't a shock to him that the code was bad and needed to be re-done. Hew knew it was all quick and dirty and hacked together. By the time I got inovlved, we had issues doing deployments (deployments would take half a day and a lot of stress around testing once code went live), we had issues around infrastructure being unstable (lost 2 days worth of customer data once after a bug caused the DB to crash), and of course, nothing would have scaled. No code review, not much of a QA process, just a million things that needed to be done better -- you can cut some corners as a startup, you can't cut every corner.
There were a handful of paying clients, but most had been sold a promise of feature A-through-Z, and really the tools did like A-through-C... the moment one of them complained the young CEO lost it because he hated criticism, especially from customers, and he didn't want people to think he had lied to them... even though he had pretty clearly over-promised.
The dev I brought on wanted to re-do a lot of things, write unit tests, set up a CI / CD process, proper backups, basically do all the stuff that should have been done day one to ensure we could work fast and have confidence the wheels wouldn't come off. The founder had been on board with trying to reduce outages and crashes, but about a week into it, when one of the customers complained about something, the young CEO freaked when he couldn't simultaneously have new features and a re-done core codebase on the schedule he wanted.
So even though a week before he had said that he liked the idea of reducing a lot of our technical debt, and giving the new dev a chance to work on clean good code... since he was young (not sure if that's the best excuse) he flip-flopped. And three weeks into the overhaul (that was supposed to take 5 weeks), he was furious. "This dev is costing us time and just doesn't get our culture and isn't aligned with our goals and just isn't working out!"
I got called in, looked over what the dev had done. Nothing short of a miracle he had accomplished so much so fast. I said as much. Later that day I get an email from the founder, "I had to let [the dev] go, he just wasn't working out." I left the project shortly after, and the founder burned through another $300k in seed money (his parents') before shutting down.
Anyway this whole "trust your gut" thing... and "don't ask around before firing" -- that's only good advice if you've got some experience and a cool temperament.
If you're a new CEO, ask around. Figure out what's going on, and if you tell people to zig, and they zig, don't get mad at them for not zagging -- they aren't mind-readers. Flipping on decisions like that are extremely demotivating to everyone who works for you, and flipping on a hire (firing someone) is the potentially most demotivating thing you can do if it's not done correctly. You hire smart people, if you can't trust their expertise, don't hire them. Since you trust their expertise, don't micromanage them, or expect the impossible from them.
That's crazy; Extra Credits posted a video about this exact same topic a couple days ago, (with an extra focus on indie game development): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnhlDwCRwkU
I like the article, and it has some really good ideas. And it is not about making firing people easier or cheaper. It is about on how to decide when to fire someone.
About firing fast and easy, it is a bad idea.
I work in Sweden. I don't think I have seen ever anyone fired. What I have seen is some of the best hiring processes. The process looks at the candidate values, and skills. And there is a discussion about what we expect from her, and what she expects from the job.
I worked previously in Spain, I saw a lot of people fired for no good reason. And they were also hired without too much attention. Shorts interviews, no real testing, are part of a process that ends consuming a lot of effort from everyone after hiring someone that is not the correct person. Other times that people is good, and leaves, because was not the job for them.
Both seem related. Cheap and easy firing produces careless recruiting. And that is more expensive that people realizes.
"No one was ever fired too soon"
Steve Jobs may have been but then again maybe he did need time to cook in Next before coming back.
It's never too early to remember that in a startup the decision to get fired depends mostly on the emotional state of a founder. That there is no process in place. It's random. If you do get fired, you have a good chance of ruining your carrier, not being able to get a good reference from your last place of work, wasting opportunities.
Jeepers. That text needs to be a lot darker or a lot thicker.
I have a different take. Never forget that you can get fired but also never forget you can fire!
You can fire jobs.
You can fire friends.
You can fire customers.
Makes life so much easier!
we need more worker protections and right and benefits....it should be harder to fire workers...and the work week should be no longer than 35 hours.
>To be provocative: No one ever fired someone too soon.
how about when the board fired Steve Jobs? (Specifically, stripped him from all responsibilities, removed him from the head of the mac division, gave him an office with nothing to do). No?
After all, he didn't code, was kind of a weirdo, and the board had every reason to have some doubts.
Was that a "wrong" decision?
Actually, pretty good advice in the opposite direction, too. If I had known at 18 that I could have easily and successfully walked away from teams, bosses, companies, partners, and investors who gave 'bad vibes', I would easily have (at least!) an extra couple million in the bank.
I wasted countless opportunities waiting for things to get better, when I probably intuitively knew that they wouldn't. Partly, it was because I didn't want to be considered inconsiderate or rude. But, also, it was because I latched on to other things: the mission, the market, the tech, the product, the teams, etc.