[scottie_m]

“Hire only for good reasons.” Well, yeah, that’s good if painfully obvious advice.

“Fire people whenever you can.” Don’t do this. “There’s often someone to fire, but not many opportunities to do so.” I thought you were hiring for good reasons, why the bloat?

“it is good to at least apply a low-frequency filter when passing along the “news”, so that good and productive people can carry on without too much hassle.”

Only if you’re their only connection to the real world, otherwise you’ll be quickly spotted for the bullshitter you are.

This is a weird article.

[PeterisP]

Firing is not because of bloat, but because that person needs replacing - it takes time to detect bad hires; and also people change, even if they were a good hire a few years ago, now they may not any longer be good at that position in that company.

Looking back with hindsight at the firings I've participated over the years, in all cases it would've been better if they would have been done much sooner; and most of the doubtful decisions that didn't result in a firing actually should have.

In essence, firing/not-firing usually turns out into a tradeoff between avoiding some short-term pain ("it's hard to get a replacement right now, it will affect schedules") and a significant long-term productivity cost. And people tend to prioritize the short term problems, while almost always it's actually better to take the short term hit to build better results in the long run - so, as a rule of thumb, it should be expected that right now you're firing a bit too carefully and should be firing a bit more (but not too much, naturally).

[barkingtoad]

> people change, even if they were a good hire a few years ago, now they may not any longer be good at that position in that company.

When a manager takes a very skilled person and demotivates them, that is what that looks like. It happens allllll the time. Fire the manager -- or you'll just be turning skilled workers into ex-workers.

[kolanos]

This may be anecdotal, but at many of the places I've worked, the employer doesn't even bother to ask the employee why their underperforming before firing them. That conversation often times starts with, "We've decided to let you go because..."

[internetman55]

Very true, in my experience.