[jimbokun]

Why do you say that?

Hiring people is very expensive. Finding and qualifying leads, creating job description, interviewing, on boarding, orientation, training, introduction to and getting familiar with the existing code base. Firing requires distributing that team member's work to other team members.

This can take months and a big investment from existing team members, to go from wanting to hire someone to a fully productive team member. And that's assuming your hiring process never accidentally hires someone even more incompetent than your "poor" team members.

Compare that to investing in improving existing team members to help them improve. Is that really more expensive than hiring and firing?

[ses1984]

Attrition is a thing. You have to always be hiring, or very ready to hire, anyway.

Also accidentally hiring the wrong people can be devastating. It's better to identify and get rid of bad hires right away.

[wolco]

Why.. getting yourself out of accidentally hiring someone who has a standard 3 month trial period is easy.

[ses1984]

I don't think it's trivial to identify a bad hire in 3 months. Some are obviously bad, some are not.

[goatinaboat]

Exactly. Spolsky did enormous harm to us all with his assertion, blindly accepted, that a single bad hire will destroy your company overnight. All the toxicity in the current hiring process should be laid at his door.

[wolco]

This Spolsky quote is so outdated. The average great developer will apply for 4 jobs unless he is trying to work remotely which will require 100 aplications / 50 tests / 75 take home assignmennts / 14 interviews per position and one job offer for below market rate for the third world.

"The average great software developer will apply for, total, maybe, four jobs in their entire career."