[burlesona]

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]

>> 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]

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]

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.