[philovivero]

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]

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]

> 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.

[cyberpunk]

Yeah well.

[ghaff]

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.