[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.