As Kaplan-Moss pointed out in the original article, "incompetent" depends on the context and circumstances, and you may be able to remedy these in order to turn an incompetent employee into a competent one.
To take a very straw-mannish example, suppose you hired a Python developer but due to some admin fuckup they were added to the Android team. The easiest remedy is to move them to the Python team. The second easiest is to ask if they are interested in learning Android, and if so give them the time and support to get up to speed. The worst option here is to just fire them: you lose a potentially valuable employee you spent time and money bringing on board, possibly damage their career as a result, and hurt team morale overall.
The article has a clickbait title: It uses the word "incompetent" when it should have said "underperforming". There are may reasons an employee is not performing and the article discusses a few of them. Sometimes it is right to fire the person, sometimes another approach might be better. It's as nuanced as the reasons.
This article, and the one it was written in response to are both about the scenario where someone is under-performing because they are incompetent, not capable of becoming competent and really nice and likable. What both articles missed is that in many organizations nice, incompetent people often get promoted to leadership positions and become the subject of business books and bad memes... and unfortunately go on to hire lots of other nice but incompetent people.
Maybe this is a language thing, but if someone underperforms because of health issues or burnout (like discussed in the article) I would not call them incompetent.
It’s not that easy in real life. A couple of years ago we had a guy who was really nice, someone who you really connect with when you first meet him. But he never produced any working code.
We have a set of “onboarding tasks” that are well defined and have definite definitions of “done”. He didn’t complete them. His team lead gave him a series of “easy” bugs (think, change this error message to that error message). He couldn’t figure that out. He required lots of pair programming and oversight.
We tried to do a PIP and gave him unlimited access to our top devs for help. We really tried everything. We should have cut it off much earlier than we did, but he was just so nice. It was hard.
Near the end when we were justifying fire him, we went through all his records. It turned out that I did his technical interview and failed him (I had forgotten by the time I got involved with his PIP) But the rest of staff loved him and thought he has lots of potential. He didn’t. We really tried.
It was gut wrenching firing him. He was a real person who we all liked. But he was just too much of a drag and we are a small company and don’t have the buffer to pay people to do negative work.
Sure. But how does worry help you or the person who is going to get fired? The manager goes through months of stress avoiding the thing they need to do (bad for their health), while the bad fit engineer gets strung along.
> how does worry help you or the person who is going to get fired?
That is the point. By the point you know you need to fire them it is easy. Getting to that point is the hard bit.
Maybe they just need a different style of assignments? Maybe there are interpersonal issues in the team you as the manager should address. Maybe they have a health issue they can address with time. Maybe they are burnt out and you should reconsider how you are running your team, or even worse how the whole company.
Depending on the situation you have many more things you can do to address an underperforming employee than just firing or not firing them. Whether or not it will be successful depends on multiple factors some in the control of the manager, some not so. A sane manager should not stress or worry over the ones they can't control, but easy to imagine them stressing over the ones they can.
Empathy is not worry. It's actually the other way around - you seem to worry that underperforming person is going to bring down the business, empathic people do not care.
If people didn't need jobs to have food and shelter you might have a point, but as it is our society is constructed such that even the time it takes to find a new job will have significant impact on most people's ability to pay for basic necessities.
Maybe we should fix that? Nah, let's just treat people like expendable resources so we don't have to increase taxes on the wealth elite who never need be concerned with such things.
Firing someone in the case of underperformance (particularly outside of the US) is rarely a straightforward process.
You typically need to give the under-performing employee at least a chance to improve and meet the required standard - otherwise the hiring company will be leaving themselves open to a wrongful dismissal suit.
>You typically need to give the under-performing employee at least a chance to improve and meet the required standard - otherwise the hiring company will be leaving themselves open to a wrongful dismissal suit.
That said, some companies in some industries add a PIP as a social norm rather than a requirement of law.
E.g., An underperforming programmer might be put on a PIP. However, in more cutthroat industries... a new car salesman who isn't selling the expected quota of cars or a hedge fund associate who lost several million on a bad stock pick are often fired immediately without any PIP.
I suspect they often do the PIP as legal protection, documentation they can produce later if needed. Even in an "at-will" environment, employees can sue for wrongful termination.
I think this is broadly the case. A few companies might be genuinely invested in improving performance with such a plan but for the majority it's a way of managing someone out. Over the years I've seen over 30 devs put on PiPs. 1 survived.
Everything you said is correct. And just to be clear, in the US it is technically very straightforward in most states and you can fire people for any (non-protected) reason or for no reason whatsoever without any notice. However, there is always a risk that people will sue the employer by claiming that they were fired for reasons other than underperformance (gender, race, religion etc).
Employers in the US don't care about giving people the opportunity to improve, it's more about documenting the underperformance so there is an airtight case against the employee - nobody can claim a protected reason if the underperformance is very well documented.
All of this said, and this applies to smaller companies more than bigger companies due to the risks involved, if the employer is very confident the employee won't be able to argue that they were fired due to a protected reason, in most states they can just fire them in the middle of the day with no justification: "I don't like you, out of here".
> Employers in the US don't care about giving people the opportunity to improve, it's more about documenting the underperformance so there is an airtight case against the employee - nobody can claim a protected reason if the underperformance is very well documented.
Actually, these efforts often don't help much. As a rule, if you find yourself doing elaborate cover-your-ass excessive, you probably are doing something very systematically wrong. I've seen plenty of situations where the well-meaning managers documented everything, did the whole document poor performance, and a single deposition of a manager made it clear that the entire process used to document and remedy under-performance was simply collusion to fire someone for a protected reason... even though in reality, it was not. It goes kind of like this:
"So after four years of not a single entry in ___'s file, suddenly a poor review and a complicated PIP?" "____ just wasn't fitting in on the team."
"Hmm. _____ is the only _____ on the team, despite _____'s race/religion being ___% of the population. All hires made after you became manager were (insert manager's race/religion/sex). No other employees on your team are on PIPs. So, why is it that ___ wasn't fitting in?"
"I can haz consult with lawyer now?" (followed by settlement for 2x manager's salary)
That documenting is self-fulfilling. It creates a bias. That is, the manager is biased towards fleshing that out, not signs of hope and change. The manager is also biased to covering their own arse, not giving the employee a fair shake.
Yes, there are cases where the employee needs to go. But there are others where that's not exactly true.
All that said, it's a relationship. Life is too short for unhealthy and unproductive relationships. When I find nyself in such situations I update my CV and start looking to move on. Somethings are what they are and not worth the fight.
Yeah outside of the US they do constructive dismissal instead, and you'll be paid pennies even if you win the suit (and fail future "background checks").
To take a very straw-mannish example, suppose you hired a Python developer but due to some admin fuckup they were added to the Android team. The easiest remedy is to move them to the Python team. The second easiest is to ask if they are interested in learning Android, and if so give them the time and support to get up to speed. The worst option here is to just fire them: you lose a potentially valuable employee you spent time and money bringing on board, possibly damage their career as a result, and hurt team morale overall.