[michaelrpeskin]

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.