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by eastbound 551 days ago
Hi,

I’m coming here a few days later and I would like to thank you for the feedback and reflection. My impression is there are two styles:

- Restless: Hire and fire as fast as possible until you work with the right people, be tough. Could be positive if you can spell out the rules of success very clearly, with 100% reliability.

- Patience: Hire and train until people fulfill your needs. Run the risk of charlatans. Sometimes even good people end up slacking off because they aren’t motivated by the trust and the absence of the carrot and the stick. But you have the satisfaction of caring about people’s wellbeing. Which they most probably abuse, and they’re probably not even happy in this situation.

It’s Christmas so I’m having hard times firing 2 non-performing people who may just happen to need more time to ramp up than I estimate. January’s coming up soon.

1 comments

Indeed, often it is a tough call, but sometimes even the best talent cannot overcome the inertia of seniority. I have witnessed folks:

* deploy the wrong stack due to existing team skill issues, than the maintenance sinks time and resources away from the project

* hit unclear project goals leading to constant distractions, and entrenched policies dominate design back into garbage

* have informal testing in random situations developers never get to see

* break the testing repeatability loop, so bugs never get properly resolved

If one only has 2 staff left, than they are likely doing 8 jobs 8 times less efficient than one expects.

Best of luck =3