Legal barriers are not the only barriers. Many companies don't work with a quick-fire model. If you, as a hiring manager, hire a person and then fire them within a month, you're going to need to sit down with your manager and explain what happened. If you do it twice, they're going to have serious doubts about whether you're qualified to be a manager.

Plus, it's sociopathic: If someone has a job already, having them quit that job, start working for you, and then get fired and end up on the street because it didn't work out... man, that's a jerk move. The manager owes it to the new hire to be confident that they'll work out.

No, Australia. Once you've hired someone, there's a process you need to go through in order to get rid of them - multiple warnings for breaking company policy, mediation, it depends on what the problems are. If they know their rights, and play by the rules, it's basically not possible.

Worse, if you have someone who just doesn't play well with others, there are no grounds for dismissal. You end up having to cook up some sort of severance package for genuinely toxic staff, and hope they hate the environment as much as others hate them.

"Please take this package. In the long run it will be better for everyone" and hope they see the light and walk.

I don't think he's talking about legal risks:

1 the people that interviewed / recruited that bad egg will be scorned as the people that brought that idiot in

2 often people think the bad one will get better so they invent a lot of time into making it work. Time that could be better spent elsewhere.

3 typically groups have a very limited headcount. So if you bring in a bad person you've used up that slot and won't have anything available for months (if ever)

4 have you ever worked with a negative person? It really zaps the energy out of going into work.

5 the damage that a bad hire can also be great on the code base, let alone morale. Some junk stays in the code for years

This might be true at place like Google.

What very few employees understand, even some interviewers don't consciously understand, is that people are hired based on race, gender, TV shows, hobbies, school pedigree, all that stuff. The "prove P=NP on the whiteboard in 30 minutes... go!" routine exists to not_hire people.

So the fix is in and the bosses nephew is going to hired or your frat bro you watched south park episodes with. HR makes you interview multiple people to make it look fair. Obviously its going to be a hostile interview experience. Maybe if you're a clone of Knuth and totally wow the interviewer, the bosses nephew will get kicked to the curb, or if you're cooler than the interviewer's frat bro, well, thats a strong maybe. But basically if you walk into an interview and they ask you about algos that a dog whistle you're not getting hired. Either the fix is already in, or you're a minority, either way you're not getting hired once the questions about red-black trees get unleashed. The interview is already over at that point unless its a 1 in 1000 meteorite strike, it does happen, just almost never.

There are way too many skilled programmers for way too few positions or else the system would collapse if just one employer defected. That hasn't happened, therefore there are too many applicants for too few positions.

The reason you hear nonsense about "not enough skilled programmers" is because they didn't mention they have to be white or male or members of the interviewer's fraternity or fans of the same TV show. There's no shortage at all of excellent programmers who happen to be minorities or unrelated to members of management.

So many things. The only times I can think that it'd be super damaging:

1) This person is talking directly to clients day one, solo

2) Their code is pushed without review...

3) They are making high-level (C-level, maybe a bit lower) decisions for your business

Otherwise, yeah... a bad employee can do some harm. But, it's that employee's fault, and the other employees will realize this.

It is the business's fault if they go a year under-staffed because "they are afraid."

The second is MUCH more damaging: shows your leadership is not bold, they are misguided, and they don't know what to do to correct course if something goes unplanned (sub-performing employee).