In my experience ever since, that's simply not true. There are "teflon engineers" out there who can get virtually nothing done and make one mistake after another, and get away with it for years. While their coworkers who have only been at the company for a few months will be routinely called out on their mistakes, missed deadlines etc.
Some people are less fireable than others and I'm afraid it has little to do with how good they are at what they do.
- Tenured staff have a track record, if they are suddenly under-performing it seems more likely that their manager is to blame. Rather than a lack of ability.
- Tenured staff have institutional knowledge which can be hard to estimate and replace, the fact that a bad engineer still knows why something was done a certain way and can help others is sometimes sufficient.
- Tenured staff sometimes have implicit responsibilities that are unclear to new hires. An engineer with 10 years in the company might spend almost all of their time doing some form of product/tech leadership. The rare times they write code it may be deficient in some manner or another.
- Tenured staff know how to read the tea leaves. The fact that they are still with the company likely indicates that they know how to avoid situations where they will get let go. Sometimes this is as simple as hopping on maintenance work for profitable systems.
On the other hand, a new engineer doing their first project may actually not have the skills to get the project done. Or, more likely they were hired for new initiatives that leadership is fundamentally skeptical of.
Now, some profitable systems are slowly bitrotting and tenured engineers can keep busy doing routine work while failing to address or escalate the bitrot. But I think people who are good at making sure boring and stable things stay boring and stable are usually underappreciated.
The teflon engineers don't seem smart and probably can't get things done on time if at all.
While the sensitive engineer seems unpleasant to work with, while not contributing at all.
Neil Gaiman has a knack of saying immensely compelling stuff, that's all there is.
Does anyone have tips for having high code standards, but still pleasant to work with? I got feedback that I have high standards, but I also go to the effort of explaining why I think an approach is better in code reviews and don't talk down to people in code reviews (and got feedback saying this), but I'm not sure it's enough.
But you gotta treat them right. Everyone becomes unpleasant in a bad environment
That would be Wally from the Dilbert comic strips...
I have seen that when the employee in question has much lower salary requirements than others, appearing to provide a sort of false economy to management, even as their actual value is entirely negative.
I accidentally solved one of those problems, myself... having stumbled upon evidence a very poorly performing employee was reading articles on the web most of the day, only doing a few minutes of coding and taking some steps to hide logging of this fact (which was actually the part that caught my attention). Setting up screen recording and running it for several days hammered the point home. Said employee at the end of this period conveniently reported running into technical difficulties with their project, necessitating more time to work on it. That nicely drove the point home, putting the final nail in and effectively catapulting them out the door...
It’s worst when the person who is doing badly at their job is a nice, well-liked person like “Bob” in this article.
But it helps when you realize everyone involved in that situation (a person is dragging the team down) is miserable, and the misery only ends when that person leaves. It also helps when you realize there’s a really good chance the person who needs to leave is the most miserable of all - they know they’re operating in a low-trust environment and it sucks.
I think there’s a lot to be said for “person-job fit.” Sometimes people really excel in one job and really struggle in another, but even folks who are really struggling are likely change averse and reluctant to do the work to go find a new job. In that case, severance can actually be a blessing.
That was me once. The severance I got helped me immensely by freeing me up to hunt for a better job full-time. Once I was out from under the soul-crushing drag of the bad-fit job, I realized I didn’t even want to be in that line of work, and changed careers. I’ve been much, much happier since.
As someone that has performed exceptionally well in high-trust environments, and essentially not performed in a no-trust environment I can confirm that the latter is both miserable and terrifying.
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.
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.
When I was a new manager I noticed an employee that would just get everything wrong and do things with a low amount of quality.
Turns out the problem was with me. As a new manager I failed to communicate and define objectives clearly. I simply assumed such things were obvious. The employee assumed different things and as a result his work output and what I expected were mismatched.
After some time reviewing my own behavior I began spending a huge amount of time defining and planning out the scope of the project at hand. I take the time to make sure that objectives and what's needed are completely clear. When I did this the employee in question delivered beyond expectations.
Turns out this guy was a literal technical genius and that his performance problems were largely communication problems on my part. The guy can literally solve technical issues no other engineer can solve and could finish his tasks twice as fast.
Other high performing employees I realized weren't necessarily technically advanced. They were just better at predicting and meeting my expectations and that was the key. They were managing me, and I wasn't doing any management.
If I hadn't reviewed my own behavior I would've went down the wrong road of firing a technically superior engineer while only keeping the people that could "manage up" better.
I will say that there are tons and tons of managers who don't realize this and even adopt a philosophy around managing as little as possible. What these managers don't know is more than likely they are letting go of engineers who are not only technically competent but technically superior by subconsciously pre-selecting for people who are better at predicting what you want rather then people who are technical wizards. You can recognize these types of managers as they have a bias for certain types of engineers who take "ownership" of something or essentially manage a product so you don't have to. These people are good people to hire but at the same time this philosophy is not scalable.
There are places for both types of people in a company and a company does worse if it only has one type.
But I do wonder if you're not extrapolating too much from this single case. Just because you made the mistake once doesn't necessarily mean it is very common per se.
Weird to me that I was trusted with interviewing around the same time, but cut loose. No warnings about performance or anything else of the sort. And since it was "without cause", no reasoning was given.
I suspect I was just unpopular with my managers, and I was maybe too vocal about my issues with the codebase.
Anyways, I got a new job and got promoted to team lead 5 months after starting there. My managers and even the VP of my department have given me great reviews.
Sometimes it really just is your environment.
The 2 times which were unfair, I learned that people can be unjust, spiteful and irrational; I learned to recognize and avoid working for such people later in my career.
The time when I got fired after burning out, I learned to be more attuned to my own feelings and to never allow myself work on something that I don't enjoy. It made me more selective about opportunities.
Tellingly, none of the places I got fired from ended up succeeding... On the other hand, one of the startups which I spent the most years working for is doing quite well.
Every time you get fired, you can learn something important; maybe you were overly ambitious and your skills don't yet measure up to the role or you made a poor choice when it came to company selection.
Getting fired can mean a lot of things, not only negative things. Aiming high can be seen as a positive attribute. Being willing to step outside of your comfort zone can also be seen as a positive (even if it didn't work out). I always learned a lot, even if sometimes I was learning by counter-example; by observing other people's mistakes as well as my own.
Also, people need to feel pressure in their lives. We need to learn how to fall and how to get back up. It's OK to fall. It's good to assert yourself and take risks, even if it means putting yourself in the firing line.
How your manager perceives you and his ability to perceive things and his personality influences everything.
What is interesting is that most of the time (4 of the 5 times) the person understands fully, gets their shit in order, and goes out and gets another more appropriate job. These firings are good for the team, and so far as I can tell, good for the individual.
One time, however, the individual didn't see it this way, and went to great lengths to keep their cushy sinecure, including but not limited to reporting random things about teammates to HR. This burned a lot of bridges, and I'm really surprised this person did this. It showed a huge lack of awareness of social convention and a startling degree of unprofessionalism.
I helped about 60% of them find new jobs, and one entire team I managed to actually get hired together as a team (and they all got a pay raise), but baptism of fire or what. I got through a lot of whisky that week.
Firing people sucks. It was actually the right move for the business in this case and we are lucky enough that the market for tech in general is fairly good in any given large city, but argh. That was a shite week.
> One time, however, the individual didn't see it this way, and went to great lengths to keep their cushy sinecure, including but not limited to reporting random things about teammates to HR. This burned a lot of bridges, and I'm really surprised this person did this. It showed a huge lack of awareness of social convention and a startling degree of unprofessionalism.
One thing I've learned is you can't project your own morals/ideals/whatever onto anyone, even if you think you really 'know' them having worked with them for some time. You never really know what's going on, and shouldn't make assumptions. It's difficult, but after a while, you learn to just follow the process and try to placate the rest of the team.
'Yep, I know <so and so> is doing that, yes, I knew it before you. Yep, I'm working on it. No, can't talk about it. How about we figure out together what crap we can give <so and so> to do that won't block anyone else while that process goes?' etc.
I assume this was part of the deal? You can't say "hey, would you like to head-up engineering" without knowing this would be your first big assignment.
I work at anduril and I know of a new manager who 6 months into the job fired 2 people and had one person quit because he couldn't handle dealing with him.
The manager obviously is blind to see the statistical significance of that many people gone in 6 months. He likely views it as a performance problem of 3 people rather then the more likely 'him' problem.
Keep in mind if you're fired it has hugely to do with the perspective and the personality of the people judging your work. Sometimes that judgement is valid, but just as often it is not valid at all. Additionally keep in mind the political motivations and machinations going on in the background. Along with firing people for political reasons... Many people not suited to be managers.
If you find yourself in that situation where you are fired do not ignore the reasoning behind why your manager fired you but also be sure to weigh it against many other opinions because often your manager is making an unjustified decision.
A lot of the stories in this article are justified though. One person was judged and placed under several people so they could all make an accurate assessment before piling the plug.
You can't tell from "statistical significance" if a firing is good or not. Maybe those three people have needed to be fitted for a while. Maybe, as the article says, it comes down to job-fit and the three employees are great people in the wrong job.
There are bad managers. But you can't identify them solely based on numerical analysis of turnover.
3 people being simultaneously not fit for the job is quite unlikely.
You have a choice here. Either 1 person is unfit for the job or 3 people. 1 person being unfit though not for sure is Far more likely.
By one person I mean the manager is not fit. But in these cases usually the manager side steps the numbers and thinks he's doing the right thing.
Having your manager fire someone that really needs to be fired can be massive relief though, I think that is pretty much the only case where there is much of a sunny side.
I've been on a team where a bad player was removed and the whole team was noticeably better performing a month later. It sounds a little "woo woo" to say it, but I think a lot of energy was freed up by the firing. Instead of thinking about how to deal with our bad teammate, we could focus on getting our work done.
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> There are jobs that are bad fits, but not bad employees.
>
> Scenario 3: Summarily Dismissed
> OK, that’s not entirely true.
Made me chuckle. So did
> We were not asking for him to be fired. Except we were.
It's funny how the perspective shifts to reality given some distance and time.
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I also thought he might be wrong about Bob; maybe Bob can and did or will learn good software development principles. Perhaps Mad Ned is being unnecessarily harsh. Or perhaps I'm overly optimistic. But I remember a time when I couldn't write code very well at all. Now, I can, at least when the stars align properly... and one of the nice things about code is the malleable nature of it: get it right once, and it is in source code management history forever.
He was moved around between a few managers after he passed the zenith of his 15 year stint at that company, but from what I was able to piece together he didn't succeed in bringing a single feature to production in the last five years he was there. He was just so darned friendly and smart that nobody was willing to do the needful and separate him.
I'm primarily a self-taught developer. Can anyone recommend some resources (e.g., books about professional software engineering practices) so that I don't end up like Bob?
To answer your question: The Pragmatic Programmer by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt, Writing Solid Code by Steve Maguire, and Code Complete by Steve McConnell.
Either people won't trust it's 100% anonymous, won't see an upside for themselves or maybe bad actors.
It's just as possible that Bob's colleagues were anally retentive simpletons that couldn't handle the truth of his code, as it is that Bob is a loosy-goosy house of cards coder whose results were always C- material (I've worked with both.)
Point being, if you want to keep your job you should aspire to be a good 'culture fit' and if you want to be a good developer then work with great people and read more source code than you write.
Books are good, but if you are new at the company or do not know how it works, find a few more senior folks who are doing well and ask them for advice. Run your architecture / solutions past them, ask for opinions, etc.
I think a vast majority of folks fired like Bob just did not listen to strong, non-subtle signals from the company trying to prevent the firing. My 2c.
I re-skimmed it recently, and it still held up, but the advice has influenced a lot of other writers so it may not feel as profound as it was then, but I think it's sound advice in terms of software craftsmanship.
It's also worth noting that Code Complete biases toward processes that work for a large company where there's lots of cross-team collaboration. The advice is good in general, but you should weigh certain parts less if you're working on a smaller company and especially a fast-moving startup.
Also Joel Spolsky's blog is fantastic.
Perhaps Bob was an engineer with a long record of success in other teams, who was surprised and justifiably defensive when his colleagues weren't happy with his work and demanded he do things differently for vague reasons that didn't make sense.
He's probably much happier now that he's in a more compatible team. Perhaps he's the guy in the photo.
They suck. We are allowed our "negative" emotions. We need to allow the shame and fear and anger and bitterness and sadness. We need to be able to voice these. And not forced to hide them for the sake of a society that doesn't want to see these. Or for our peers and their well being.
But as said. I might be tainted by experience and misread you.
I think that seeing people happily go through dreadful events would be therapeutic for some people because it would reduce the anxiety that people experience when anticipating these events happening in the future.
I hope my organization has the insight to know where the person I am letting go would be a better fit in... and has the influence to recommend them there inside the organization or another one.
If the fired person is fit for no place of work in the or circle of influence in the current state of the organization, I hope we would still be able to provide support for them while giving them the opportunity to still engage in the orgaznization until they find an alternative... or find a useful opportunity inside when things change or when they they change i.e. acquire the skills that may be more useful to the organization.
I don't know how this can be made possible... i.e. what the organizational values that will be required to be able to achieve this while still being sustainable... or if government involvement is required and how can organizations fund tho government programs through taxes.
It’s also not easy to predict how a fired employee will react, but gets easier with experience. But big companies don’t leave room for any continued engagement for this reason- after layoffs they provide support at significant arm’s length.
I've seen a scenario where 2 people at anduril (where I work) were fired in 6 months and 1 person quit to get away from the manager. Statistically in this case it's a managerial problem and you need to place those employees in different teams to know that it's the manager that's the problem and not the employee.
Simply assuming the employee is the problem without additional oversight is the wrong path.
>take your good intentions and put them into a retrospective and action plan to fix the organization
May be this will be the path to get there. I doubt it will happen by a political plan designed by career politicians out of popular fantacies they like to sell to the masses... which then they plan to impose on everyone. That approach will most likely backfire in unexpected ways. I believe it will have to happen organically and will most likely will come about in the most successful organizations who can afford to build it... at least in the beginning... before it becomes available to everyone.
Also, it is important to make organizations responsible for this and not end up with individuals funding this through increased taxes for the working class. Next time your favourite billionaire talks about UBI or something similar, ask them if they are willing to offer unemployment benefits or something like an UBI to people they hired and let go from the corporation itself... or if they are willing to pool in extra taxes for this purpose so that multiple organizations can offer this to their former employees. They have incentives to make it the "government's problem" i.e. just use the income taxes from the working class to make this happen... and they absolve them of any responsibility and commitment to make this work.
After a few gigs that didn't go great, I ended up at a research org, where my less than perfect code that would do things in a non-scalable way was actually appreciated and a benefit. This org had amazing engineering capabilities, and amazing research. I was an oddball that straddled the line between the two.
My engineering improved slowly, and I eventually ended up in management, and now run two start-ups. I don't get to code much at all any more, but the experience has given me a new direction in life.
It's great when a manager can recognize that even though you're not the right fit for that company, it's possible your weakness there could be a benefit to someone else.
I can't remember who I was listening to on a podcast, but they said that rather than firing people, they would regularly recommend they go work for a competitor. :)
This was me. The small firm I worked for went belly up during the dot com burst when all our contracts dried up. But, I ended up getting an amazing job at a Fortune 500 company where I still am this day. I have had an amazing career and it is largely thanks to losing my job back then.
I have seen in the past. They fired promising engineers out of the blue (no negative feedback until then) and for completely random and unprofessional reasons given, e.g. we think you don’t like us.
They can certainly drive the decision, but they need the buy in of others too.
I have seen it happening.
I had previous experience working in research, and tended towards a more hacker's style of coding that had always been good enough for the prestigious lab where I interned. Looking back, the older guys on my team were signaling disapproval to management but would never correct me to my face, and never offered constructive feedback. My manager was largely the same way. People in tech tend to be terrified of controversy and struggle with conflict.
Getting PIP'd was the best thing for me, because it established clear standards and goals for me in my role. In sixth months, I got promoted. Sometimes it's a communication thing.
There are cases where a late-stage startup got into too many businesses and the next investor wants them to cut a line of business. Like I can imagine Uber having to shed UberEats if that was going poorly, but the investor liked the core driving business.
Publishing an article about firing and only talking about cases where someone went to jail for assaulting his wife, or where the company is about to run out of money, is not exactly helpful to the founder agonizing over what to do about his head of marketing who isn't scaling effectively.
I was woefully unprepared, having worked mostly meaningless jobs up until then. I was complacent and lazy and took the opportunity I had been given for granted. I started out strong and did good work for the first few sprints, but fell back on my old habits.
At the same time, my supervisors seemed to have unrealistic expectations for a first-time software professional. The team also despised pair-programming (even if done occasionally), and the dread and resentment any time I asked for help were palpable.
A couple of months in, a supervisor started dropping hints that they weren’t happy with the quantity nor quality of my contributions. The 100-day check-in was a trainwreck. Half an hour or so of two supervisors dumping on me. The only kinda positive thing mentioned was that I “socialize well”.
I was eventually given typed meeting notes, and they considered that my PIP. The next few months had ups and downs but overall nobody was happy. I started responding to recruiters and exploring potential new jobs, but the company already had my exit in motion. After about 10 months total, I was fired because I was late finishing my work and “depending too much on other developers”.
The timing and manner of my firing were humiliating, as were the terms of my severance.
I was initially heartbroken, and went through the five stages. In retrospect, I still have mixed feelings about everything that happened. I really tried to get my act together and do better work, but was never given any structure or support. It seems their mind had already been made up at 100 days, and they just wanted to get their ducks in a row before firing me.
Fortunately, I found another job not too long after getting fired. I felt I had learned my lesson, and came out very strong out of the gate and worked harder to sustain that. There was also more structure and collaboration. We got more learning resources (we were basically expected to learn on our own time, with our own money, at the first company). My teammates and supervisors liked me, and were patient in giving me time to learn and grow. The salary and benefits were much better. I eventually left after less than 2 years because I felt I had hit a ceiling and couldn’t grow much more within our legacy tech stack, and I didn’t want to get pigeonholed and have to write enterprise Java for the rest of my career.
I’m now in my third industry role, learning and collaborating more, using the coolest tech stack ever, and making even more money. I’m even playing a leading role in team-wide learning initiatives, and I’ve had opportunities to evaluate potential new hires. I feel infinitely more happy than I was at the first company (and a lot happier than I was at the second).
I’m writing this partly for catharsis, but also to provide an example of being fired not meaning the end of the world, and in my case it ended up being a blessing in disguise.
The first company also seems to have found devs who worked out much better for them, and they even got acquired by a larger company in their space.
So overall I think it ended up being a win-win.
Ultimately I think there were a variety of factors always. Our company did less and less cutting edge neural network research, and more software development. It slowly turned from informal and small to scaled and rigorous software development. I couldn't keep up, career-wise, and I can definitely say everyone of us involved gave it our best shot to make it work. Despite everything else, it was hard to leave. The employees are good employees, and I like them a lot. I'll miss that group of people.
Something I found interesting too was that there's an interesting budget trade-off between struggling in a job position and struggling emotionally when moving towards a fire/layoff threshold. I went through a rather terrible time a year or two ago when a lot of cumulative trauma came to head and opened up in my personal life. We had a pretty generous vacation policy -- 45 days a year (yes), and all of that for ~1.5 years was used to supplement my hours, though I technically swapped in FMLA for some of it. Not having vacations definitely added to things. But there was an interesting tight race that happened that as I recovered, there was some pile of damage that had built that I wasn't able to really resolve yet, but was able to just stay productive enough to keep it from triggering a letgo condition.
Then of course the present. Feeling a lot better about my interactions with self and other, but enough of a period of struggle that only actions really can show that turning around. Buoyed by some confidence, I took a few risks and fell on my face, and tipped off a signal I'd thought I was pretty far from. It was a hard process for all of us.
Of course there's the feelings of shame, etc. But I think getting to have an empathetic conversation and knowing it was a "lack of work" rather than behavioral primarily (or much at all) really salved it. Now I'm tangled in a huge mess with a very overarching IP clause that's tangling the job search, but after a long break for the burnout just to keep the job, I think maybe it's time to go part time and just travel the country or something. Make friends, focus on a garden plot, and catch up on all the life I missed. With how strict our hours were plus other obligations, I was spending 10-12+ hours on work and work-related stuff each day. Humans weren't designed for that.
Anyways, hope that was an interesting account. I think I can see the struggles, and like most things I think it was out of most of our hands despite best efforts. I still thrive in nn research, so it will be nice to really get back to that more.
There are times when workers feel they’ve been lied to when they have simply misread or misheard some communication from their manager. This is an actual communication that I recently had with a freelancer I was working with, putting together some preliminary numbers for a marketing campaign:
Me: About Task 3, can you wrap this up by Thursday or Friday?
Them: I’m busy on Thursday, but I can get to Task 3 on Friday or Saturday.
Me: Are you sure you can’t get this done on Friday?
Them: I don’t know. I’ve got some things scheduled for the afternoon on Friday. I’m not sure how long that might go into the evening. But I can get it to you by Saturday afternoon, for sure.
Me: Look, this doesn’t have to be perfect. Don’t go overboard. Just put in what time you can on Thursday and Friday. In this case speed is more important than quality. Whatever you can do is fine.
Around 9 PM on Friday I had not heard from them, so I wrote to them again:
Me: Hey, can you please send me whatever you’ve got regarding Task 3?
Them: I told you, I can get it to you by Saturday afternoon.
Me: I told you the deadline was Friday.
Them: You never said the deadline was Friday.
Me: What I said was, whatever you have by this point, Friday night, is fine. I think I said that speed is more important than quality.
Them: Yeah, but you never said that Friday was the deadline.
Me: Okay, that’s fine, but please send me what you have.
They sent over what they’d done so far, and it was fine. In this case, we were both a little bit in the wrong, in that neither of us made explicit what the deadline was. I thought I’d been reasonably clear that by Friday night they should just send me whatever they had, but they felt that I’d authorized them to keep going until Saturday. It’s important to be very clear about expectations, otherwise workers hear what they want to hear and then they sometimes feel that you lied to them.
In this case, I simply failed to make 100% explicit that the deadline was Friday night. If I had invested a little more time into the communication, I probably would have made clear what my expectations were.
I've previously suggested that larger, stable firms should do more to offer some kind of apprenticeships to novice tech workers. But in small startups, when the whole team is just 4 of 5 people, often you need for everyone on that team to be perfect, so if someone on that team isn't perfect, you need to be fast to fire people. This was one of the main conclusions that I put in my book "How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps."
If this is the culture then the person being cut loose is the winner. Not much warning is bad management / leadership.
What should absolutely be done is inform him of the exact performance problem and steps to improve. An actual well intended PIP and not just a way to throw someone out.
The difference being that being fired suggests the employee did something to deserve it, but being made redundant could happen to the best of employees.
By the time you have to fire somebody, that's usually a huge relief.
Personally I think people with your style of personality aren't suited to be managers.
To the other replier: it's definitely not sarcasm.
