I came here to say something similar. I'm a founder, I've been a manager and a software engineer, I did 5 years @ Google.
When I hear someone in "upper management / founder / in a position of power over employee's lives" say that what they really needed for their own success was a way to threaten/risk the livelihood of their employees so that they would work harder, it just makes me sad for anyone affected by them.
Yes, sometimes employees need to be fired... but sometimes management also needs restructuring. The truth of the matter is that at a company the size of Google, it gets harder and harder for an individual employee to directly influence success. I think that's mostly because of the policies in place to make sure that employees don't directly *damage* success either.
This means that you have to work within the system you have. An employment contract is two-sided, you're offering something that the employee wants, and they're offering something that you want. If your first reaction when there's a problem is to cut their pay or fire them, then you're the one with the problem, not them.
Yes, there are times you need to fire someone (and I have), but that should be reserved for one of two cases: 1) they are actively damaging the business (e.g. destroying company property, morale, hurting business prospects), or 2) despite your best efforts, they are unable/unwilling to fulfill their side of the contract. Just realize that firing someone has a cost for your company and team as well as for the employee.
I'd rather part ways amicably, finding them something that works for them if possible, and I think what Noam said about managers recommending great employees is unfair both to the managers and the employees. I've had employees who were hard-working and passionate, just not passionate about the project they were working on. When that happens, the best thing you can do for both of you is to find them the fit that works.
Can you build a large company that doesn't get mired down in things like management and governance and legal and policy? I hope to someday get large enough to find out, because I've got some ideas... (Like separating those functions out in the same way there are engineering teams dedicated to software tooling.)
But it requires a will and effort from the top down, and the people who get excited about building billion dollar businesses don't seem to get excited about maintaining them once they get that size.
I came specifically to the comments for this. Yes, great comment from your side as I disagreed with the fire mentality of the article.
Even if sometimes people need to get fired, I’d say it is more important to make a good hire upfront and normally these people should be very capable and adapt to these dynamic environments.
Just firing on the quickest difficulty says something about beeing rather a bad manager or not knowing how to hire / what to look for.
I’ve seen many incompetent managers firing their tech leader or program leaders just because it did not meet the set arbitrary delivery goals. By firing them it only reinforced the managing-by-fear way of working and lead to a cover-you-a* mentality that things just became even slower...
Thanks for your comment and I wish there were more managers like you!
I wish I could give you more than one upvote for this.
I work for a huge company. For every person I've worked with who I thought needed to go, there at at least 10 (probably more) who have become ineffective because of management,politics, and bureaucracy.
I had a very different view of "who should be fired" when I joined this company, but I think I've grown up a bit.
As I was writing that statement, I was sure that someone would ask this very same question, but I think explaining it in the middle of that paragraph would have distracted from the overall point I was making, so here it is apart:
Yes, sometimes management needs firing as well, but in the context of my comment above, we were talking about a case where one employee's performance doesn't match up with the expectations of their manager.
To put it in the context of software engineering, if you have an engineer responsible for ten features in a year, and nine of them are coming along just fine, but the tenth was completely bungled, it would be incredibly rare to think that it was time to fire the engineer over the tenth. You're more likely to restructure things so that the engineer has less of a workload, or has help on the tenth, or maybe even just give them a bad review and make it clear that their performance needs to improve.
Firing a manager has an even greater cost for a company and team than firing an employee because the manager is a representative of the relationship between their employees and the company, so firing a manager also damages that relationship for each of their employees.
This is not exclusive to managers. Other roles like engineering team leads and senior architects also have a greater cost, because they're the employees whose roles have a connection to more people than just themselves.
I came here to say something similar. I'm a founder, I've been a manager and a software engineer, I did 5 years @ Google.
When I hear someone in "upper management / founder / in a position of power over employee's lives" say that what they really needed for their own success was a way to threaten/risk the livelihood of their employees so that they would work harder, it just makes me sad for anyone affected by them.
Yes, sometimes employees need to be fired... but sometimes management also needs restructuring. The truth of the matter is that at a company the size of Google, it gets harder and harder for an individual employee to directly influence success. I think that's mostly because of the policies in place to make sure that employees don't directly *damage* success either.
This means that you have to work within the system you have. An employment contract is two-sided, you're offering something that the employee wants, and they're offering something that you want. If your first reaction when there's a problem is to cut their pay or fire them, then you're the one with the problem, not them.
Yes, there are times you need to fire someone (and I have), but that should be reserved for one of two cases: 1) they are actively damaging the business (e.g. destroying company property, morale, hurting business prospects), or 2) despite your best efforts, they are unable/unwilling to fulfill their side of the contract. Just realize that firing someone has a cost for your company and team as well as for the employee.
I'd rather part ways amicably, finding them something that works for them if possible, and I think what Noam said about managers recommending great employees is unfair both to the managers and the employees. I've had employees who were hard-working and passionate, just not passionate about the project they were working on. When that happens, the best thing you can do for both of you is to find them the fit that works.
Can you build a large company that doesn't get mired down in things like management and governance and legal and policy? I hope to someday get large enough to find out, because I've got some ideas... (Like separating those functions out in the same way there are engineering teams dedicated to software tooling.)
But it requires a will and effort from the top down, and the people who get excited about building billion dollar businesses don't seem to get excited about maintaining them once they get that size.