I'd straight up not work for a place that took this approach. Seems like a great way to fuck over the folks who made a big life change to join you. Though this philosophy is probably super effective, as long as you're willing to not think about the effects it has on others. Yikes!
Seems to work for Netflix, who is very up front about this philosophy. Of course, a big part of this is they do pair it with an incredibly generous severance package.
Personally, I would jump at the chance to work at a company with this philosophy, even if I ended up being the one getting canned. I don't think I've ever worked at a company that fired "too fast", if anything it was clear that some folks were clearly not going to succeed, but hard decisions were avoided, which took down the productivity of everyone involved, and when the folks were eventually let go or left on their own they usually ended up still being super bitter. A reluctance to fire, in my experience, just really translates into a company that has difficulty making hard decisions.
As someone who’s worked at Netflix, I feel the whole philosophy is a little too glorified.
The first thing you have to remember is that Netflix pays a lot (a lot lot). The idea of expecting high performance only works when it’s accompanied with substantial benefits.
Second, Netflix does “fire fast” but not in the sense most people interpret it. New hires are given enough scaffolding to succeed. It’s not like other companies where they expect people to come onboard as revolutionaries and create impact in a month.
Third, high performance isn’t a constant like most people pretend it is. Netflix has managers who understand this fact and support their employees when things go down. They aren’t ruthless maniacs who fire you the first week you take a breather. And most managers who try to copy this elsewhere, miss that point.
I agree with everything you've written, but to be clear, I don't think a reasonable version of the "fire fast" mentality means you throw people in the deep end with no support and then can them at the earliest moment if they struggle.
But I do think it means that when it becomes clear that it's not working out, and the reason for it not working out is pretty fundamental to the employee's personality or aptitude, that you make a decision to let them go quickly and fairly.
It's really easy to have this attitude when you don't really think it will ever happen to you. I'm also guessing you've never been the target of harassment. I don't think you're going to like it as much when you're really excited about the job and on your first day you find out that the superstar developer on the team Gill just doesn't like you, never did. He was the one person who said they shouldn't hire you and is now pissed that he was overruled. Turns out Gill doesn't like not getting his way. You find yourself socially isolated because everyone knows what Gill is like and that he doesn't like you. Being seen talking to you isn't worth getting on Gill's bad side.
You get the shit assignments and code reviews are really rough. Especially the ones where Gill's around. Then you get hauled into the office about some problem with something you did. It isn't clear if it was something you did but it seems to be related to something Gill's working on. Gill's the super star and you're just the new guy so you can guess who caught the heat. It didn't go well when you suggested it might be Gill's fault. Turns out Gill was in the office right before you and he's telling a different story and they let you know what a superstar he is and everything he's done for the company over the years. It's clear that Gill's just going to grind you down as your quality of life decreases, you start losing sleep, acting out from the stress, you snap at your wife, children, and friends because you're still upset about something Gill did to you at work.
See the problem now or are you just imagining yourself as Gill?
This feels exactly how firing at most companies without firing fast works. Whether Gill is a standup upstart decent worker, or ehether maybe yeah Gill isnt really fitting in. There's no process, no review, no structure, and more and more people using gossip & feel to decide where they stand on Gill, & whether or not he's worth a lick or semi productive or mostly not competemt. Doubt circles all of us, almost all of us, to some degree; even the best as they encounter strong & weak situations for them. When doubts start flying many teammates semi-covertly hide it, many attempt politeness, ignorance, keeping it to ourselves. But the picture just gets clearer & clearer, more & more apparent, & oh-they-were-underperforming Gill keeps feeling more pressure to quit.
The structurelessness & lack of a system, pressuring someone out, is no favor for Gill, but it seems like how it usually works.
i've seen 1 person in my career put on a performance improvement plan & let go. i've seen 5 fall out of general favor & get driven off. feels very lopsided & hard to see, grapple with.
On the flip side, firing people around Gill, who he doesn't like, fast will make it apparent that Gill is the problem much more quickly than just keeping everyone around when things aren't working.
It just reinforces what Gill has been saying all along, that most of the applicants out there really suck and it's impossible to find good people. That's why you better listen to him because if he ever decides to leave they're screwed. He's the most dependable employee. After four turnovers of the staff he's still there heroically keeping things going.
Yeah, Netflix appears to do it in a reasonable way. I would be perfectly fine taking an offer to work there.
But I've more frequently heard stories of others who see "fire fast" solely as a way to save money and also avoid having to ever train or mentor. That's bad for the employee, and not a place I'd work, if I knew it in advance.
If you're looking to structure your employees' comp with a heavy equity component that takes a while to vest, "fire fast" becomes especially dangerous for the employee.
"People are fired when they underperform their peers [over some time window]" is much more common, since most organizations have a very fuzzy grasp exactly on value returned per employee.
Candidates should try to be aware of companies that won't give new hires much of a time window to prove their performance level or value creation. Especially if large amounts of their compensation depend on going at least 12 months without getting fired.
Companies indeed often have a fuzzy grasp. But you can do things like point out how your work got the product to market X days sooner, and point out the profit per day of sales times X. Or point out how you fixed Major Customer Y's problem, ensuring a steady revenue stream from that happy customer. Or point out how you sped up the code in the datacenter by 1%, meaning 1% less needs to be spent on the datacenter.
At Boeing, the accountants managed to pin down the cost of one pound of airplane weight. At the time, it was $250,000 per pound. This made it easy to point out to the boss how much money you'd saved the company by doing weight reductions. I.e. if you saved a pound, that was the equivalent of 6 years salary. Time to bring up that raise you deserve!
I pretty strongly disagree this is actually possible (and not just be an exercise of made-up statistics) at any sizable company.
Look at Google for example. I'm quite sure that a very large percentage, if not majority, of the employees at Google produce net negative value. The problem, of course, is that it's impossible to know which ones. I know a bunch of people (brilliant people, mind you) that worked years on products at Google that never shipped, or worked on products that shipped but were discontinued long before they were ever profitable. But Google is willing to make these investments because they believe that, one day, one or two of them will pay off spectacularly.
I mean, Waymo has certainly never been profitable (heck they've barely had any revenue) - what do their employees argue?
The employee needs to be profitable, not the aggregate of all the employees.
As for speculative research projects, nothing succeeds like success (making money). Researchers who produce loser after loser projects I expect would be much more likely to be fired than researchers who had a win big enough to cover their losing projects.
> possible
The whole field of cost accounting is devoted to figuring this out.
Back in the 70s, I attended Caltech when Feynman was on the staff. It came up in conversation that Feynman was making a salary of something like $55,000 (a lot of money in those days). I said what could anyone do to justify paying him such a salary. A grad student laughed and said "you don't understand. Feynman doesn't need to do anything to be worth that salary. He just has to be on the staff, which attracts donor money and draws top talent to Caltech."
Of course, he was right.
But also, Feynman being Feynman, did do an awful lot as well.
In many universities and companies, you'll find such "prestige" staff.
This is typical breakup scenario. Yes getting fired sucks, but it’s probably best in the long run. Wasting an employee’s time in an environment where they’re definitely not going to succeed is not good for anyone.
There is an important nuance here in that it assumes that all employers understand that someone being fired can just mean that they weren't a good fit for that particular position. I'm not sure that is universally understood. I would be that most people still look at firing as an indication that the employee is no good. That isn't necessarily correct at all, but unfortunately I do think it's how the majority of people perceive things.
I have some issues with the "fire fast" philosophy, but this is not really one of them. Companies don't generally even divulge that they fired someone when giving a reference. They will say the employee is "not eligible for rehire," which is frequently code for "we fired this person for cause," and is generally interpreted that way. I do wish they would just come out and say that the person was terminated for cause, so others wouldn't have to guess, but that's not even really related to the "fire fast" issue.
Yes, and given that being without employment (really, without income, but those are equivalent for most people) for long enough is literally a life or death situation, you're fully justified in that by lying about it in self defense. If you're privileged enough that not having any income for an extended period isn't a big deal, then, so what? But, if you aren't, lie.
You don't need to lie, but you also don't need to disclose every single thing to your new employer. If you had a short stint at a company, just leave it off. If they ask, just say you took some personal time to figure out what you wanted to do next. I think that's a totally valid description of trying a new job that didn't work out. I know a lot of people who have taken years off for fun. No one questioned it.
"Fire fast" can mean you get canned after a 6 month probation period (I know I was at one place). Explaining a 6 month gap is just barely possible if you leave it off, two of those in a row and it's a substantial chunk of anyone's career.
That's a two way street. An employee who knows he'd be a better fit in some other position should proactively agitate for it, rather than hoping the boss will guess it on his own.
If you assume that the breakup is inevitable, yes. Working through issues is another possibility; firing fast misses that opportunity and sacrifices potential loyalty in the process.
> Seems like a great way to fuck over the folks who made a big life change to join you.
Most companies are motivated by profit, and will, therefore, gladly pay someone to fill a role that earns them more money than it costs. I don't see severing a non-mutually beneficial relationship as fucking someone over.
If you are in a position that being let go would be horribly detrimental to your personal and financial goals, looking for a company that is very slow to fire may be a good way to go. However, that is for your benefit, not the company's. I was targeting my advice at employers.
Not in software. At least not in the US. I have very little fear of being let go. If it's not a good fit, I'd personally rather spend my time elsewhere.
I believe the thrust of the GP's point is that your position is quite particular to you, as there are plenty of highly-skilled, highly-paid professional software developers, even in the US, who struggle to find good, well-paid work quickly after being laid off, so have legitimate reason to worry about being let go.
For example, that may be due to any combination of age, skin colour, geography, ethnicity, visa/citizenship, neurodivergence, gender, family dependents, or other factors outside the person's control, helpfully summarised by the umbrella word "privilege".
After all, as is often said here, hiring is broken. It's not enough to be highly skilled.
I had to re-read both your comments carefully to understand them from that perspective.
Though you didn't intend to generalise, your refutation can be (and clearly was) parsed as an assertion about a whole category of people not having the high relative risk, rather than a singular counteraxample to say not everyone in the category has that risk. Your followup comment could also be parsed that way, unfortunately.
I think what motivated Bud's reply, and then mine because your followed appeared to entrench the position, is that it's common around here for people to talk as though virtually all software professionals are paid well and can easily slide into great new jobs as and when they want to, when really there's a huge "underclass" of software professionals who feel shut out of that nice world.
I understand. Sorry if I was unnecessarily curt in the reply. Most of the disagreements I get in replies are reacting to an extrapolation, implication, or association I did not intend to make.
> I think what motivated Bud's reply, and then mine because your followed appeared to entrench the position, is that it's common around here for people to talk as though virtually all software professionals are paid well and can easily slide into great new jobs as and when they want to, when really there's a huge "underclass" of software professionals who feel shut out of that nice world.
I get it. I was once in a similar boat, so I understand the feeling.
He's been pretty up front that he's looking for young people, both in this podcast and on the previous messaging of Pioneer.
The cost to someone in their early 20s to take a job for a month or two and then hop to another one isn't very high compared to someone far enough into their career to likely be making changes for their family and possibly face more judgement for a short stint from future interviewers.
Using language like "fire fast" might presuppose a situation where someone is going to be "hired" - possibly involving a lot of work, life changes, and moving/other expenses - only to have their effort/money wasted when they are "fired fast".
What if instead of "fire fast", the idea was re-framed/restructured into the new employee initially working as some sort of consultant with a short term contract? Use telecommuting/work-from-home or other temporary workarounds to defer expensive/disruptive things like moving to live near the company until after the defined "trial" period. Instead of "firing fast", you either let the temporary consulting contract expire or you proceed with the actual hiring process and the deferred tasks.
Maybe this isn't possible in practice, but it seems like we could design a workaround to this problem if were sufficiently creative.
> think about the effects it has on others
Unfortunately, that takes proactive effort. Unless there is a mechanism to actively incentivize spending time and energy to protect others, most of the time that effort will be spent on "more important" things. ~sigh~
Yeah, the stigma of getting fired is bad for the employee. They may not have been a good fit for your team, but now other companies will automatically feel they're not a good fit for their team either.
Not firing fast is like cutting the dog's tail piece by piece. Every time I have tried to give an employee another chance, I have ultimately regretted it in the end.
I'd straight up not work for a place that took this approach. Seems like a great way to fuck over the folks who made a big life change to join you. Though this philosophy is probably super effective, as long as you're willing to not think about the effects it has on others. Yikes!