>>But 1 bad hire is easily correctable - you fire the person.

Not sure if you have ever been a manager, because firing someone is NEVER easy. It hurts everyone emotionally. The person getting fired feels awful. The person doing the firing feels awful (unless they are a real sociopath). And team morale tends to take a big hit.

Here is my stance: if you hire someone who isn't a good fit, unless they actively deceived you, it is your god damn job to find a way to make it work. As a principle you should treat people with respect and dignity, and not as easily disposable and replaceable cogs.

> it is your god damn job to find a way to make it work.

No, it isn't. This is why probation periods exist. If you hired someone and they aren't working out, then at the end of the probation period you don't keep them on.

Trying to force someone who doesn't fit the team dynamic to stay is going to hurt your org. It doesn't make you a "good" manager to say to everyone "I know this sucks but deal with it because letting them go would mean I was wrong."

> As a principle you should treat people with respect and dignity, and not as easily disposable and replaceable cogs.

Which is ironic because so many job descriptions I see today are basically written as "we want to hire someone with exactly these skills, who requires zero training, and can become an expert in our systems in their first week."

No one is that way, unless your system consists of pressing one button all day, but then the job description would probably require that the person have intricate knowledge of the button and is friends with the engineer who designed it so they know what to do if the button suddenly stops working.

If companies actually treated people with respect and dignity, I'd get the training I need to become a better employee, instead of going to management and begging them for any training every 6 months like the industry is now.

/rant

> Trying to force someone who doesn't fit the team dynamic to stay is going to hurt your org.

Doesn't this rather presume that your "team dynamic" is actually good to start with?

Let's say you had a team of not very good engineers. Then you hired quite a good engineer who looked at all the terrible practices (e.g. no version control, shitty or nonexistent testing, poor build processes) and said to themselves "look, I need to fix this shit or I'm leaving, and I've got ten better offers in my inbox".

They might not be a very good team fit, but that's because the team is filled with idiots who haven't figured out how to use version control or whatever.

So, you know, the best thing to do is to get rid of them for not being a culture fit or for not being good for the team dynamic...?

> They might not be a very good team fit, but that's because the team is filled with idiots who haven't figured out how to use version control or whatever.

Yes, if you have a team like this and you hire someone who has a higher standard, there is going to be some friction between them and the existing team members. Letting that person go isn't your concern, because as you said yourself:

> and said to themselves "look, I need to fix this shit or I'm leaving, and I've got ten better offers in my inbox".

I've been in that situation before. I was hired to a company and when I got there I found out that every single day they were fighting fires because of stupid decisions management made with little foresight into how it would affect the team. Funny enough none of this was mentioned during the interview, although it was a definite red flag that they had high churn for this particular position.

I stayed there for my probation period trying to fix things so the team would fire fight every day and change management's mentality, but it wasn't happening, so I gave notice and went somewhere better.

> So, you know, the best thing to do is to get rid of them for not being a culture fit or for not being good for the team dynamic...?

No, you took me too literally. Obviously if you've got someone who has friction with the team, but they're a hard working individual who is trying to make your team better and more efficient, you should try to work through those stressful periods because in the long run it will be better for your team's health and the company's health. If some of your low performers leave during this period, that's okay, they were only going to hurt you in the long run. That being said, don't burn bridges with your existing employees. Try to find a happy middle ground that results in a better work environment for everyone.

I have been a manager, and I have had to fire people.

I have also quit a job because they fired the wrong person.

In my opinion, if you fire someone and the reaction from the whole team isn't "thank god, that guy needed to go", then you made a mistake firing them and should have tried to make it work. In the past when I fired someone, the general reaction was much more along the lines of "what took you so long". In both cases I was the one at the table defending the person while everyone else said they needed to go.

Interestingly, in both cases the reason for firing them was that the person in question was not treating other people with respect. So what is worse, letting one person shit on your whole team and make everyone else feel bad, or getting that person off your team?

Managing isn't easy.

"it is your god damn job to find a way to make it work"

That attitude is how bloat happens. There is a middle ground here. Not firing bad employees also hurts many people emotionally as does an underperforming, overbloated company. Employees are as replaceable as employers. To use a sports analogy, it's the big leagues and you may not make the team and often times it is hard to know whether someone can make the team without a trial. I believe these draconian interview practices and contract-to-hire approaches are a direct result of the never-fire-bad-employees attitude.

If Google didn't apply the equivalent of the Hogwarts Hat to placing its employees, I'd agree with you. But in doing so, they remove the ability of the potential Googler to meet their potential teammates and decide whether it's a good fit.

Ergo they own the problem, not so much the Noogler. Also generalists == mediocre code in my experience because there's no passion for such work in a lot of people who are fantastic with other in-demand skills, but I digress.

And when I joined, Google wasn't so much bloating as it was metastasizing. Most of the people I knew who joined around the same time have long since left. In contrast, I've been at the same gig ever since I left Google. The Google experience was the outlier.

Hmm. When I joined Google, I interviewed the managers of both teams I was offered a position on, and a team member on the one I ultimately decided to join.

I'm not sure if this is the norm--I believe it differs for industry hires versus those fresh out of school--but it's certainly not true that, as a rule, you can never meet potential teammates.

Two decades in the valley has taught me that you can't decide anything in a half hour conversation beyond recognizing an absolute bozo incarnate. You need to meet the whole team and preferably have lunch with them and figure out whether it's the right next step. What Google does instead reeks of magical thinking to me.

Because for the most part, Googlers aren't bozos (although a couple of the true believers in the Googleplex blew my mind with how crufty their skills and knowledge had become), but that doesn't rule out one of the many great engineers there promoted to their managerial level of incompetence. And that's what I had - a guy with no people skills whatsoever - and two teams with a total of 20+ engineers to "manage."

I agree with you, but it's still easier to fire someone than to un-not-hire someone ;-)