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A comment on Ask HN: Should I fire half of my team because their performance is terrible?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Should I fire half of my team because their perfo... by auxbuss on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @06:39AM (#1648955)
Working remotely is different to working together in an office, of course. It requires different skills and a different type of motivation, ime. It also requires far better communication skills. Weak communication skills can kill productivity.

An observation I've made is that folk who hide their mistakes can be a serious problem. You need the complete opposite, so that when someone shouts for help, then it's all hands to the pump. Those folk they can be hugely disruptive without realising it.

Regarding nudging: Ask when something will be done (with units of work that are small enough to make this viable), and get them to commit to it. If they repeatedly don't deliver, and fail to communicate the problems, then you know you have a problem.

Nudging is usually a sign of poor (or no) communication and lack of confidence.

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Re:Ask HN: Should I fire half of my team because their perfo... by firingtest on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @06:46AM (#1648961)
> Regarding nudging: Ask when something will be done (with units of work that are small enough to make this viable), and get them to commit to it. If they repeatedly don't deliver, and fail to communicate the problems, then you know you have a problem.

That's what we've been doing almost for a year now and many failed repeatedly. Secondly when you give them strict deadlines and this kind of tracking I noticed that they might not deliver the best but they'll just fix/do something quickly and in a dirty way. Stuff like programming and Q/A testing is not easy confirm. Generally this sort of stuff bit us in the ass after months and ended up clients to be unhappy.

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Re:Ask HN: Should I fire half of my team because their perfo... by auxbuss on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @07:26AM (#1649012)
Then, on the face of it, you have poor quality workers, or folk that are the wrong type to work remotely.

For cross-checking, CI (with code coverage), tdd, and pairing helps a lot, I find. And they're cheap to do.

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Re:Ask HN: Should I fire half of my team because their perfo... by wariola on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @11:38AM (#1649695)
There are many automated ways to do this too. Check out Parasoft Concerto. http://www.parasoft.com/alm
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Re:Ask HN: Should I fire half of my team because their perfo... by gommm on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @10:10AM (#1649411)
Code reviews are very important... You should always have another team member review the code produced by any of your employees..
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Re:Ask HN: Should I fire half of my team because their perfo... by wariola on Tuesday August 31, 2010 @11:40AM (#1649700)
There are many automated ways to do this too. Check out Parasoft Concerto. This system does it by managing by exception. Meaning that if an artifact is not where is should be the worker gets notified. http://www.parasoft.com/concerto
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