I wouldn’t say ANY company necessarily. A lot of companies even in IT are body farms and low wage, expendable (but still necessary) labor is their lifeblood where they trade off quality for more volume. Employee turnover doesn’t matter much besides in the highest ranks in that case either. A “bad” hire in such companies is one that causes such irreparable harm that it costs the company more in reputation / brand than the paid out wages (this is the case with most large scale employers in the US like retail, sales, etc).

FAANGS may have the funds together to hire out probably the rest of the entire software developer market but it doesn’t do them as much good to have laggards that can’t pass a FizzBuzz test. Sure works for a lot of defense contractors’ business models though, especially if the candidates are cleared.

You don't have to be a body farm to justify someone considered a "false positive" at a large employer. Most companies outside of the top employers have a hard time staffing up. They might just want someone to fix their bugs, not someone aspiring to invent the next Kubernetes.

Unless you have clearly defined separate roles, titles, career ladders, etc. for the "bug fixers", this isn't a recipe for success. You would end up with an underclass of employees that are unhappy that they don't have the same career opportunities as others in their role, and a bunch of unhappy managers who are given the difficult task of enforcing this division.

If you just need someone for narrowly-scoped tasks like fixing specific bugs, it might be better to hire a contractor, so the role expectations can be well-defined and agreed to up front.

Every company I’ve seen that needed people dedicated just to fix bugs was in a downward spiral with maintenance mode software. Those organizations outside really slow moving but well financed bureaucracies are disappearing rapidly as investors pull money by divesting or selling to larger companies that wind up casting off the unprofitable / non-growing lines of businesses they acquired.

It’s pretty evil IMO to hire people as FTEs into such organizations when you are probably better off with consultants that are at least used to short term gigs.

Just out of curiosity, what is an example of a tech firm that would be considered a "body farm"?

Most of the services organizations that exist within enterprise tech companies scales very poorly and is supported by a high-margin software product or two. But the usually cited companies are Infosys, Capgemini, Wipro, Accenture. To make their businesses more sustainable / profitable they overwhelmingly favor labor cost arbitration and oftentimes aim at non-tech companies that still don't consider IT or software strategic to their business.

Then there's the "unintentional" body farms that organize due to structural reasons of massive funding combined with labor structure dictated to support a massive enterprise. Within defense, almost all the major defense contractors like Northrop, Lockheed, General Dynamics, and maybe Palantir these days (the bar for hiring is higher overall there, but not quite the full story) fight for huge, bloated Pentagon budgets that resembles VC funding except with military officers as partners and minimum headcounts are usually specified in contract vehicles. You'll oftentimes see at least n PhDs on staff, m veterans, p program managers, etc. as competitive factors for getting a contract ahead of other companies because with too small of a company it's deemed a risk to the government (people do take vacation, get into accidents, etc.). While there's been some efforts to make the RFP process better aligned towards outcomes, everything I've heard since I left the community has not been encouraging.

This is repeated so much but it’s just wrong. Companies are usually very socially toxic places, and the definition of “bad hire” is usually subverted to mean “does not capitulate to our bad monoculture.” It has nothing to do with hiring positive people, skilled people, etc.

Why are bad hires so damaging? I've encountered very unskilled coworkers, they didn't do any serious damage, just wasted some people's time and money.

I'd actually say the opposite: standout engineers can be very valuable, I'd rather work on a team with a couple lemons and one really good engineer than 3 middle of the road engineers. So I think that false negatives can be damaging, especially because it's probably the best people with the most options who won't bother with an excessive interview gauntlet.

Unskilled is a problem of course, but with an unskilled, but ambitious individual, they can be mentored. In my mind a bad hire is someone that has a negative drag effect on the psychology of the work environment or the project.

I had one hire who was brought in as a junior dev, thought he was better than he was and that he didn't deserve to do the grunt work he'd been assigned, and then proceeded to constantly bitch about anything he could. He was so negative that when he finally moved on I was super relieved.

That psychology of "why even bother" can just sink into people's subconcious and become problematic. It's hard to spot who's going to be like that at an interview though.

Lemons can significantly impede a team's velocity and, more importantly, the team's overall happiness. It's difficult to enjoy and take pride in your work when the code base either looks like shit or require that you spend most of your time reviewing/cleaning up the mess the lemons create.

Will your standout engineers enjoy working with the lemons?

I could substitute "the business" for "lemons" above and describe many (most?) companies. In that case, what effect are these lemons really having?

Not sure your 'lemons' qualify as 'bad hires'. I've refrained from defining, as it requires context, but the 2 pillars of badhirism are negative productivity and negative attitude. Being "unskilled", by itself and in void, does not imply a bad hire IMO. We are all "unskilled" occasionally.

Mostly because of bad management and an inability to fire people even when it is clear that they should.

Generally a hiring process is a good hint to the dysfunctions of a team before you join. Panic about bad hires and a quintuple-filtered pipeline is a good sign of weak management and a structural inability to fire.

Intuitively I wanted to say "Yes 1000 times, unless you REALLY need to hire NOW, the effects of a bad hire are going to be a lot more negative than a no hire".

But what about a very good hire that you end up missing that has been a very expensive mistake?

I think we have a pretty high bias here. Organizations can see the effect of a bad hire and have more data on what went wrong during the hiring process, retrospect why that person passed and put more "tests" to prevent to repeat the mistake. But organizations can never measure the differential between the impact on the company of a candidate that was not hired and the present condition. There is simply no data about the impact that that person could have had.

I heard a few detailed stories on "the guy that should not have been hired" and I can add my own stories. But the stories on the cool people that should have been hired are brief and rarely go beyond "I thought that guy was very smart."

So I think we should make sure we check our hiring processes against negative positives. How? To be continued...

It's missing nuance.

For most companies missing out on an excellent hire is worse than hiring someone subpar.

I've worked in companies that struggle to hire any candidate, let alone top candidates. Stripe is amongst the top employers. The vast majority of smaller shops (banks, b2b software companies, agencies) just need to staff up and would rather hire and fire than miss out on a good candidate.

Maybe, but hire and fire is also a great way to show the team that you don't know what you're doing as a hiring manager; not to mention how firing a team member, who may be incompetent but still well-liked, affects morale. Then, there is the problem where you fail to fire when you should. To me, this is just not a good way to build an effective team.

No one is saying you should hire and fire a ton of people, only that rejecting good candidates for most companies is not possible given how difficult it is to find them. Talk to any recruiter and they will tell you that finding good (not great, just good) candidates is often a struggle.

> hire and fire is also a great way to show the team that you don't know what you're doing

It's an expensive (painful) signal that you actually do know what you need to do and are capable of it.