Taking years to prune bad talent is another sign of a problem in the organization.

They'll miss most of the good talent if they're doing 6 interviews for a standard role. The candidates with skills and options will go elsewhere and you'll be left with the desperate dregs.

And they're also in the situation where good talent isn't going to tolerate that rubbish.

The worst performer you tolerate on your team sets the tone for the whole team.

The best teams embrace and level up their low performers and make the whole team better.

The delta can’t be too big.

I don't think it's that at all. It's very easy to fire people in US. I think they are trying to hire cultists. The harder it is to get in the more people think they're special once they do and the less likely they are to leave.

The difficulty isn't with regards to the process/legality. It's more behavioral/organizational

Do you have probation period where you work? i.e. if an employee doesn't live up to expectation, release with short notice? Where I am, a 3 year contract typically carries a 3 month probation period, and a 1 year contract carries a 1 month probation period.

The problem is management are often too busy or overwhelmed with other stuff to observe and provide feedback until someone's passed the probation period then releasing them becomes a bureaucratic nightmare - and when the new hire's not getting feedback, you can be sure not a lot of the rest of the team are.

Probation periods in the US are rare, especially for white collar positions like software engineers. Of course, that’s mostly because of at will employment where either side can choose to part ways at any time.

That sounds like infinite probation period to me

> The reason they want to remove the risk is because it takes years to prune bad talent.

I've never understood this given that the hiring is so often at will.

Isn't that one of the things Netflix is famous for getting right? Generous severance but quick to exit you if you're not a good fit.

They could prune that talent overnight if they wanted.

In my long and storied career, well long at least, every single truly heinous, project-killin', crazy person actually interviewed pretty well.

Honestly, I don't have a good solution to the problem.

It's a bit like the good-books/bad-movies phenomenon.

There's a quality-distribution of both books and films.

There are only so many good books. And a percentage of films end up poorly made.

Sufficiently low-quality books tend not to get made into films. The ones that succeed are notable --- there's nothing but upside.

A good book can be made into either a good or a bad film. If it's a good film, then yay, but if it's a bad film, people are aware of it (through the book's quality and popularity). This is a perception illusion called Berkson's Paradox. It's an illusion because what awareness fails to account for are all the bad films made from bad books.

Hannah Fry of Numberphile does a much better job than I of explaining this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FUD8h9JpEVQ

In the interviewing / performance case, you have good vs. bad interviewees, and good vs. bad performers.

Someonehone who interviews poorly but performs well is a positive exception. Someon who interviews well and performs well meets expectations. It's the good interviewer/bad performer who stands out. But it's the poor-interviewer/poor-performer who is missed by this assessment.

Fire fast. Use that 90 day try out period. Contract-to-hire.

In the past I would never have been interested in a contract-to-hire. These days though if the company and role is right, and this an option to short-cut a ridiculous interview process, I might spring for it.

Just personally I would never accept an offer that was contract for hire and think it's downright insulting a suggestion. My family needs health insurance and the market has never been so cold that I'd be desperate enough to take such a garbage offer.

Nothing about contracting precludes having health insurance though? For the roles and situations I'm talking about this would all just be factored into the rates.

Even if they can just pay for health insurance out of pocket, they’d be switching plans twice, and each time they’d reset their deductible and possibly need to find a new doctor.

When I was an actuary we used to do “intern to hire” for unemployed recent grads, but I can’t imagine leaving a full time position for a contract-to-hire position. I think for me personally the opportunity would have to be really interesting and the comp upon converting to FTE would need to be at least double my previous comp (meaning the contracted rate would probably be something like 4x my implied hourly).

I've only ever seen it done in legally dubious ways to skirt paying benefits for 3-6 months for new hires in entry level positions.

> Fire fast. Use that 90 day try out period. Contract-to-hire.

I've see that work before, but it was some time ago. The company also had a very large test department with separate management and kept to a strongly enforced waterfall-esque design routine.

Of course, it used to be a lot harder to ship out version 1.01 of the software.

I just assume it was a different world as this was in the days of US manufacturing, very limited set of software tools, high importance placed on domain knowledge as opposed to toolset, longer average stays at employer, lower wages for programmers. Probably not applicable to modern times.

I have experienced the exact same thing. In fact, the worst person I have ever worked with consistently aced interviews wherever he went.

What questions did they ask in the interviews? (Or didn't ask?)

There's probably not a single one-size-fits-all solution - what works for FAANG and their millions of applicants is lunacy when you're a three-person startup, much like adopting Kubernetes to run an internal web app with half a dozen users. It probably starts with proper training in conducting interviews, a respect for candidates' time, a realistic appraisal of your needs and budget, and constant feedback-driven refinement of your process.

I suspect the reasons they killed the project were all over the map too, so you are basically searching for a big unknown problem.

I would also suspect that any filtering mechanism that cuts out the truly destructive people might well be either unacceptable or illegal at this point.

The solution is to accept that shitty candidates can't always be filtered out and to have a probation period to remove them before they do too much damage to your codebase/morale.

How? I have seen people with 25 years service (electrical engineer) walked out with zero notice. Unless you are unionized, you can be fired on the spot.

Increasing risk of liability for firing is real, as is increasing oversight of discrimination law. You can be fired on the spot for breaking company policy, or doing something illegal. Without more info, that’s what I might assume you saw. But getting fired for mildly low performance without notice is not normal, at least not among engineers in large companies, and assuming it’s not because a division or the company is being shuttered. Companies have to give people feedback and give them time to respond. Failure to do that can and sometimes does result in legal action compelling the company to prove the employee was failing and that the company did not unfairly discriminate even unknowingly, which is costly, difficult, and risky. Plus, most companies aren’t capricious with firing engineers, and are also aware that hiring is expensive and employee ROI can take time.

> result in legal action compelling the company to prove the employee was failing

The company doesn’t have to prove that the employee was failing. It’s perfectly legal for a company to fire an employee because they the employee likes the wrong football team.

The employee or people pursuing legal action on behalf of multiple employees has to prove that the company fires the employee(s) because they were a member of a protected class.

Assuming there are no incriminating emails stating that that was the reason, the only realistic way to do that is to show a pattern.

If an employee decides to sue, whether you had them on a documented performance improvement plan for 6 months or 6 days isn’t going to be the deciding factor.

> The company doesn’t have to prove that the employee was failing.

They do if the employee sues claiming age discrimination, for example. At least, they have to defend the accusation to show it’s not discrimination. When someone has been at the company for 25 years like in the parent’s example, and they get fired abruptly without notice for liking the wrong football team, it’s likely the stated reason is untrue and inviting a challenge.

> If an employee decides to sue, whether you had them on a documented performance improvement plan for 6 months or 6 days isn’t going to be the deciding factor.

It certainly helps show that the company isn’t discriminating arbitrarily, and gave the employee notice and a chance to improve the situation.

BTW actual legal action isn’t necessary for firing to be getting harder. The fear of legal action is all you need, and that is in fact going up.

>They do if the employee sues claiming age discrimination, for example. At least, they have to defend the accusation to show it’s not discrimination.

They don't have to show anything. The employee has to prove that it's age discrimination.

>When someone has been at the company for 25 years like in the parent’s example, and they get fired abruptly without notice for liking the wrong football team, it’s likely the stated reason is untrue and inviting a challenge.

Without a pattern of discrimination this isn't a problem. If there is pattern of discrimination then it is. However, if that's the case it doesn't matter how much documentation they have.

>It certainly helps show that the company isn’t discriminating arbitrarily, and gave the employee notice and a chance to improve the situation.

You can't discriminate arbitrarily. Discrimination in this context means firing someone because they are part of a protected class.

>gave the employee notice and a chance to improve the situation.

Whether you gave someone the chance to correct the situation or not isn't relevant.

>BTW actual legal action isn’t necessary for firing to be getting harder. The fear of legal action is all you need, and that is in fact going up.

The number of charges filed with the EEOC has gone down over the last 20 years https://www.eeoc.gov/statistics/charge-statistics-charges-fi...

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/eeoc-roundup-part-i-10-...

"At the same time, FY2020 saw the lowest number of charges received from workers in more than two decades. The agency received 67,448 charges—continuing the steady downward trend since 2017 in the numbers of discrimination charges filed with the EEOC."

> The number of charges filed with the EEOC has gone down over the last 20 years

Yes that’s a compelling data point for decreasing legal actions (and it’s interesting, thanks for including it), but not all actions and not all fears end up in front of the EEOC, right? This data point alone is likely due to decreasing union membership over the last 20 years, but is also explained by the increasing prevalence of mandatory arbitration clauses. What it doesn’t explain is why HR departments nationwide are increasing efforts to educate employees about anti-harassment policies. If they are legally in the clear, why is that happening? Twenty or thirty years ago it was hardly a thing, today it’s the norm.

> They don’t have to show anything. The employee has to prove that it’s age discrimination.

You are right about the legal burden of proof in court, absolutely. Court isn’t the only possible outcome of a discrimination claim, though, and the one specific example you gave is a defense against a discrimination claim that would not hold up in court (firing a long-time employee for claiming to not like the right football team).

I agree with everything you’re saying about what is required in court, and what are the legal rights for all employers in the US, not just tech companies. That’s just not exactly what I was talking about.