Yet that's short-sighted. Teams and expertise are built over time. It may not be ideal for people like the author of this article who believe themselves to be high performers who shouldn't have to ever put up with low performers. However, the real high performers are the ones who can accept that no team is perfect and nobody starts out as a superstar. They make the effort to work with people, mentor, and lead by example.

Mentoring and leading by example are great things to do, but they do nothing to solve the actual scenarios that Will gave as examples in the OP. There are some situations that you can’t resolve by being a good colleague, and the manager needs to step in.

Managing peers is not their job - the author tried to spin the lack of action by manager as poor management, but what if the manager has more context and good reasons for maintaining the status quo? IMO, this is management equivalent of tech debt, and hr is demanding that it gets addressed immediately without caring about other consequences outside their own narrow window into the org.

This is not how I read it. You have to do your best as a manager to train your employees and live up to what Andy Grove said in High Output Management. You must set a high standard and it is your job to get your reports to that standard the best you possibly can.

But when your reports cannot or will not get to that standard despite a huge investment in training and clear direction, you have to move on.

Emphasis mine.

When you fire someone. You tax HR and yourself with the process both of letting someone go and finding their replacement. You have to pay their salary 3-6 months going forward as well as all the paid vacation they may have saved up. Most importantly you tax your team with the added resource drain of covering the tasks as well as integrating the replacement. You also risk damaging morale, and worse, you risk increasing employee anxiety as even the best employee can have inferiority issues.

That being said, the basic mantra in management should always be that you can get rid of anyone, it’s just a matter of cost. So if you need to fire someone, then you need to fire someone.

Personally I prefer building people to the point where they will leave you themselves, but, that’s a style or management that isn’t present in a lot of companies because it takes a corporate culture that is very hard to maintain in large organisations and require quite a lot of management talent in small organisations. It’s also something that is incredibly hard to do as a single manager if the culture is against you.

Well, that’s time (or deferred pay) they’ve contractually and morally earned, so that part’s entirely fair.

In the U.S - where you generally don't have to pay as long a severance pay if at all.

on edit: as in most things 'in the U.S' this varies on state by state basis.

Does Denmark not have constructive dismissal laws? Making changes that force someone out is an easily winnable unfair dismissal at an employment tribunal, at least for the UK. And that costs more than just firing them for bad performance.

You clearly haven't met Austrian management. It's nearly at will employment (in theory it's not, but in some domains many companies know and do skirt around the law to get rid of employees quickly without getting sued).

Once the management decides they don't like you anymore, you're given your standard one to three months notice, then you're gone. I asked a lawyer, and they said the employer can fire your without any reason as long as they give you your contractual notice period.

My favorite example is them using Jira velocity charts to fire the one with the slowest curve. You get a warning (p.i.p.) telling you your velocity needs to catch up, then after two sprints you get your notice handed to you.

OTOH, there are other EU countries where firing people is really difficult. Here it's just a rubber stamp thanks to decades of pro-business politicians elected in power who eroded workers' rghts.

In many English-speaking countries is not difficult to convince an employee to quit.

If someone really should be fired but isn't, that also damages morale.

This is the crux of the issue: The definition of "causing problems for other people" isn't as well defined as it may seem.

Someone who is constantly driving the team further apart than together, struggling to work with other members of the team, and being openly dismissive of others would fit the definition of "causing problems for other people".

From another perspective, it would also fit the definition of the "hard to work with" person in this article. That's the point: Even when someone is falling behind, as an employee you must find a way to at least try to work with them and lead by example.

One pattern that I saw quite a bit was one team member being a bit more technical (rather than business focused), so they tended to cop a lot of the internal questions that caused them to context switch a lot. It increases their frustration levels and drops their performance. One effective way to solve that is to acknowledge what is happening, and put in some boundaries so the other team members know that (for example) Tuesdays-Thursdays you need to really be stuck before you bug XXX about your problem. It makes XXX feel better about the situation because not only has it been acknowledged they are a key team member, it also makes sure they get some quiet time to really get stuff done at their own pace without having to switch jobs all the time.

The other team members, knowing there are a few boundaries now, tend to become more self sufficient so you end up with a better performing team overall, and one that isn't so dependent on a single person.

Obviously there are other patterns that end up creating "hard to work with" people, but the example came up so often I think it's worth writing about.

If you're too busy thinking what an amazing worker you are and everyone else is dragging you down, there's a good chance you feel vindicated in behaving in a way that makes your coworkers' jobs harder. Why should you help them out? They're not even trying to do things right and they're making you look bad.

Let's imagine there is a problem that requires to need to implement 100 classes to deal with 100 different types.

A 18th century person would say: I have 100 classes, 5 workers, I am going to give 20 classes for each worker to implement.

A person that actually knows what's going on would simply write template <typename T> class FuckYou, done.

In the wrong hands, software is misery.

  function FuckYou(T) {
    return class {
      // something with T
    };
  }

My read on the article was more on a mis-alignment of values and what is considered success. High bar / low "performance"(which is a subjective thing and can vary based on external factors) are those who want to learn because they know they aren't at that bar now but they want to be.

"Low bar" / high or low performance means that you have different goals and different measures of "success". If you don't resolve those first then that leads to the friction and the pattern the author outlines.

This can be in a bunch of different areas(security, performance, maintainability) and sometimes if you have two people who hold velocity and architecture separately as their highest bar it can appear that they don't value each other's bar since they are in direct conflict. It's been my experience that if you can ground it in why people hold certain bars and that the goals are actually aligned then the sum of the team that hold a high bar in different areas is greater than the parts.

In his shoes, I’d be thrilled if the response was “you’re right, we’re going to coach this other person to improve, because they’re valuable in a lot of ways, but need improvement there so we can succeed.”

In the other situations an employee is performing poorly, not recognizing it, and neither is the organization.

Here we have an excellent example of the straw man, nice to see still practiced these days.

You were quite fortunate to have a manager that believed in you and it's good that you're paying it forward

This is so true! If only we were consistent and picked one or the other all the time! The world would be a better place.

Did you improve? Did you provide the results needed by the organization? Did you work better (not simply harder)?

Forgive me if this seems like an overly familiar set of questions, I'm not quite sure how else to frame them.

It's great to be loyal; it helps both parties make long term investments, engenders trust, and ensures stability.

But loyalty to a bad manager is no good. Similarly, loyalty to a report who is over their head and continues to be unable to improve at the speed needed is not good.

Source: I have both been over my head and had reports in over their head.

Unfortunately, sometimes you can trust and it still doesn't work out.

It took me a long time to realize I wasn't a great fit for every job. Now I try to lean into my strengths and acknowledge my weaknesses. For instance, please never hire me for my design sense (see my personal blog at https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/ for proof of that).

It's really hard to acknowledge weaknesses, especially when employment/$$$ are at stake. But it is important to do so.

Did you end up succeeding at the job because of the trust offered by your manager?

Some in the comments suggested a differentiator about my performance gap was my self awareness that I was doing poorly - I certainly had an anxiety problem in general that was getting in the way beyond work too, but knowing my manager really had my back went very far. I knew of course that I could still get fired, but it meant a lot to me that no one was jumping at the chance.

I stayed in that role longer than I should have and cost myself a lot of growth and money by not switching jobs every 2 to 3 years like I do now.

I just start to get going 1 year in. That's when I've learned enough to start having instincts for what is going on.

How do companies survive with that sort of turn over?

Unsure, but it's a conscious and calculated decision not to pay market rate for current employees.

I don't like it, but it's the case that if you're not moving every couple of years then your wage will deflate compared to peers, and I've never worked anywhere that gave more than a 2% pay increase (and that's with good performance) without a promotion.

Ideally you want to be able to keep your head on straight and obviously it's easier to work harder for someone who 'believes in you' ... but that's a bit emotive. Just do a good job, be professional, expect the same knowing you're not always going to get it and that's that.

Instead of someone 'going to bat' you really want someone who's just communicating and helping you create the outcomes necessary.

Easy as that, huh?

I think the comment was about what to do when you aren't able to 'just' do a good job for whatever reason, which could happen to anyone. They posted about how to handle a problem and your response was 'just don't have problems'.

There's a reason this profession has the issues it does because the most drama heavy people are always those who think they're perfectly rational automatons.