In the US, where most startups are based, firing is actually quite easy. For a brand new employee, it's especially easy.
All that BS about it being hard financially or legally? Not true. At all. It's just an excuse startups use because they don't understand basic HR functions. And that's why every company of a reasonable size (i.e., more than a few dozen people) has an HR department, even if it's just one person. Because they know how to do this stuff.
My comments are based on what nearly every major company in the US actually does, not what people in Silicon Valley think other companies do. Since all those other companies have HR departments and most of the startups in SV don't, I'm pretty comfortable with my stance.
After all, managing hiring and firing are literally the primary reasons HR departments exist in every company making more than a few million $/year. Especially the profitable ones.
Every company in the US has an aversion to firing that leads them to use expensive defensive measures (in the case of the larger ones: severance pay, PIPs, standardized performance reviews, diversity training) for when they feel they have to go though with it.
Whether or not you’re talking about Silicon Valley, you’ve endorsed a much stronger claim, that such measures are pointless because firing is just so easy.
If you’re not ready to defend that claim, then maybe you should walk back on your original. Or at least show some some sign that you recognize things aren’t as easy or simple as your original blithe dismissal implies.
Remember, you didn’t even think the emotional side merited an acknowledgement.
> Every company in the US has an aversion to firing that leads them to use expensive defensive measures (in the case of the larger ones: severance pay, PIPs, standardized performance reviews, diversity training) for when they feel they have to go though with it.
Not really. It's just harder to hire again usually than figure out how to coerce the problem you have already to be less of a problem. That's the nature of the market right now.
If developers were easy to find and hire then they would be getting fired left and right like happens with just about any other commodity job.
This is simply not true. Employers have been hiring like crazy all across the country for the past few years.
And severance pay is not a thing for most employees, just the ones, like programmers, that have fairly cushy white collar jobs.
You need to stop seeing everything through a rose-tinted SV lens and look at it the way the rest of the country does. I'm ready to defend my claims. Are you?
But we aren't talking about non programming jobs. We are talking about programming jobs.
What everyone else does is completely irrelevant.
In the programming world, specifically, which is what we are talking about, firing is extremely costly.
This is proved by what companies in the programming world are doing right now.
If you disagree, then you are disagreeing with basically every major tech company in the world. And personal, my bet on who is right would be those tech companies, not you.
Oh if we're going to limit this to programming jobs then I know for a fact that the majority of programming jobs do not pay for relocation or a signing bonus. Especially not in the startup world.
And when they do, it's standard practice to require that relocation and signing bonuses be repaid if the employee resigns or is terminated within a certain time frame after joining the company.
I have worked at 5 different companies over the years, and Every single one of them was absolutely terrified of firing engineers.
Not only have I worked at a bunch of different companies, but I have also straight up failed at some of the earlier jobs, and have been in situations where I absolutely deserved to be fired, yet it took literally months for anyone to even approach the topic of my performance.
I am talking, situations of me not doing any work, for months, because I didn't care and was looking for new jobs during that time period.
My experience has shown to me that engineers are pretty damn untouchable. And yes, these have been (mid sized) startups.
The one time I had a reloc bonus, of a job that I left after 5 months, they did not ask for it back, and simply never talked to me again.
It is not about signing bonuses though. It is mostly about things like bad Glassdoor reviews. Many engineers would never ever work at a company where the engineers were constantly terrified of, and complaing about being fired quickly.
Also, disgruntled ex employees are something that you don't ever want to deal with.
All that BS about it being hard financially or legally? Not true. At all. It's just an excuse startups use because they don't understand basic HR functions. And that's why every company of a reasonable size (i.e., more than a few dozen people) has an HR department, even if it's just one person. Because they know how to do this stuff.