I'm surprised to see how many people are saying that this is a bad look. You want to fire this person so fire them.
> Should I let them vest then let them go, or just let them go? Feedback from former founders esp is helpful. Any downsides to having them on the cap table?
IMO the time to fire an employee is as soon as you have decided that you need to fire them. That's all there is to it barring an extreme circumstance, but in this case it's clear cut - you gave them plenty of time, warning, etc. It has gotten worse.
As for your cap table, I doubt there are serious implications to having them on it, assuming they're just typical common stock options and not very many. That said, the first time I fired someone I got on a call with my lawyers to make sure everything was ironed out - I suggest you do the same.
Firing people really really sucks. It's maybe the worst part of the job? Not sure. But ultimately that's what you sign up for when you start a company. It's not fair to anyone else on the team to keep someone around who you know needs to go ASAP.
I see a lot of posts saying that your other employees will feel negatively. That's not my experience at all. If this is a justified firing they probably already think it should have happened and they will totally understand why you had to do it. Explain to them that there was ample notice, you set a timeline for improvement, you saw things get worse, and so you took action.
edit: I will add that:
a) It's your company, you ultimately make the calls on how these situations are handled
b) You're going to have the most context. No one else has the same view of how the company is structured, how people will react, etc. Use your best judgment.
If I saw a review on glassdoor for a company stating that they were fired a month before vesting and received nothing, I would never work for that company. Not only that, I would actively advise my professional network to never work for that company.
> Letting someone go right before they vest will likely create distrust on the rest of the team.
I kind of doubt it'll even occur to the rest of the team, but even if it did I can't imagine that they wouldn't feel it's justifiable given this employee has been such a consistent issue.
IMO the time to fire someone is as soon as you've decided you're going to fire them.
That said, offering nice severance perks is a nice thing to do.
It will absolutely come up. And people will remember it. It will absolutely be perceived as "cheap ass founder didn't want to pay worker for their time."
However paying them will be remembered too. It will be perceived as "why are you giving away profitability of the company (and thus my equity and/or end of year bonus) to someone you should have fired a long time ago?".
The answer to that is “they worked 50 out of the 52 weeks; it was a leadership mistake earlier to not hold everyone to the high bar we expect, but we still act ethically towards all of our stakeholders, even when doing so is inconvenient.”
Yeah, sounds best. I'd still run it past the lawyers to make sure it's fine to "badmouth" a former employee in your jurisdiction.
It means taking ownership of the mistake, even if it does mean that you're effectively apologizing for devaluing the company to the other stockholders and other stakeholders.
Still, there's a little bit of "oh, so when I leave I can expect management to talk shit about my performance", which wouldn't do wonders for my impostor syndrome.
The problem is the onlookers don’t know why you’ve fired someone; they’re free to assume whatever they want.
And anyone remotely suspicious of your good will should be mighty suspicious that anything you’ve said was just justification to deny compensation — when is my vesting date again..?
Really? I think it’s generally considered bad business etiquette to publicly speak about why someone was fired, beyond something very generic such as “performance-related reasons”. Once someone has left the company there is very little point in making critical comments about them, as it’s too late to change anything.
Yes but it gives the remaining people a mark on what is acceptable or not acceptable. If you fired someone for bad performance they now know that bad performance will not be tolerated (or at least not forever). If you fired them for being unprofessional or for bad behaviour the rest now know that there is a consequence for such behaviour.
If your team at a startup of <=10 people assumes you are lying or that you have no idea how someone performs (to the point of firing a good performer for bad performance) you've got much bigger problems than that employee.
I don't think so. There can be good reasons not to tell the whole truth about why someone was fired, and it's normal for managers to have only a rough idea of how well people are performing, even in a small company.
If you're the boss then "what you perceive" as poor performance and "what is" poor performance are effectively the same thing. Companies aren't democracies were the team decides on what the bar is. The role of the lead / manager / owner is to set that bar and help the team to reach it.
It's certainly possible for the boss to base their evaluation on mistaken beliefs. For example, they might think Employee A is largely responsible for a delay in releasing Feature X when in fact it was Employee B.
I have to say though, this whole discussion is a fascinating insight into what appears to be the thought process of many managers and/or founders.
Who was responsible for a delay isn't what's being asked at all. What's being asked is: "I have an employee who isn't producing the outputs requested of them in a timely manner, what should I do?" This has nothing to do with Feature X or Feature Y. They also highlighted behavioural issues. These are all within the scope of a leader to determine.
I understand that. The point is just that a boss isn't infallible in evaluating the performance of their employees. I wasn't expecting that to be a controversial statement, but you seemed to be challenging it. As to whether or not the person who asked the question is right, it's obviously impossible for us to know.
My response was in the context of "what your team members perceive" to be performance. My response was quite simply: "you get what you measure." Your team will respond to your perception by focusing on improving in areas that you perceive to be markers of good performance.
That certainly can happen. However, it depends on at least the following assumptions:
* Your perception of your employees' performance is consistent and predictable over time. Not all bosses evaluate based on consistent and predictable criteria.
* Your perception isn't significantly distorted by false beliefs about who has done (or not done) what.
(Needless to say, that's generic 'you', not you specifically.)
If you want, you can say "I hereby define 'good performance' to be any performance that I, the boss, think is good" – but that's just a semantic game.
I wouldn't explain why in detail/ be critical, but I would have a meeting to address what happened. Having been in this position when someone gets fired people get nervous - they ask "are we doing OK on money?" and things like that, which you can address.
I think it's very rare to give reasons for firing someone.
If someone was a bad performer, they team knows it's because of bad performance, but reasons given will be "cost cutting", "personal matters", or "they've moved to a better project."
If someone was fired right before vesting, and the reason given was "bad performance", everyone "knows" that management is just being cheap.
If someone was a bad performer, they team knows it's because of
bad performance, but reasons given will be "cost cutting",
"personal matters", or "they've moved to a better project."
If I fire someone for bad performance I will absolutely tell the team that's why i fired them. I may not tell people outside the team (I don't want to bad mouth my former employee) but the team deserves the truth.
When I see someone getting fired for performance, usually the team has been complaining about them (in performance reviews or 1-1). So it's no surprise to the team and the reason isn't given.
When someone has poor but not terrible performance, it's usually accompanied by a second factor (high salary, absence). In that case, the nicer reason is usually given even though we know they were not faring that.
There also tends to be a bit of theatre before someone is fired for bad performance. "Are you sure you fixed the bug?! Give me a video. Which PR? Which line?"
>> The problem is the onlookers don’t know why you’ve fired someone; they’re free to assume whatever they want.
> You can and should address this.
Except that you can't address this. You can say whatever you want, but it won't result in onlookers knowing why you did what you did. You were probably lying.
I've had both: a bad colleague who went dancing while we were struggling at 23 PM in the data center for a government project, and a really shitty PM whose incompetence ruined a lot of people personally. Both can have adverse effects on people, although a bad boss in an otherwise sane environment would probably strengthen the group for being perceived as an external "enemy".
That has not been my experience with a bad boss. They do things like play favorites and create a culture where people are competing rather than cooperating. Even if they are just shitty to everyone equally I find it far easier to deal with a bad colleague than a bad boss.
> a bad colleague who went dancing while we were struggling at 23 PM in the data center
If that's your definition of a "bad colleague" I would be a little concerned. There are situations where it may be necessary to do that struggle, but in my experience there are far fewer than you think, and people often fall into a trap of competing to be the last one standing rather than actually doing good work. If you're struggling in a data center at 2300 you may well be doing more harm than good and going home to sleep (or dance, or whatever you need to refresh yourself and come back focused...) is often a better choice.
I always try to be pro-labor but i had such a situation in my own company. A person I tried to make work for months, the situation just got worse the OP describes (it wasn't performance issues but more attitude/social/soft-skills related). I hesitated before firing them, fearing effects on team morale. After firing them morale improved immensely.
The best thing you could have done is fire them 6 months ago. The second best is firing them today. Don't hesitate.
A decent percentage of the time the person 'management' sees as problematic is a problem because they are a threat to management not to the team.
If I had a nickle for every time management used the 'saving team morale' excuse to get rid of someone out of fear of them being promoted faster than thenselves ...
Employee coasted, did bad work and still gets a generous payout at the end? The team could very well be bitter about it, especially considering that it's such a small company and they certainly "know" about this employee's issues.
They might figure it out by reading this AskHN too.
Rather pick what you think is fair based on circumstance and let the team know your reasoning. It's your company after all, show leadership and set the standard that you want based on your values.
Edit. The "you" here is directed at the ask hn poster, not the person I'm replying to.
The employee spent the time at the firm that it took for the vest to happen. That time is mostly already served. Yanking the promised reward like that does not send a good signal to the rest of the staff. If the employee was so bad they should have fired them long ago, for the sake of the rest of the team if that was a concern. But a month ahead of the vesting? That is a shitty move. In this scenario, the eventual firing is sufficient signal to the rest of the team that the person was not living up to their paycheck.
Being fired is not a "generous payout"; colleagues will hopefully remember that the company got rid of an underperformer, without being bitter about their stock. The parable of the workers in the vineyard comes to mind.
On the other hand, a boss screwing an employee over stock, for any reason, would set a terrible precedent of greed and untrustworthiness.
I find this to be pretty unhelpful. "Do better" isn't useful or actionable otherwise everyone would already be doing it. "Trusted Advisor/ The Dashboard will tell you" is empirically unhelpful, as demonstrated by the post.
I'm not sure what can really be done about that while still allowing custom AMIs with arbitrary operating systems. "Talk to local network" is a pretty generic interface.
AMIs are already specialized for virtualization. To get full performance, guests need a whole pile of specialized drivers. Most are industry standards, but they’re still specialized for VM. Adding one more for IDMS v3 and similar mechanisms from other providers seems straightforward to me.
That makes very little sense. If it's for security it does a terrible job of conveying that, nor would it help anything since you're already in the conversation with that person.
That's right, DoS in Rust is still a thing you can have. But it's no worse than in memory unsafe languages, since memory unsafety can also lead to DoS (and in a much worse way - there are methods for managing panics, managing segfaults is much harder).
If their major concern is memory unsafety it's a lot easier. Most dependencies don't use any unsafe, and instead there's usually just a few libraries pulled in across them that do. One of the best parts of auditing rust (for memory unsafety) is that you can just "grep for unsafe" and know exactly where to start.
If transporting steel wiring is a major cost for you you could reduce that cost significantly by transporting far lighter, thinner strands of these fibers. That would have to assume that you can make up any increased costs of using the silk, of course.
Very interesting. Currently there are genetically modified silkworms that produce spider silk but it's not quite as good as the real thing. This method basically tries to "up" the silkwork silk to make it better. The metric they use is tensile strength. Curious to see applications.
> Should I let them vest then let them go, or just let them go? Feedback from former founders esp is helpful. Any downsides to having them on the cap table?
IMO the time to fire an employee is as soon as you have decided that you need to fire them. That's all there is to it barring an extreme circumstance, but in this case it's clear cut - you gave them plenty of time, warning, etc. It has gotten worse.
As for your cap table, I doubt there are serious implications to having them on it, assuming they're just typical common stock options and not very many. That said, the first time I fired someone I got on a call with my lawyers to make sure everything was ironed out - I suggest you do the same.
Firing people really really sucks. It's maybe the worst part of the job? Not sure. But ultimately that's what you sign up for when you start a company. It's not fair to anyone else on the team to keep someone around who you know needs to go ASAP.
I see a lot of posts saying that your other employees will feel negatively. That's not my experience at all. If this is a justified firing they probably already think it should have happened and they will totally understand why you had to do it. Explain to them that there was ample notice, you set a timeline for improvement, you saw things get worse, and so you took action.
edit: I will add that:
a) It's your company, you ultimately make the calls on how these situations are handled
b) You're going to have the most context. No one else has the same view of how the company is structured, how people will react, etc. Use your best judgment.