Firing People
&gt; I hadn’t been involved with the company at all for two months through my sabbatical, and I hadn’t even talked to my manager in four months, ever since she had decided that 1:1s weren’t really valuable between her and me.<p>&gt; I’m still not fully certain why I got the axe ... My best guess is that it’s Tall Poppy Syndrome<p>Probably some signs here... I wouldn&#x27;t say he was fired &quot;fast&quot; by any stretch of the imagination.<p>I will explain what firing fast means to me. I get a lot of work done through foreign devs I find on Upwork. I have to manage them closely, but overall, as they become acclimated and trained, they become pretty self-reliant in about 2-3 months.<p>However, I have also invested plenty of time into bad apples hoping to train their dev skills, teach them about our product, and all sorts of things only to get random &quot;hey I&#x27;m going away for couple weeks tomorrow&quot; kind of messages or a waning commitment to the project and quality of work.<p>Admittedly, I used to feel bad about firing people. I didn&#x27;t care if they were &quot;just&quot; some Upwork guys, I try to get everyone involved in my team and feel like they&#x27;re part of something. These days, I&#x27;m experienced enough to see the warning signs and rather than mull over &quot;should I do it?&quot; I just fire them and get onto hiring the next. I&#x27;ve never seen anyone turn around after warning signs, and I&#x27;ve gone through enough &quot;oh come on they&#x27;re human too, let me try to just understand their situation&quot; moments to know it&#x27;s a flawed manner of thinking. This is why you &quot;fire fast&quot; and &quot;hire slowly&quot;.<p>Business is business. It sucks to get fired, but it&#x27;s worse for your business to run on rusty cogs that can break at any moment.