If you believe that you can find an employee that is more attentive or with more experience, and you are not laying off your employees right now to find those better employees, what the hell is going on? Are you just hanging out, basically sitting there knowing you have suboptimal employees, and eagerly waiting for them to fuck up so you have an excuse to axe them? You know your employees are (dun dun dun) capable of mistakes but it's expensive to lay them off so you're watching like a hawk for when you get to upgrade them?
The key difference here to me is mistakes vs negligence. Employee makes a typo -> It's a mistake. Not severe, negligent incompetence. It's a learning experience. The company is worse off by firing that person who has experience
If someone is slacking off? Yeah, fire them, that's not a mistake, that's negligence. You email a colleague in another time zone asking for help and they ignore you because you didn't CC their manager? Yeah, fucking fire that person.
I mean, in fact we have an industry based around the fact that people make mistakes: it's called software testing. Should we be firing developers when they make a mistake (i.e. their code has more than zero bugs)? That would be ridiculous. You're not even punishing them in that case - they're going to use their current salary at your shop to leverage a higher salary at the new place they (effortlessly) land at, whereas you're going to spend tens of thousands of dollars to hire that mythical developer that you should have fired this guy for a year ago?
The key difference here to me is mistakes vs negligence. Employee makes a typo -> It's a mistake. Not severe, negligent incompetence. It's a learning experience. The company is worse off by firing that person who has experience
If someone is slacking off? Yeah, fire them, that's not a mistake, that's negligence. You email a colleague in another time zone asking for help and they ignore you because you didn't CC their manager? Yeah, fucking fire that person.
I mean, in fact we have an industry based around the fact that people make mistakes: it's called software testing. Should we be firing developers when they make a mistake (i.e. their code has more than zero bugs)? That would be ridiculous. You're not even punishing them in that case - they're going to use their current salary at your shop to leverage a higher salary at the new place they (effortlessly) land at, whereas you're going to spend tens of thousands of dollars to hire that mythical developer that you should have fired this guy for a year ago?