> are they getting any equity? Do they make more (meaningfully more) money if they do a good job?
No, I understand this can be a problem but at the same time I don't see a good reason to give them equity. I might give them equity and then get the bad performance again then I'll be a total idiot.
> Are you sure of the reasons why their performance is bad?
No I'm not but I've tried hard to figure out and so far couldn't pin point.
> because they don't want to anger you and risk getting fired?
I don't think so as I openly discussed the matter and tried to change how we work to fix this problem by their suggestions. So they know if they think something will work better I'll go with that. For example with one of them we were doing daily reviews then he wanted to weekly and thought it'd be better. I agreed and didn't bother him for a week. Result same.
Some of them know, couple of them quite new hires who started with a very bad performance (I've no clue how the hell this is possible! - maybe my fault)
Also I openly discussed all these issues and invite them to find a solution all together. So far not going well.
In some cases after being informed of possible serious consequences their performance got back to normal for a month or two then cycle repeated itself. So maybe every 2 months I should remind them that they very close to getting sacked.
To be honest numbers are slightly less I put 8/5 by scaling the current technical team to a little bit more to keep it anonymous (I might be paranoid but my team mates reading HN as well!)
But still it's clear that my management skills are not top notch and I didn't hire right people.
We are building a (fairly expensive) desktop software in a quite niche area, releasing about 4 updates per year and it's been about 2 years we are doing this.
That is a killer release cycle. It is a inefficient as hell. It encourages people to hide in the long deadline. Switch to 2 week releases, even if it is only internal. Eventually switch to two week releases to customers. They will get new goodies every two weeks and they wont have to wait months for bug fixes. Who knows, the discipline might solve part of your problem.
Internal releases all automated so daily, hourly whatever in every commit and it's almost forbidden to keep your code more than a day at home! even if it's broken I force people to commit to keep it alive. If one code takes more than a day there is generally something with (design, task splitting etc.) unless we are introducing a big feature.
However based on comments I think focusing on important couple of features and try to deliver them in weekly of 2 weekly periods makes a lot of sense and should motivate people better.
Not doing their job which is tickets assigned them (coding, testing, building, buying groceries etc.)
So we do have a clear definition of what needs to be done, and it's also clear that who's doing it and who's not. Only question in here might what's the accepted amount of tasks done. Like does this ticket takes an hour for X and a day for Y. In either case (Y is slacking or it takes a day for him) he's an incompetent employee and needs to go. Am I missing something?
Like does this ticket takes an hour for X and a day for Y.
Out of context, comparisons like this are meaningless. Maybe the ticket took a long time for Y because he was assigned 30 tickets and spent most of the day suffering paralysis of choice, maybe that particular subject is difficult for him but he has other strengths. When you blamed him for it his knee-jerk response was to get defensive and make excuses (eg personal life problems).
Either way that shows that the employee is not good, if a person can't handle to do his/her own tasks one by one that person should not be work as a developer. BTW generally assigned person decides how long will it take to finish a task (a task can't take longer than 4+ hours if it's needs to be split into smaller chunks)
I'm a bit lost though, I thought in HN many people thought that telecommuting was way to go and there are cool companies such as 37Signals rocking by telecommuting.
Am I missing something? Are those all lies, or do HNers generally love telecommuting because they can slack off as an employee? Or maybe that was only me and pretty much everyone thinks telecommuting is a bad idea.
>Normally I'm not a manager just an passionate engineer however setting up your own company generally makes you an instant manager.
If you have 8 people working for you, well, you are a manager. You can also be other things, but you are a manager. expecting to manage eight people without any effort is like expecting to code up a complex web application in an evening. sure, if you are really great, yeah, maybe you can do it? but very few people can.
>Can't I find 5 more people who can work without nudging instead of hiring a useless person (read: manager) to just nudge people?
It's possible to find people who don't need nudging. It's just hard. People who can work without nudging make excellent and very expensive contractors.
The thing of it is, if you have 8 people working for you, uh, you are not only a manager, but an advanced manager. Hell, just hiring 8 good people without making a bunch of mistakes is no mean feat.
I'm not sure that hiring a manager as a go between would help you much; there are plenty of incompetent idiots going around selling themselves as excellent managers, and like anything else, it takes one to know one.
The thing is, coordinating 8 people is a difficult task. hiring a good manager could ease the burden, or it could add a 9th personality in there to muck things up.
I think the point is that if you fire 1 as an example, the other 4 will improve. So pick the worst and lose him. If you do indeed need to fire all 5, then do it at once and pay the remaining people more.
I'd be surprised if the problem is that more than 50% of your programmers need to be fired . Maybe 1 or 2 and better managament for the rest. I don't think you need a manager for 8 people, but you probably do need to do a little better yourself at managing. If you are the leader/owner of the company, and it has 8 employees, then you are the manager whether you want to be or not.
Actually I wasn't considering this but you and many others in here pointed out mass firing would be very bad with very good reasons. Now I changed my mind about this, even if I finalize my decision on firing it'll be worst to better in every 2 months (unless they change in the middle).
I actually think dragging it out over several months would be even worse. I wouldn't fire more than 2 that way. Your good employees will be wondering if they are next and if they should be polishing their resume (which they'll do instead of work you need done)
We do many of these, however we don't focus on weekly tangible results which is a really important point and can motivate the team a lot. One of the problems that we don't do web startup which means whatever we do, it'll be generally delivered to the end user at least 2 months later, but still seeing something get done is a good way to be motivated.
