Hi, this is the Daily Overpass, my name is Eric and I make apps!
Today I wanna talk about letting go of a remote team worker.
Ok so today I had to let one of my team members go which is never a good thing.
So usually when I hire somebody, my hope is that it's for the long term.
I think every kind of job situation is that way, you don't want it to end in "this is
just not working out", but that's what I had to do today.
And I've had to do this a lot.
in the old days, I would keep somebody for far too long until I decide to just cut my
losses and every time you cut your losses, you wish you'd done it several months before
or whatever.
I would go through people and i think my experience is that you have to go through several people
to find that right person for a job.
And sometimes somebody might interview well, somebody who's CV might look really good but
then when it actually gets to doing the job then they're just not up to scratch and you
have to say ok, this is part of the process, we have to let you go.
there's no sense in beating yourself up about it saying "this is never gonna work out",
or anything like that, which is what a lot of people do when they talk about working
with remote teams, they say "oh we tried it before but it doesn't work".
But there's usually four different reasons why I let somebody go, when I think about
it.
The first is easy - technical difficulties.
If I hire somebody, like everybody works from home, so if I hire somebody and their computer
is always crashing, or their internet is really slow, or the internet is always going out,
then that's not their fault but it's just something we can't work with.
So that's something where we usually have to part ways, but trying to give them enough
time to get it sorted out.
I can't switch ISP's or anything for them so that's something that has to happen.
And that happens from time to time, where somebody wants that working from home job,
but they just are not equipped to do that.
The second is probably I would say laziness.
And not so much laziness, but just really slow productivity.
So some people can get that way, and sometimes something might seem like laziness but the
problem is actually with me, like they're not quite sure what they should be doing so
they just try lots of different things rather than ask for clarification.
And so sometimes that could be a false negative, so I usually try to give people more time
if I think they're just lazy because it could just be I'm not giving them enough to do,
or they're starting to do that kind of stuff.
Because I know that I've worked in jobs before where there was just nothing to do, and you
start off on day 1 going "Let's do this!
Give me some work, give me some work!", and then people say "oh no, soon Eric, soon, and
then after a while nothing comes and you just sit there and you're like "God, I'm so bored",
and then when you do get a project then it just takes ages to do because you've slowed
down, your motivation...you know, you've gotten used to this slower pace.
And sometimes when you're hiring a developer, you have to look out for that.
Some developers are just in that.
You know, you can hire two developers to do the same job and they can do the same quality,
but one of them has the mentality that this should take two weeks, and one of them has
the mentality that this should take six months.
So it's the different types of working styles and things that happen.
So that's technical difficulties, laziness, the third one is incompetence.
And I don't mean that in comma, like "man, you're in competent", I mean like they might
not know the job very well, they might not know how things work, I mean we're all incompetent
at some point.
When we're starting out, we don't know how something works, so we have to learn something.
Or we might be in over our head and that kind of stuff.
And a lot of the time, it's the case of - that's a temporary problem.
It's not laziness, which is psychological, it's just like they don't quite know what
they're doing, and they need to work on it.
When we can, just give them the time and say hey, I understand this is how you do it,you're
honest, I can trust you, we'll give you the time to learn this, but sometimes it's just
not working out.
And the last one is just through dishonesty.
And that's something you can't do anything with.
And I've fired people for dishonesty quite a bit in the past.
Usually it's like they're working more than one job, or they're saying that they're one
place and they're not, or giving lots of excuses for why things aren't getting done and things
like that.
When you catch them out, then it can be a bit difficult.
So that's part of the process.
But I'm gonna tell you about a situation which - when I let somebody go I go through this
whole ritual now, where I have to go and disable all their accounts first before I actually
give them the news that it's not working.
And the reason for this is, back in the early days when I first started hiring people, I
hired one guy who I gave him - we were using corona sdk back when corona sdk was 600 dollars
a year or something.
I had all these courses that I had him take and he didn't seem dishonest, he just wasn't
getting it.
In the end i just thought, it's just not working so I said "sorry, we're gonna have to let
you go, but I've paid you to the end of the month already so don't worry about it".
It's one of the things I do, try to give them as much opportunity as possible.
So what he had done is he had gone through and he had changed all the accounts on the
training course, on the corona sdk and several other things where he's changed the email
address, the username and the password to his.
So basically he stole the software, so I couldn't log in, I couldn't do anything and then I
had to contact corona, I had to contact this training company and I said "look, I'm really
sorry, I don't know why I can't log in, it could be this guy", and I gave them his address
and they looked through and they found it and then they changed it back, switched it
back to me and everything and I changed the passwords.
It was embarrassing.
So I confronted him about it, I said "look, you're trying to steal from me", and he says
"oh I'm sorry but I just thought it was unfair that you let me go", and it was like, well,
you know.
So I gave him a bad review on this website and he was really upset about it and i thought,
"well, you made a mistake", so I just went ahead and I removed the bad review because
people make mistakes, it shouldn't follow them forever.
But then later on, he came back and asked me to give him a reference for a future job
and I said I'm sorry, I can't do that.
So because of him, every time I let somebody go now I have to go through this...I gotta
keep track of what access I give to people.
So I've gotta remove them from twitter, I gotta remove them from trello, I gotta disable
the google mail account, it depends on what the job is, so from Wordpress, from whatever.
And then we have that conversation.
And it's hard to process.
I mean, a lot of people, they'll say this to me, they'll say "why don't you just hire
somebody locally?", and I said "you don't think that has headaches, getting the wrong
person when you hire somebody locally?!
That has headaches too.
You've got loads of issues with that, and you've got loads of red tape".
So anyway, for those of you who are thinking about hiring somebody offshore, there's lots
of things to look for.
It's better to...if you get the wrong person, don't stick with it too long like I do sometimes.
You gotta cut your losses and say.
It's unfair but what I find - it's possible for a really good person to degrade over time.
And it might not be their fault, it might be your management style.
It could be that you're just not giving them really good information or you're not being
clear about what you want and they just have this feeling of helplessness.
but I've never seen somebody who started off lazy get good.
It's always been a one way thing.
And you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your price.
You have to go through a lot of people sometimes before you find a really good team, and that's
just part of the process.
Anyway, kind of a bummer.
Anyway, that's it for today, I'll talk to you guys on Monday!