alt Hacker News> In today's corporate world, it can be difficult or impossible to fire people
Really? In the US you can fire an employee for any reason at any time (aside from a few illegal reasons: union activity, racism, etc.).
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the "few illegal reasons" are able to be leveraged by almost any employee to write a letter and/or lawsuit suggesting they were fired for the wrong reasons. if you didn't internally document -- exhaustively -- how bad they were, and also assuming they didn't expertly document -- exhaustively -- how great they were and how unfairly treated they were as an employee -- it winds up being a gigantic pain in the ass and almost always better for the company to simply pay them $200k as a settlement to said lawsuit. And that comes out of the budget of a department who doesn't have $200k to spare.
That's why it's so hard.
Firing someone "for cause" is an incredibly long and difficult process at many organizations. They eventually get put on a PIP for 3 to 6 months, meanwhile they are looking for another job and continuing to drag down performance of the rest of the team. It would be cheaper to pay them to leave sooner.
> In the US you can fire an employee for any reason at any time
On paper, yes. In practice, especially in a larger company? It's often a long journey that involves a lot of energy on the part of the manager. And then of course you may not get a backfill rec. So then one needs to ask themselves: is this person truly a net negative when compared to the energy that'd be required to jettison them *and* replace them with nothing?
Often the answer is no.