In the jobmarket, everyone is a used car salesman!
While being in the jobmarket is hard for most, it also evokes romantic visions of getting a great career break at this fabulous company known for its excellent culture, cool products, bleeding edge technology and cut-above-the-rest compensation! Most of us use that as an opportunity to critically examine our strengths and weekenesses, our USP, our inner calling - and last but certainly not the least, our market value. In a freemarket economy, that’s a lot like selling your used car :). Selling a used car is tough. I don’t know too many people who trust a used car salesman, but here’s the radical idea - we are all used car salesmen working extremely hard to outcompete other similar salesmen to eventually sell ourselves. Only we know the true strengths and hidden constraints of our ‘car’ - only we know what is...
What kind of “Managers stick with poor performers rather than hire new faces” ?
I am sure you have heard it in all versions, subversions and perversions, but one simple universal workplace truth seems to be don’t tolerate poor performance, and if not outrightly eliminate poor performers, do ease them out over a reasonable but fast period of time. The yawning gap between a bottom performer and the top performer is perhaps nowhere more so prominent as in a human-skill based knowledge industry like software. Over the years, various productivity studies still continue to point a gap of anywhere between 1:10 to 1:20 or even more between the top programmer and the bottom one. The exact number doesn’t really matter. What is important is to understand that success of a software endeavor howsomuch is dependent on very smart people, it finally needs a great team to deliver goods - no task is trivial...