A few months with the wrong hire is detrimental to the team.

Your stars will get annoyed that you have someone not pulling their weight, your team will have to clean up the mess of bugs and incomplete stories, and the mentors will spend more of their time supporting an engineer that will not come up to productivity no matter how hard they try.

If it’s really a bad hire, you can’t be afraid to move quickly. If it’s not going to work out, I’d rather it not work out in a month than not work out in six months.

A mentor of mine once said, “You will never regret firing somebody, but you will regret not firing somebody.”

Part of being a manager means having a bias for action and being able to back your decisions once you’ve made them.

Admittedly, you’re not just shooting from the hip and firing at random. But by the time you get to the point where you have to thinking about getting rid of an engineer, it’s probably past the point of no return and you need to move.