It sucks to let people go. I hope we get better at not hiring False Positives. But False Positives is the only way we learn. We learn nothing from False Negatives. And there is a huge risk we miss out on a 20x employee. The way we get better at hiring is to hire, learn, and improve. Do not be afraid of hiring False Positives. Give people chances. Be afraid of missing the 20x employee.
…ady knows the secret: Professional assassins don’t introduce themselves. Whatever the popular myth, Foo doesn’t crush Bar merely by relaunching it to grander fanfare; it tinkers quietly for years, experimenting with novel and native ways to do things that steal from Bar a visit here, a visit there. One day, a data scientist at Bar is grabbing coffee when she notices a trivial — almost imperceptible — dip in a graph that for as long as anyone can remember has gone up and to the right.