It's not often you find an employee who really simply does not produce. There are some who are simply in over their head, they've overestimated their abilities, or they've overpromised their schedule. These individuals at least appear to be busy, they have the right goals, they just can't cut the mustard. Then there are those occasional people who you have to wonder what they're thinking. They're not in over their heads, they just can't seem to actually get anything done -- and worse, they seem like they don't want to get anything done.
Juliet.net was a brand-new startup, and neither founder was technical, so they figured they needed to hire on two people. I met them, and told them I could build them their prototype, no problem. Without my knowledge, or input, they hired on another guy, to do some funky Javascript stuff, something that, admittedly, I'm lacking advanced skills in. They told me not to worry, this guy also had startup experience, and he had been at a major search engine company. Okay, I figure this guy probably has some good energy, no worries.
I could not have been more wrong. I don't know how his interview went, but he has to have been the worst person for a startup I've ever seen. I launch into development, even before I officially started, and build out the back-end architecture and infrastructure. The plan was for the other guy to develop the CGI applications, while I focus on building the servers to power it. A month into it, I've got preliminary work running, and crafted up some demo apps that he could look at, to see how the infrastructure worked. It's at this point I find out he's never actually worked with source code control before.
Red flags went up; how could someone who worked at such a prestigious company have never used source control? As well, during this time, his work on the AJAX (a fancy acronym for advanced Javascript development) front-end elements has progressed excruciatingly slowly. We give him a few days to work on a CGI, to see if he can do it. He can't. He's not a developer, and he's definitely not startup quality. A startup needs to know that work can be delivered, and if it can't, it needs to know that as soon as possible. This guy would not only return no status on his work, but we would have to figure out he was incapable by waiting for his deadlines to pass.
I talked with the founders about this issue. He was not only failing to get his work done within deadlines (even when we tried to cut his workload into small chunks, with daily deliverables, so we could better track his time), but I would look over to see him playing web games, just an hour or two before his deadlines. He simply seemed incapable of actually putting in the effort to get work done.
This issue was at the forefront after just the first month of working with the team. When I left the company three months later (and this was definitely one of the reasons I left), this employee was still there, and was still failing to deliver. What's worse, he was a contract employee, and his contract was renewed monthly! He could have been let go at the end of any of those months, but the founders, for unfathomable reasons, felt it was better to continue to pay him, getting almost no value in return. Meanwhile, my frustration with this employee, and with the failure of the founders to actually handle this situation in any logical sense, drove me to leave the company -- the person who had actually done all the work necessary to launch their website on an aggressive schedule.
Companies I've worked at, which have gone on to do well, have never been shy of losing dead weight. Hotelecom actually fired several salaried employees during my two years there, and in almost every case, they were very good decisions. Peer employees understood why they were let go (and the reasons were well explained, which prevented rampant rumors and hearsay), and in most cases, the peers were glad that management took the responsibility for getting rid of people who were not pulling their weight, or earning their paychecks.