Firing People Fast (or, The Most Expensive Empathy I Ever Bought)
In a country with no social safety net, "understanding" becomes the most expensive word a founder can use.
Imran bhai had been with us since the second hire. He had carried boxes up the unfinished stairwell in Chairmanbari and slept on a desk the night our payment gateway crashed. People loved him.
By 2019, we had crossed five hundred, and Imran bhai was drowning. Vendor invoices paid twice. A campaign shipped without legal sign-off. A junior came to me directly because she could not get a decision out of him for two weeks.
“Bhai, ektu time lagbe,” he said in our last review. I gave him another six months.
What I refused to see was the quieter cost. New hires asking what he did all day. Team leads who knew his mistakes never landed on him. Interns noticing the founder’s favorite got a free pass.
Understanding
In Bangladesh, a job is rarely just a job. It is the household. School fees, rent, medicine for a parent, the only thing between dignity and disaster. There is no social security here. No unemployment cheque after a layoff. People live month to month, and losing a job in Dhaka has nothing in common with losing one in Berlin.
Other cultures have built their own compacts around this. Toyota and a generation of Japanese and Korean companies anchored themselves to lifetime employment, where letting someone go was nearly unthinkable. Every country writes its own deal with work. Ours has been forged by precarity.
Our work culture orbits around a single heavy word. Understanding. “Bujhen amar obostha.” Employees ask for it. Employers extend it.
Understanding is a beautiful thing in a neighborhood. It becomes a slow poison in a scaling company. Every month of understanding extended to one underperformer is paid for by the four people around them.
The Keeper Test
Reed Hastings built Netflix around a single brutal question. If this person walked in tomorrow and resigned, how hard would you fight to keep them? If the honest answer is “I would let them walk,” they should already be off the team.
A second move follows. Every cycle, cut your bottom performers. Especially when the team is strong. The only way to raise the floor is to keep raising it.
The Two-Month Notice Trap
Bangladeshi labour law gives you two months’ notice. At Pathao, we set our policy at two months on purpose, thinking we were being responsible.
It was theatre. I never saw a handover that genuinely needed more than two weeks. What happens in those weeks is predictable. The person takes interviews on company time. Calls go unreturned. Slack messages get the slow-drip treatment. Their heart left the building the day they got the letter. Pay the notice. Send them home that afternoon.
Who You Actually Owe
When you decide to let someone go, the question is who you are actually protecting. The Bangladeshi instinct sends every drop of empathy toward the person being fired, which is the easiest choice.
What you owe is the company. The co-founders who bet years on the same thing you did. The investors who wrote checks on your promises. The three hundred others on payroll watching whether you have the spine to protect what they are building.
How to Fire
Step one is the performance appraisal. Sit down, name what is working, name what is missing. If HR is in the building, write it down so the record exists on paper.
Then give them three months. Long enough to turn it around if the will is there. Inside that window they move or they don’t.
If they don’t, the second meeting goes on the calendar. Twelve minutes. You tell them the role and the person are no longer a fit, you outline the severance, you give them room to respond. You make it about the role, never about who they are. Both of you already know what is coming.
This whole sequence has two purposes. A paper trail that answers for itself later. And dignity. None of it should feel personal. The role asked for something the person could not deliver, three honest months tested that, and a clean decision followed.
Pay the severance generously. Your remaining team is watching whether you treat tenure like humanity.
I finally let Imran bhai go that December. He had known for weeks. He found a new role inside two months. He still messages on Eid. The team he led became one of our strongest within the quarter. I had waited six months too long, and every month cost something I could not get back.
Be less understanding. Be more responsible. Those are two different jobs, and confusing them is how good companies die slowly.