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Comment by hackula1 | Hacker News Reader

IDK, I could see this the other way around too. If you are currently doing the job, then you must be qualified for it, or are soon to be fired. There are probably some small percentage of people who just slide under the radar, but I would think if you were entirely incompetent and unable to do your job you would not last long.

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sometimes it's not trivial to fire people, because lawyers could get involved.

In most of the US, you just walk into an employee's office and tell them they are fired. If you tell them a reason that is discriminatory, prepare to be sued, but most of the time you are not required to give them any reason at all.

For gross incompetence it's not really that hard in either the USA or the UK of course this just means your HR dept has some performance issues it needs to address :-)

depends on the state in the US. And let's say the HR dept has performance issues. How do you fire someone in HR? They're the ones that know all the rules and all the laws that could get you in trouble. Where I work slid by, managed to can the HR head, but they were only able to do it because 1) she was super-overpaid and there was a budget crunch - which can be a legal problem for nonprofits (overhead) 2) there was a pretty serious SNAFU involving federal funds that happened under her watch, so she could have been in legal trouble herself.

Also, gross incompetence is not necessarily the problem... Death by a thousand cuts.

Then the board is incompetent.

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