Your best friend works for you and he is not good at the job

$ eldr --explain hired-a-friend

You hired him because you trusted him, which was a good reason, and he is not doing the job, which is a separate fact. You have known this for about five months. Two other people on the team have stopped bringing you their complaints about him, and you told yourself that was because the problem had improved.

It is not because the problem improved. It is because they concluded you are not going to do anything, and people stop escalating to a manager they have quietly reclassified as unavailable.

The claim

Every week you do not act, the eventual conversation gets harder and your authority with everyone else gets cheaper — and the second cost is larger than the first. The delay is not protecting the friendship. It is spending something else to protect it, and the something else is the thing you were actually hired to hold.

Falsifiable, and checkable this week: ask the person on your team who was most vocal about the problem in the spring what they think now. If they hedge, if they say it is fine, if they suddenly have no view — that is the receipt. The information stopped flowing upward and you can date roughly when.

The three things you are conflating

Men stuck in this file are almost always running three separate decisions as one, which is why it has not moved in five months.

• Is he doing this job? An evidence question with an answer. Write the answer down in one sentence.
• Is there a job here he would do well? A different question, usually answerable, and sometimes the whole solution — a narrower role, a different function, the thing he was good at before you promoted him into managing.
• Does the friendship survive? Not your decision alone, and not knowable in advance. You are currently letting the least controllable of the three veto the other two.

Separate them on paper and the paralysis usually breaks inside an hour, because the first question was never hard and you have been answering the third one instead.

The conversation you are avoiding is not the one you think

You are rehearsing a firing. What the situation usually needs first is a much smaller and much more uncomfortable conversation: telling him, explicitly, with examples, that he is not meeting the bar — something you have probably never done, because every attempt so far was softened into friendliness by the end of the sentence.

Ask yourself honestly whether he knows. In most of these files, he does not. He has had five months of a friend being warm to him and no manager telling him anything, and if you fire him in September he will be right to feel ambushed, and you will be the reason.

So the forced move is not the exit. It is one meeting, this week, framed as a manager and not as a friend, with three written examples and a defined bar and a date. Then he gets a real chance and you get either a fixed problem or a clean basis for the harder decision. Either outcome is better than what you have now, which is neither.

The case against this

Firing a friend is not a management problem to be solved with a protocol, it is a permanent cost to a relationship that will outlast this company. Small teams are built on trust and the man telling you that your authority is being priced by your staff is assuming your staff is more important than a twenty-year friendship. Plenty of mediocre hires become good within a year. Plenty of founders who fired friends for underperformance now run bigger companies and eat alone.

That objection is real and I want it on the page in full. There is a narrower version that is harder to answer: your judgment of his performance is not independent. You are evaluating a friend, which means you are either over-forgiving him or over-correcting to prove to yourself you are not over-forgiving him, and you have no way to tell which from inside your own head.

Which is a decent argument for getting an outside read on this specific file before you act, and also a decent argument for the smaller move. The bar conversation does not require you to be right about his performance. It only requires you to be specific about it, and specificity is what you have been withholding — out of kindness, allegedly.

What the read will do with it

It will almost certainly return SPLIT, because the file contains three decisions and a compound file cannot be resolved, only decomposed. The window will be short — under two weeks — because the cost being incurred here is continuous rather than event-driven, and there is no external date coming to save you. The counter-case will usually ask whether you have ever stated the bar out loud, which in this library is the most common load- bearing assumption in the entire category of management files.

You will not get told whether the friendship survives. Nothing can tell you that.

One last thing, and it is the sentence men in this file resist hardest: he is also paying for your delay. Five months of being quietly judged and never told is five months of a career he cannot correct, at a company where two of his colleagues have already stopped taking him seriously. Whatever you think you are protecting him from, you are not protecting him from that.

For entertainment and reflective purposes only. Not a substitute for professional financial, legal, medical or mental-health advice.