Sadly, this whole discussion missed the point of the post, which is probably a pretty good argument for writing it in a different way. Having said that, many people got the point and didn't get balled up in this detail. The point of the post was that either being a good company is a priority or it is not. If it's not a priority, there's very little chance that it will happen. Further, if people don't understand both why it's a priority and how high the priority is, it won't happen. The controversial line about firing Steve and Tim was intended to be a colorful way to bring sharp clarity to what had evidently been a fuzzy priority. I tend to value clarity over sensitivity, but that's obviously not universal.
In terms of whether or not it was right to "clarify" things to Steve that way, I really did not provide enough context in the post to answer that question. However, implicit in the communication was me prioritizing the employees of the company over the managers and executives. Specifically, if you don't hold managers strongly accountable for management, then the employees will suffer which in my opinion is worse than executives getting their feelings hurt.
For whatever it's worth, I never wrote and I never asked anybody to work 12 or 16 hours a day. I never asked anybody to work any specific number of hours. However, many people did and it was important to me that we respect the effort.
The firing line was intended to come across as the very last straw. After training, after many conversations, after performance reviews, if I still couldn't get them to take management seriously then this was to be the last conversation before making a change. If I didn't hold managers accountable to that, then I should be fired as well-- no question about that.
It seems that most people on the thread skipped most of the post and focused entirely on the firing part, so I'll clarify what I wrote.
First, the post isn't about 1:1s. 1:1s were just our way of doing things at Opsware. Other companies have other ways of doing things. It was about whether or not people who worked at the company received any guidance, context, or feedback.
Second, the point of the conversation was to focus the executive on what the environment was like for employees (as opposed to managers and executives). In general, I believe that is important to optimize for the feelings of the people doing the work rather than the people doing the management. If you optimize for managers, then you get what you get.
Finally, 1:1s were a huge point of emphasis in the company from the initial training through everything that we discussed as a team. Not ever meeting with your people in this context basically meant that you cared nothing about your employees. If you read the entire post, you should get that.
Having said that, for whatever reason I didn't make things clear to every manager in the company (my fault). The point of the conversation was clarity. The firing comment was to emphasize the importance of the employees vs. the executives.
It's fine with me if you hate it, but you should probably try to understand it first. Finally, fwiw, I still talk to Steve every week and he's done extremely well in his career. This did turn out to be clarifying for him and we'd worked together for 7 years at the time of the conversation, so there was quite a bit of context.
Finally, there were 600 people in the company at the time and only one manager that wasn't having regular 1:1s. It's interesting to me that most people on this thread think that it's not a serious matter to let people come to work with zero guidance or feedback. In fact, it's just fine. What's really bad is making clear what's acceptable and unacceptable management. Hmmm.
In terms of whether or not it was right to "clarify" things to Steve that way, I really did not provide enough context in the post to answer that question. However, implicit in the communication was me prioritizing the employees of the company over the managers and executives. Specifically, if you don't hold managers strongly accountable for management, then the employees will suffer which in my opinion is worse than executives getting their feelings hurt.
For whatever it's worth, I never wrote and I never asked anybody to work 12 or 16 hours a day. I never asked anybody to work any specific number of hours. However, many people did and it was important to me that we respect the effort.
The firing line was intended to come across as the very last straw. After training, after many conversations, after performance reviews, if I still couldn't get them to take management seriously then this was to be the last conversation before making a change. If I didn't hold managers accountable to that, then I should be fired as well-- no question about that.