The Physics of Firing
Why Your Team is Secretly Praying You’ll Pull the Trigger
As leaders, we face a unique challenge: we rarely see the immediate results of our work.
When we were individual contributors, our code produced rapid, tangible outcomes. But as leaders, the effects of our decisions—or our passivity—often take months to surface.
Behind the scenes of our daily management, we are constantly fighting two invisible, relentless laws of physics: Entropy and Inertia.
Nowhere are these forces more destructive than when dealing with a chronic underperformer or a cultural detractor.
If you scroll through LinkedIn or other leadership sources, firing is overwhelmingly framed as a failure of leadership.
We are told to coach, to mentor, to find them a different seat on the bus. But there is a hidden hack to building high-performing cultures that no one wants to talk about:
Removing the “rotten apple” is often the single most effective way to fight organizational decay and increase your team’s output.
The Capacity Sink (Human Entropy)
In physics, entropy is the measure of disorder in a system. According to the second law of thermodynamics, entropy always increases unless energy is applied to stop it.
We usually talk about technical entropy—systems becoming overly complex, technical debt accumulating, and codebases decaying. But there is also Human Entropy.
Recently, I was speaking with another engineering leader who shared a brilliant framing for evaluating a struggling team member.
They rely on one simple question:
“Does this person add capacity to the team, or take it away?”
When someone is a chronic low-performer or an asshole, they don’t just contribute zero—they operate in the negative. They act as a human catalyst for entropy.
They drain your senior engineers’ time with repeated, basic hand-holding. They make code reviews exhausting. They introduce toxic friction that occupies the mental and emotional space of their peers.
They are a capacity sink.
Unaddressed, this human entropy paralyzes the team. The group would literally get more done, faster, and with less stress, if that person simply wasn’t there.
The “Nice Leader” Trap (Overcoming Inertia)
If human entropy is the disease, why do we wait so long to apply the cure? The answer is the second force: Inertia.
Inertia is the resistance to change; it’s the tendency of an object to keep doing exactly what it’s doing. For engineering leaders, organizational inertia often disguises itself as empathy.
I speak from experience because I fell into this trap myself. For years, I had situations where I hesitated to fire someone who was clearly dragging the team down. Because I wanted to be a “good” leader, I waited. I tried to find them a new project. I moved them to a different squad. I convinced myself I was giving them a fair chance.
But the reality was just psychological inertia. Our brains are wired to favor familiar patterns and resist change because it burns much less energy.
It is emotionally easier to stick with the familiar discomfort of a failing employee than to face the sharp, disruptive reality of firing them.
I thought I was being empathetic. Driven by my own thoughts of Developmental Leadership.
I was actually just being lazy and negligent.
What You Tolerate, You Encourage
Here is the hard truth about letting inertia win: Your high performers are watching.
When you keep a net-negative performer on the team, you aren’t just “helping” that one person. You are sending a loud, clear signal to everyone else: “This level of performance is acceptable here.”
I realized my hesitation was creating a sense of deep inequality. My top engineers were asking themselves a dangerous question: “Why am I working this hard, pushing for quality, and sweating the details, when the manager is perfectly okay with keeping someone who drags us down?”
By shielding the low performer from consequences, I was disrespecting the people who were actually carrying the team. Slowly, the performance of my good engineers started to degrade because I had effectively lowered the bar to the floor.
I allowed entropy to spread.
The Silent Expectation
We often fear that firing someone will disrupt the team and make people feel insecure. We worry they will think, “Am I next?”
But in my experience, the opposite happens. The rest of the group knows about the capacity sink long before you do. They are the ones fixing the broken code and enduring the negativity.
They are silently expecting you to do your job.
When I finally fought through the inertia and made the decision to let those individuals go, yes, there was an initial shock. For a week or two, the air felt heavy. But once the dust settled? The relief was palpable.
“We knew it was right. We didn’t know why you hesitated for so long,” - this is what I heard from one of the principal engineers a few months later.
The velocity went up. The culture solidified. The team realized that I was willing to apply the necessary force to correct the system and protect their working environment.
Finding “The Line”
I’m not suggesting we rule with an iron fist or fire people for a single mistake. Coaching and grace absolutely have their place.
But as leaders, it is our primary job to fight entropy and inertia, and that means defining “The Line.”
When does “support” become “enabling”? When does “patience” become “negligence”?
If you have been clear about expectations, provided support, and the person is still actively draining capacity from your team, you have reached the line. Crossing it means you are sacrificing the productivity of your best people to protect the comfort of your worst.
It is not a “bad” thing to fire people. It is a necessary function of guarding your company’s culture. Don’t wait years like I did.
If you are holding onto someone purely because it’s easier than letting them go, look at your high performers. They are the ones paying the price for your inertia.