Varun Gupta shared the incident in a post, saying he ignored advice from his HR team and colleagues, who felt he was being too harsh. “I once fired an employee on Day 2. HR advised me to wait. My team thought I was being too harsh. But somewhere I knew waiting would make it worse,” Gupta wrote.
Event Context
Further, explaining his decision, Gupta argued that while technical skills and knowledge can be taught, intent and ownership are qualities that reveal themselves from the very beginning. “Skills have a learning curve. Knowledge can be transferred. But intent? Intent shows up before the ID card does,” he wrote.
“He walked into a room full of people carrying something heavy and didn’t once stop to notice. That’s not nervousness. That’s not being new. That’s just who you are. He showed me who he was before he even had a desk. I believed him,” he added.
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Team Analysis
The next morning, Gupta said that the team again found itself one member short during one of the busiest days of the quarter. It was then that he learnt that the employee had left the previous day without informing anyone. “Day 2 was a very short conversation. People said I was too harsh. I said I was too slow,” he wrote.
Match Outlook
Gupta shared that the employee joined the company on the day of a major internal event. While no one expected the new hire to lead or take charge, the team did expect him to participate. He claimed that during the event, employees stayed back beyond regular working hours to help. However, the new hire walked into the venue, looked around and left without informing anyone.
When Gupta called him, the employee allegedly said that he had only just joined the company and believed it was the responsibility of his peers, not him, to manage the event. “I asked him, ‘But don’t you want to know what’s happening?'” Gupta wrote, adding that the employee appeared hesitant in his response. “He hemmed and hawed,” he said.
One user criticised Gupta’s decision, writing, “Transforming people is one of the toughest aspects of leadership. That’s precisely where leaders are expected to make a difference. Firing an employee on just the second day, before giving them a fair opportunity to learn and improve, struck me as a poor example of leadership.”
Another commented, “Just because you happen to be the CEO of a company, doesn’t mean you are always right. You saved that guy from a toxic environment that you must have built over the years.”
Others supported Gupta’s stance. One user wrote, “This is not about expecting a new hire to be perfect; it is about expecting basic ownership and communication from day one.”
Another added, “Sounds like a misuse of power to me. Your judgement is valid if you have asked him to do something and he left without showing the output or progress to anyone.”
