At the start of the month, I was on a panel at Unified Diff (which, if you’re in the South Wales area, is well worth your time going to every month), and the last question we had is well worth expanding into a blog post. We were asked what each of us would do with a failing developer, and everyone was taken aback by my unequivocal answer: I’d fire them. After some back and forth between us (which carried on over a pint afterwards), my fellow panelists concluded that I seemed to be able to afford higher standards than they could in their organisations.