Your decision cost the company and likely also that person. You kept him on in a position he was either going to still get fired from, quit, or cost the company more than his paycheck.
All because you didn't want him to have a bad opinion of you. You wanted to seem like a good guy so you avoided doing the thing everyone needed done. You caused everyone way more problems for your selfish ego.
That's a jerk move. You weren't really nice.
The nice thing to do would have been to acknowledge the hard truth in front of you and cut him during the probationary period.
I wasn't trying to be nice; I was trying to do the right thing. It had nothing to do with me caring about his opinion of me.
He was a career academic, this was his first job on the coalface. I really thought he'd improve. Of course, I didn't want to fire him, because I wouldn't want to be fired myself. So there was a strong element of wishful thinking, of which I was fully aware. Basically I took the "easy path", so I was lazy, although I didn't see it that way at the time.
Your remark about my ego is simply wrong, not justified by what little you know about me from my comment, and insulting.
FWIW, I had discussed this fellow with my own manager, who was on the other side of the Atlantic. His attitude was that it was entirely my decision; I think that was meant as some kind of management training - like, "toughening me up". This manager told me that he loved firing people.
I personally liked my manager, but I think he was a jerk, and not a good manager. He was very technically competent. One day he turned against me for reasons I never learned. There was a redundancy programme just starting, and I left with a nicer redundancy package than I'd have got if I'd waited (every cloud...).
No wants to be fired. No one wants to lose a game either. But it happens. People get fired. People quit.
Seeing yourself in him is investing him with your ego. This is not an insult, it's the core of the behavior. It is why we do these things. They are ego-preserving actions we take. Because I'm literally talking about your sense of self and not using it in a colloquial sense.
And seeing yourself in him is what you are doing when you say you didn't want to fire him because you wouldn't want to be fired. You are saying he should feel a certain way because you would feel a certain way. You are the Platonic person other people are templated off of.
And you can deny it, but all the reasons you give circle it. We often care too much about how we are perceived by others and often try to influence that even though we have very little control over it.
One should not love firing people either. That's a whole other thing.
Your decision cost the company and likely also that person. You kept him on in a position he was either going to still get fired from, quit, or cost the company more than his paycheck.
All because you didn't want him to have a bad opinion of you. You wanted to seem like a good guy so you avoided doing the thing everyone needed done. You caused everyone way more problems for your selfish ego.
That's a jerk move. You weren't really nice.
The nice thing to do would have been to acknowledge the hard truth in front of you and cut him during the probationary period.