Btukfyl

I think you are misunderstanding the question from your boss, and over thinking the situation.

Your boss isn't asking how long you want as notice for the person, she actually wants to know what the effect of this person leaving has on your team and delivery.

"I'd say 4 weeks as we'll need X here while we fix that new module they spent 4 months on. No one can work out how it is supposed to work, and if we don't we'll miss the Feb delivery" etc

There should be HR plans around how this will happen by default when a probation doesn't work out. Your boss just wants to make sure that it won't throw a spanner in current plans, as opposed to riding out the person for a little longer to ensure handover.

So just respond on what you need (the person isn't working on anything critical so we can wrap up asap) and leave it to people who's job is to take tough decisions like this.

Does a person have to "deserve" their notice period or should it be always given, simply because this is "the right thing to do" or so you don't burn any bridges?

There is no such thing as 'deserve' in business. If it's not contracted, then there is no obligation. Sometimes there is a company policy or even 'norm' that applies.

But not in your case. Which makes this a purely personal decision that we can't make for you. The pros of doing so are all to the benefit of the employee, the cons are all to the detriment of the company. Your problem is whether to let your personal feelings be a factor or not. Professionally you don't without authority, but you have been given the authority so it's up to you.

Hard decisions are why companies need leads and managers but to hit the core of your question, there is no ethical dilemna here with sacking without notice period.

Give the employee a notice period that is standard in your company. You will not regret it in a long (enough) term.

It seems you found an employee who is sadly totally incapable of doing their job. You gave them a lot of chances to improve, and they didn't - quite the opposite.

The last weeks seem to be the effect of what I would recommend to any employee: If you feel you are on the way out, don't worry about the old company, getting a new job should have priority. Sure that's bad for the employer, but if the employee asks, I will say what's best for the employee.

As far as OP is concerned: Ethically you are absolutely fine of letting him go without notice. Obviously check that your boss, HR, and the laws of your country agree with it. Your boss will of course want to know if the employee leaving tomorrow will cause any problems; apparently it won't and your team's productivity won't be harmed so that's fine.

I'm new at leading teams

I think that your performance as an inexperienced leader may've also been a contributing factor to the situation your employee is facing right now.

If teams share in their success, then they must also share in their failures.

While this does not excuse the employee, you and your team should see this situation as a team failure. Take a long hard look at the things that you and your team will do to avoid this kind of team failure from repeating itself in the future with another new-hire.

Teams must set themselves up for success.

Does a person have to "deserve" their notice period or should it be always given, simply because this is "the right thing to do" or so you don't burn any bridges?

What I think people "deserve" is to be treated with respect, dignity, and professionalism. That's not to say that you must "agree" or "celebrate" their behavior; they're different things.

At my workplace, there was an intern that, according to management, was under-performing. (I didn't see this myself, as I was a new-hire at the time on a different team.)

He was still given a notice period because that is The Right Thing to Do™. The notice period was roughly two weeks, from what I recall. The company took a quantified 2 week "hit", but that was it.

On the other hand, this is what happened when the company laid off ~%2 of its workforce earlier this year. There was no notice period; it was "effective immediately". Well, the employees that were left behind were not happy at all with how the company had treated their "valued" employees [1], and that created a significant amount of distrust and can still be felt today and was reflected in company surveys of "leadership".

When a company shows that it is all talk (e.g. "we value our employees", we "always strive to do what's right", etc), and companies usually like to parrot these things, but then pull a stunt like this, then the company is, by actions, showing how hypocritical it is towards its own "valued" employees. Some employees that had not been laid off chose to leave later in the year anyway.

The point of this is that, whether you have a contract obligation or not, as a leader, you need to take into account the impact of your actions. Besides, it's not like employees get offered contracts that favor them in any way; the contracts that companies provide are entirely one-sided, making the "we're not required to do this by contract" excuse a textbook example of begging the question.

Therefore, with this in mind, you must understand that, had employees really been able to have an actual choice, they would've certainly liked to get some sort of notice.

Look at it the other way around: Suppose your employees have no requirement to give you a 2 week notice before leaving, and they leave you in a tough spot, what would you think about it? In short, treat others the same way you'd like others to treat you. End of story.

[1] And these weren't even under-performers; it was due to bad management decisions that put the company in a tough financial spot. But hey, at least now I know what kind of "loyalty" I can expect from my company in the future, right?

How do you get a person to understand you're serious about taking action regarding their poor performance, so they improve (or seek another job they'd be a better fit for) instead of getting fired?

I think your approach as a leader sets the tone of the conversation. Perception, clarity, and straightforwardness go a long way, and if your company has the kind of culture where everything is too political and everyone must read "between the lines", then perhaps you could've been more up front and explicit about the situation.

However, I don't know what was said or how it was communicated, so you'll need to keep this in mind, especially if someone is not yet used to the company culture and the true meanings behind certain things.

For example, at a former employer, they'd have a tendency to say "That's a great idea" to things they had no interest in, so I got burned a few times because of that disingenuous nonsense, since saying "We can't work on that at this time" or something to that effect would've been better by not causing confusion. I assume you get my point.

How do you decide (and at what point) that a person is not good, rather than simply not used to a new job, so you can take action to get them off the team?

I don't think there's a hard-and-fast rule for this, such as "always wait X months". You must account for the actual background of the person and the actual tasks that you gave him.

For example, at a former employer, I had been interviewed as a firmware engineer, but then spent the 1st year doing the work of a firmware test engineer.

As I stated in my comment under OP, this was a bait-and-switch, which contributed to frustration, lack of motivation, and being generally upset for a while. However, I did not take this as an excuse to under-perform (I did quite well, actually) and later moved on to do software engineering work, but you must at least be aware of whether this did or didn't happen at your company with that employee and how that might've contributed, if it happened at all.

In my experience, depending on the kind of work (and actual effectiveness of any help received, if any), the complexity of existing systems could require devs to spend anywhere between 3 - 12 months to become reasonably effective at something. (Again, depending on actual complexity, and mentorship, etc.)

As someone who has mentored interns several times, I can say that I've seen some do well and others not-so-well for different reasons.

An intern that didn't so too well had been, unfortunately, set up for failure by a more senior engineer who severely under-estimated the complexity of the project to which the intern was assigned.

This, in combination with the intern's attitude problem (probably a side-effect of frustration), ended up contributing to his failure. While I didn't mentor this particular intern, I don't think I would've been able to do much either, given the situation.

In summary, based on my experience, in many (not all) cases, employee failures are as much the fault of the employee as it is the fault of management and leadership within the same company. Only you can take an honest look at this and see what does and doesn't apply.

Don't give them notice.

Give them a severance pay package that would be commensurate with the standard notice period.

You will not be doing them nor anyone else any favors in allowing them to continue.

It may seem harsh, but it is actually the kindest thing you can do for them. No one likes to be the "walking dead" on a job site. Also, involuntary terminations open the door for retaliation, especially as a developer.

You should have your sys admins ready to cut all their access the minute the door to the office closes. If possible, walk them out a side door so they don't have to do the "perp walk" out through their former colleagues.

Creating this answer since I don't see anyone considering the probation period.

I work for a Portuguese company and here it is customary that the first 3 contracts have a fixed end date (6 or 12 month contracts). We are a tech support company and are struggling getting people that speak the languages we provide support for. There are incentives of 1000€ if you bring in people speaking a certain language, we are struggling to meet KPI's at times, we renew contracts of people that just aren't that good.... Even with all these signs, people due for a renewal stress that their contract might not be renewed and there's always a bit of relief when they get the email saying their contract is ready to be signed at HR. I wrote all this to tell you that your colleague should know well enough what the consequences can be at the end of his probation.

Your team member was on probation and got a PIP without showing signs of improvement. They should not be surprised when you terminate the contract.

Since you ask how to show a team member you are serious, I think you made a mistake by not having an official PIP started. Putting stuff to paper with clear consequences will always have more weight.

How to decide when enough is enough? When there's been no improvement for some time and no drive to improve. This is what you have the PIP for.

Concerning the ethics at play, it might be good to read how Netflix views this:

We model ourselves on being a team, not a family. A family is about unconditional love, despite your siblings’ unusual behavior. A dream team is about pushing yourself to be the best teammate you can be, caring intensely about your teammates, and knowing that you may not be on the team forever. Source

I also follow The Wandering Dev Manager's answer in that your boss is only asking you how much time is needed to minimize the impact to your team.

One factor to consider: is there a risk of this individual doing some kind of active harm to the organization or team (e.g. spreading malicious rumors, committing acts of vandalism or property damage, causing subtle harm to the system, etc.) during the notice period?

In terms of the effect on the morale of the rest of the team: I'm guessing that other people in your team have already figured out that the person is incompetent, especially if they're reporting virtually no progress on any task during stand-ups and aren't completing tasks. That being said, keeping this individual around could actually hurt morale. I worked at a company where certain employees had a reputation for not doing anything useful, and it was bad for morale because it made it look like management didn't care whether you performed well or not.

Based on what you've stated, it also sounds like you've had multiple discussions with the individual, including the informal PIP. Given that and their subsequent apparent lack of effort to improve, the individual shouldn't be surprised that they were fired. Admittedly, the timing (December) is at least mildly unfortunate, but that's kind of their own fault.

For future reference, it may have been better if you had formally documented his poor performance (e.g. the PIP and his subsequent lack of improvement) and possibly given an "official" length for his PIP (i.e. he has to meet specific goals within, for example, a month). That's probably not as big of a deal in this case, though, given that the employee is still in their probation period, so you really aren't obligated to do so.