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Telegram's Pavel Durov: Firing One Engineer Made His Whole Team Faster

By Pavel Durov · Hiring · 1 min read

Two engineers couldn't keep up. He fired one. Suddenly the other didn't need help.

Key Points

Firing an underperformer can increase total team productivity.
B players don't just underperform. They drag A players down with them.
A players can tell instantly when a colleague isn't pulling their weight.
90% of the time, the issue isn't experience. It's the inability to focus deeply on one task.

For people who have the ability to focus deeply, it's an insult to work alongside someone who is distracted and cannot go deep.

The Math That Doesn't Add Up

Two Android engineers. They can't keep up with the feature schedule. The obvious move? Hire a third engineer.

But Pavel Durov noticed something. One of the two was falling behind. Complaining. Dodging responsibility. So he tried something counterintuitive. He fired that person.

The team was slower with two engineers than it would be with one.

Subtraction by Addition

A few weeks after the firing, Durov realized something stunning. They didn't need the third engineer. They never needed one. The problem wasn't headcount. The problem was the B player creating more issues than he solved.

This runs against everything the tech industry believes. Throw more people at the problem. Scale the team. But sometimes the team shrinks and speeds up.

The underperformer created more problems than he solved. Removing him fixed the bottleneck.

The Poison of the B Player

Steve Jobs talked about A players and B players for decades. Durov sees the same pattern. When you put a B player on a team, they don't just underperform. They infect everyone around them.

Everyone on the team can tell. The wrong questions. The constant lag. The lack of depth. It's visible to anyone paying attention.

B players don't just fail to contribute. They actively demotivate the A players around them.

The A Player's Frustration

Durov: If you're an A player, you get this dissatisfaction — this feeling that you are not able to realize your full potential, accomplish what you're really meant to accomplish, because of this person working next to you. Or pretending to work next to you.

If you're an A player, you feel you can't realize your full potential because of the person next to you.

It's Not About Experience. It's About Focus.

Durov makes a sharp distinction. In 90% of cases, the issue isn't laziness or lack of experience. It's the inability to focus on one task for an extended period.

Not everyone has this ability. Deep focus is a rare skill. And for those who have it, working next to someone who can't focus feels like an insult to their craft.

The real separator between A and B players is the ability to go deep on a single task.