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Those of use that worked through the first dot-com bubble can surely tell better stories than that. There is no graceful way to do it. One company I worked fo
by outericky 12y ago
Those of use that worked through the first dot-com bubble can surely tell better stories than that.
There is no graceful way to do it.
One company I worked for, there were probably 200 people, and the CEO gathered everyone into a big room and started talking layoffs, kind of beating around the bush. But essentially saying a core team will stay on, while everyone else is gone.
A person asked, when will we know if we are on the core team? And he just blankly answered, "Oh, we spoke to those individuals this morning" - Yeah, the collective gasp was something I will never forget. I had only been there a week but made the core team. 4 months later the company was out of business.
- masklinn 12y agoI'm reasonably certain you missed it. The "worst way to fire someone" wasn't the public way it was announced or the pre-recorded layoff messages, it was the firing of "Abel" in front of all his colleagues for — as far as they knew — doing what he was supposed to do: > I guess my point to CEOs and managers alike is this – don’t fire people in front of 1,000 colleagues for no real reason. To put it mildly, it doesn’t help morale. > If you are ever considering doing it, take a deep breath, and at least wait until you can meet with the person in private. Or, even better yet, perhaps you shouldn’t fire someone for no good reason at all
- cookiecaper 12y agoReally the article is not interesting. I think everyone knows that it's terrible practice to fire someone in front of thousands of their peers. I'm sure even the guy that fired Abel knew that, but didn't care since he was in the process of firing everyone else anyway. The discussion this article generates about how to fire people is much better than the article itself.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoSomebody should make "Nominations to Biggest Douchebag of the Year Award" and people making such decisions should be listed there by name.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- outericky 12y agoNo, I got it. I just think when emotions are high, people don't always know how to act / react. Point being, people are still people. They will do dumb things that they wish they could redo. My story wasn't about how they told everyone... it was the fact that the CEO couldn't think fast enough on his feet so he broke the news in an unexpected, unthoughtful way. I don't think he intended to publicly tell everyone, but he was caught off guard and reacted. Reacted incorrectly.
- arethuza 12y agoI seem to remember one story from the dot-com bubble of one company firing staff by disabling their key cards while they were out to lunch - a security guard came out and dumped their personal belongings in boxes.
- spydum 12y agoI heard a similar scummy kind of thing (cant remember name.. it was like Adtran or some other communications equipment corp) they used a fire drill to get the building vacated, then disabled access cards. Boggles my mind that this seems like an acceptable strategy.
- tr352 12y agoWow that's Rollercoaster Tycoon level trolling.