From more of an engineering standpoint, those meetings with the COO seemed like textbook knowledge transfer to me, except the context (that the subject was not

From more of an engineering standpoint, those meetings with the COO seemed like textbook knowledge transfer to me, except the context (that the subject was not made aware of the nature of this event and his upcoming firing) reflects really bad on this company’s management. It reads as if the upper management treated the employee as a highly unpredictable individual who would undermine the company out of spite. They might have thought: if the author were to be informed in advance about potential firing, he would become… “problematic”, hold a grudge, sabotage knowledge transfer, leak something, or use the advance notice for some diversion and future legal action. On the face of it, this would point to insecurity or nearly-psychopathic tendencies in the employee—but, I suspect, it actually points to somebody in upper management who, probably due to childhood trauma, operates this way in life and hurts others by presuming they’re the same.