Probably not what happened here, but it reminds me of a medium-sized business owner I once encountered. A few years before I met him, he had fired one of his I

Probably not what happened here, but it reminds me of a medium-sized business owner I once encountered. A few years before I met him, he had fired one of his IT staff. The firing quickly became a debacle, as the recently fired employee had been performing herculean feats to keep the company's infrastructure running. The business owner ultimately needed to hire four new employees at more that the original fellow's rate to get everything back under control again. The owner vowed that he'd never let something like this happen again. Of course, he decided that this wasn't his fault. After all, if the employee had gotten sick or was hit by a bus, he'd be in the same situation. Instead, the problem was that the business had a single point of failure. Too much business knowledge was only available in a single place. His solution was an early form of Netflix Chaos Monkey, but applied to HR. A couple of times a year, he'd fire an employee at random. The plan was to ensure that knowledge was in the company, not in people. You didn't get used to asking Bill from Accounting how to file your expense forms, since Bill could disappear at any time. Instead, you insisted that Bill (or whoever was currently in accounting) create easily accessible documentation for the expense forms. Then, when Bill disappeared, everything was documented and the business continued smoothly. From what I've heard, the owner may now be in minimum security prison for shady financials at the company, so there could have been another reason to encourage people not to stay too long. Edit: Fixed stupid homophone