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I'm surprised how many people think this is about the person doing the firing. In my post, my example wasn't how horrible it was to see the guy break down, but

I'm surprised how many people think this is about the person doing the firing. In my post, my example wasn't how horrible it was to see the guy break down, but how clearly he wished he hadn't been put in a situation where he had to do that in front of someone else. Such an interesting conjunction of masochism here from employers that feel they need to see the pain they're causing their employees. In this specific instance, I chose to fire her via email because 90% of our communication was via email, it usually takes weeks to schedule and actually get to an in-person meeting time (since she would cancel meetings probably 70% of the time), and we always meet in public places like coffee shops (her choice, not mine), where any visible emotional shock would be apparent to bystanders. It had much more to do with practicalities and concern for her privacy than any concern about "saving myself" from an adverse reaction (which I still got in a nasty retaliatory email).

jacquesm 12y ago
There is nothing masochistic about it, it's simply trying to be human in a bad situation for both. Making time for her and selecting an appropriate venue would have been better - in my opinion, not being in your shoes that's an easy one to hold. But I've been in your shoes in other situations and we seem to have a totally different take on this. As for the nasty retaliatory email: you fired her by email, what did you expect in return, a personal visit?
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  I definitely agree that we have differing perspectives on this. To me, the more human thing to do is to give her privacy and time to regain composure before any final words or property are exchanged, instead of blindsiding her with this in a public place and expecting her to maintain professionalism or decorum sufficient to avoid embarrassment. Is it really nicer to make her walk out of a place where she knows people with mascara running down her face than it is to let her read and handle the news at home, just so I can go around and tell everyone that I wasn't a coward and I "owned up to my mistakes" by making an adult cry in public? I should note that not everyone cries. Maybe she wouldn't have cried. Maybe she would've jumped up and screamed at me. Maybe she just would've been noticeably sullen. Maybe she would've been completely unphased. I ultimately decided that for her sake, it wasn't the appropriate venue to take that kind of risk, and that the news would be best received via email at a time when I knew she'd be home. >As for the nasty retaliatory email: you fired her by email, what did you expect in return, a personal visit? It's not that I didn't expect the email, just that I didn't expect to avoid the "consequences" of my "screw up" by firing her in an asynchronous medium.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    Ok. Thinking a bit more about this: I think the basic problem is that this blindsided her. If you are firing someone un-expectedly that alone will cause a reaction. I've never (fortunately) been in a situation where I had to fire someone out of the blue (except for the aforementioned thief), and I can't actually imagine that this would ever happen to me. That may be the root cause of what's going on here rather than the way in which it was done or where it was done. It may be a cultural difference or maybe it is for legal reasons but I don't believe in getting people fired 'on the spot' unless they've done something quite terrible and in every other case the fact that we will be parting ways at some point is most likely evident to both parties long before it needs to be formalized. So maybe that's why I don't need to resort to firing people from a safe distance because the writing will have been on the wall for quite a while. Case in point: when I wound down TrueTech Canada Inc (15 employees at its peak) it was obvious to everybody working there that we were doing bad, even so I found the time to try to get those that had trouble finding other employment at least a temporary fix. I'm still in contact with almost everybody that I employed over the years and that's a point of pride with me. If I'd have sent them an email while keeping them in the dark about the situation until the last moment I doubt that that would have been the case.
    - cookiecaper 12y ago
      I don't want to get too far into the specifics of confidential personnel matters, but I'll say it shouldn't have blindsided her, but I think (and she stated) that it did. You can only do so much for some people. I'll also say that for all the politically-correct management platitudes that people like to throw around like "if someone gets fired, it's always the boss that failed" or "your employee should always know what's coming", real life is frequently somewhat more complex. I completely agree with the principles behind these populist quips, but like most things in the real world, there are imperfections -- mitigating factors -- that can make the application of the principles complex. These are generalizations, and they're good generally, but they're not good all the time. I've also been able to maintain good relationships across employment status changes, fwiw. I've hired back people I've fired before and maintain a good rapport with most employees I've had to dismiss. I'm in an engagement now with someone who I've hired myself, been hired by, quit on, and been fired by (remotely, for a gig he didn't hire me for) and we've been able to remain friends through all of that, so I don't think it's a generalized issue with my conception around employment relationships. EDIT: Also, even if people know a termination is coming somewhere along the line, it's easy to forget and they often will have an adverse reaction when it actually comes down. I don't think "employee is so naive they think they'll be kept around after X Y and Z" is the only situation where this kind of consideration is appropriate. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree; we place fundamentally different values on "looking someone in the eye" (maybe because I've done so much telecommute stuff that I don't see this as the MO for "big decision" discussions, at least not with reference to employment). It simply isn't an important independent principle for me, and I try to consider what will make the employee most comfortable, within reason.
lmm 12y ago
> it usually takes weeks to schedule and actually get to an in-person meeting time (since she would cancel meetings probably 70% of the time), and we always meet in public places like coffee shops (her choice, not mine) That's super-weird, frankly. If you're running a serious business you ought to at least have access to office space for something as important as this, even if it's hiring one for an hour. In the worst case if an in-person meeting takes that long to arrange then something like skype or even a phone call is still a much better fallback than email. If she doesn't turn up to the meeting where you're firing her then sure, email.
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  >In the worst case if an in-person meeting takes that long to arrange then something like skype or even a phone call is still a much better fallback than email. I guess the root of the thing here is that I don't think it's that bad to fire someone over email if that's appropriate for the situation and personality. I didn't give this list as proof that I couldn't've fired her in person if I REALLY wanted to, I gave it to provide just a bit of context around the circumstances that influenced the tradeoff. Yes, it's possible she'll go around and think about how I'm such a spineless coward because I didn't make her cry in the coffee shop when I fired her, but it's probable she'd go around thinking I was a spineless coward or INSERT_INSULT_HERE even if I met her in person and did it. That's the point. A friend recently fired an employee in person and was informed that he would come back and "rape him [my friend] in the ass". Obviously the setting is not the most important part of the firing; the most important part is that it's happening at all. At this point it may be worthwhile to indicate that these positions aren't all for well-tempered, highly-compensated hackers or engineers. The worker I fired did not have advanced skills and neither did the worker my friend fired. Some people in these groups are less objective about these involuntary departures than you'd expect in a conventional white-collar setting. It would've been highly unusual to procure a space that would've been appropriate for this type of meeting and she'd immediately be tipped off that something weird was happening. This could put her in a worse frame of mind; if she enters fancy virtual office and thinks, "Wow, this is a nice place, I wonder if we're going to move here, I bet some really big super cool deals are happening that I'm about to hear about", is that really going to make the situation less volatile? And again, I'm doing all of this... why, exactly? So she'll have one less checkbox in the "things to hate" list? She can put plenty there if she wants to, "fired me by email" is really immaterial, and again, even though it may look worse to fire via email, I did end up doing it out of concern for her long-term well-being, not mine, since it doesn't really make a big difference to me either way -- it's just an hour or so of my time, for her it's a big life change, and we usually meet at a public place near her home (for her convenience, of course), which is where this would've potentially gone down.

jacquesm 12y ago

There is nothing masochistic about it, it's simply trying to be human in a bad situation for both. Making time for her and selecting an appropriate venue would have been better - in my opinion, not being in your shoes that's an easy one to hold. But I've been in your shoes in other situations and we seem to have a totally different take on this. As for the nasty retaliatory email: you fired her by email, what did you expect in return, a personal visit?

cookiecaper 12y ago
I definitely agree that we have differing perspectives on this. To me, the more human thing to do is to give her privacy and time to regain composure before any final words or property are exchanged, instead of blindsiding her with this in a public place and expecting her to maintain professionalism or decorum sufficient to avoid embarrassment. Is it really nicer to make her walk out of a place where she knows people with mascara running down her face than it is to let her read and handle the news at home, just so I can go around and tell everyone that I wasn't a coward and I "owned up to my mistakes" by making an adult cry in public? I should note that not everyone cries. Maybe she wouldn't have cried. Maybe she would've jumped up and screamed at me. Maybe she just would've been noticeably sullen. Maybe she would've been completely unphased. I ultimately decided that for her sake, it wasn't the appropriate venue to take that kind of risk, and that the news would be best received via email at a time when I knew she'd be home. >As for the nasty retaliatory email: you fired her by email, what did you expect in return, a personal visit? It's not that I didn't expect the email, just that I didn't expect to avoid the "consequences" of my "screw up" by firing her in an asynchronous medium.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Ok. Thinking a bit more about this: I think the basic problem is that this blindsided her. If you are firing someone un-expectedly that alone will cause a reaction. I've never (fortunately) been in a situation where I had to fire someone out of the blue (except for the aforementioned thief), and I can't actually imagine that this would ever happen to me. That may be the root cause of what's going on here rather than the way in which it was done or where it was done. It may be a cultural difference or maybe it is for legal reasons but I don't believe in getting people fired 'on the spot' unless they've done something quite terrible and in every other case the fact that we will be parting ways at some point is most likely evident to both parties long before it needs to be formalized. So maybe that's why I don't need to resort to firing people from a safe distance because the writing will have been on the wall for quite a while. Case in point: when I wound down TrueTech Canada Inc (15 employees at its peak) it was obvious to everybody working there that we were doing bad, even so I found the time to try to get those that had trouble finding other employment at least a temporary fix. I'm still in contact with almost everybody that I employed over the years and that's a point of pride with me. If I'd have sent them an email while keeping them in the dark about the situation until the last moment I doubt that that would have been the case.
  - cookiecaper 12y ago
    I don't want to get too far into the specifics of confidential personnel matters, but I'll say it shouldn't have blindsided her, but I think (and she stated) that it did. You can only do so much for some people. I'll also say that for all the politically-correct management platitudes that people like to throw around like "if someone gets fired, it's always the boss that failed" or "your employee should always know what's coming", real life is frequently somewhat more complex. I completely agree with the principles behind these populist quips, but like most things in the real world, there are imperfections -- mitigating factors -- that can make the application of the principles complex. These are generalizations, and they're good generally, but they're not good all the time. I've also been able to maintain good relationships across employment status changes, fwiw. I've hired back people I've fired before and maintain a good rapport with most employees I've had to dismiss. I'm in an engagement now with someone who I've hired myself, been hired by, quit on, and been fired by (remotely, for a gig he didn't hire me for) and we've been able to remain friends through all of that, so I don't think it's a generalized issue with my conception around employment relationships. EDIT: Also, even if people know a termination is coming somewhere along the line, it's easy to forget and they often will have an adverse reaction when it actually comes down. I don't think "employee is so naive they think they'll be kept around after X Y and Z" is the only situation where this kind of consideration is appropriate. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree; we place fundamentally different values on "looking someone in the eye" (maybe because I've done so much telecommute stuff that I don't see this as the MO for "big decision" discussions, at least not with reference to employment). It simply isn't an important independent principle for me, and I try to consider what will make the employee most comfortable, within reason.

lmm 12y ago

> it usually takes weeks to schedule and actually get to an in-person meeting time (since she would cancel meetings probably 70% of the time), and we always meet in public places like coffee shops (her choice, not mine) That's super-weird, frankly. If you're running a serious business you ought to at least have access to office space for something as important as this, even if it's hiring one for an hour. In the worst case if an in-person meeting takes that long to arrange then something like skype or even a phone call is still a much better fallback than email. If she doesn't turn up to the meeting where you're firing her then sure, email.

cookiecaper 12y ago
>In the worst case if an in-person meeting takes that long to arrange then something like skype or even a phone call is still a much better fallback than email. I guess the root of the thing here is that I don't think it's that bad to fire someone over email if that's appropriate for the situation and personality. I didn't give this list as proof that I couldn't've fired her in person if I REALLY wanted to, I gave it to provide just a bit of context around the circumstances that influenced the tradeoff. Yes, it's possible she'll go around and think about how I'm such a spineless coward because I didn't make her cry in the coffee shop when I fired her, but it's probable she'd go around thinking I was a spineless coward or INSERT_INSULT_HERE even if I met her in person and did it. That's the point. A friend recently fired an employee in person and was informed that he would come back and "rape him [my friend] in the ass". Obviously the setting is not the most important part of the firing; the most important part is that it's happening at all. At this point it may be worthwhile to indicate that these positions aren't all for well-tempered, highly-compensated hackers or engineers. The worker I fired did not have advanced skills and neither did the worker my friend fired. Some people in these groups are less objective about these involuntary departures than you'd expect in a conventional white-collar setting. It would've been highly unusual to procure a space that would've been appropriate for this type of meeting and she'd immediately be tipped off that something weird was happening. This could put her in a worse frame of mind; if she enters fancy virtual office and thinks, "Wow, this is a nice place, I wonder if we're going to move here, I bet some really big super cool deals are happening that I'm about to hear about", is that really going to make the situation less volatile? And again, I'm doing all of this... why, exactly? So she'll have one less checkbox in the "things to hate" list? She can put plenty there if she wants to, "fired me by email" is really immaterial, and again, even though it may look worse to fire via email, I did end up doing it out of concern for her long-term well-being, not mine, since it doesn't really make a big difference to me either way -- it's just an hour or so of my time, for her it's a big life change, and we usually meet at a public place near her home (for her convenience, of course), which is where this would've potentially gone down.