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Comment by jameshart | Hacker News Reader

> Firing someone is the worst experience ever

I mean... yeah, it sucks, but have you tried being fired?

-I've tried both, and by a wide margin the worst was firing someone. (Doubly so as I was a low-level manager in a very hierarchical organisation, so I had little to no sway on who got the boot and not - I was basically handed a list over the employees who were to be fired and told to get on with it.

That was the hardest bit - I wasn't even able to tell them WHY they had been selected over others as I had no idea.

Then a few weeks later, they came for me, too.

I get that there's a lot of anxiety involved in firing someone. But at the end of the day (lol) you still have an office to go to tomorrow, they don't.

Source: Been on the receiving end of 2 layoffs (dot-bomb and covid), it _reeeaaaallllyyyy_ sucks to be fired in a down market, like "how am I going to feed my family, how much is in the bank, and when is the mortgage/rent due" level of suckage.

Yes, you still have a job. But you also have the knowledge that (even though it probably wasn't your fault), you just turned someone else's life upside-down, and you have no power to do anything about that. The person who was fired will probably get resolution in the form of a job somewhere else, but you'll rarely ever get to share in that resolution.

To clarify, the person losing their job has the bigger problem and are worse off. But the person doing the firing pays a cost as well, and between the two, getting fired is easier for me to handle than firing someone.

Layoffs are probably a little different because they're less personal, but I've not experienced those, so I don't know.

> I've tried both, and by a wide margin the worst was firing someone.

I've done both as well, and I agree. I'll take getting fired any day of the week over having to fire someone.

Frankly, it can be a liberating experience, releasing the ongoing feelings of certainty that things are not going right and uncertainty of what's going to happen. Better a horrific end than horror without end. Though that's coming from a privileged position of IT where it's reasonable to find a different job with acceptable (even if lower) pay relatively quickly. Of course, if it was a surprise firing, then it's bad all around; but firings should not be a surprise, they're an inevitable outcome when things aren't good, both parties know that things aren't good, and they have tried to make them good and it's not working out.

Being laid off is terrible. Getting fired is like a divorce -- it usually comes at the end of a long or intensely bad experience.

Is that based on the idea fired means for cause and laid off means not? Many people and jurisdictions say fired includes both.

The end of an intensely bad experience can be the beginning of another.

does being laid off count? i got laid off relatively early in my career and it worked out well for me. big severance for a nice month long vacation, found a new job in a few weeks and realized how underpaid i was, and learned to be jaded and cynical in all my interactions with a company from that point forward

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