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Comment by literallyWTF | Hacker News Reader

How was that the “best layoff”?

Instead of being an actual fucking leader and making a difficult decision, your boss just said “lol so who wants to leave.”

I swear sometimes the shit I read here makes me go insane.

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She was a great leader. She recognized that our team was cohesive and could make a better decision than she could. She was one of the best managers I ever had.

she is supposed to be part of the team and have the same knowledge and thus be able to make an equally or more informed decision

The reports were all good friends, she knew that, and gave them the option for her to decide or them. She apparently didn't know the personal lives of the reports as well as they did themselves.

Don’t bother man. These people will bend over backwards to justify inane decisions like “who wants to lay themselves off”.

I guess it might be attributable to how much managers consider themselves to be, or actually are (subject to org limits), a part of the team, vs just managing it

Sometimes there is no good decision, and empowering the underlings to make it is best term for everyone.

Context and relationships matter. Apparently this manager had a relationship with her reports where that would work. It's obviously not going to work in nearly any other situation, but kudos to her for figuring out what would work in this situation.

Bottom line is that all of the reports involved were reasonably ok with the outcome--no one is ever happy about getting laid off--and that is far better than the situation in most layoffs.

Sometimes people are planning to leave anyways, and wouldn't mind a potentially generous severance package.

By quoting her wrongly you missed precisely the reason why her's was considered a good approach to communicating this.

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