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Comment by bink | Hacker News Reader

Fired -> Let go -> Laid off -> Impacted

I'll be curious to see what comes next.

"Let go" is the worst, it implies "I let you go" -> "I allow you to leave" which is the ultimate humiliation when you are getting fired

I think of it more like the protagonist (or antagonist, one could argue) of a movie holding on to the hand of someone (employee) about to fall off of a cliff (the descent, ultimately, to poverty and homelessness) just to make the metaphor as vivid as possible.

Fired still semi-exists. Let go seems to show up for insufficient performance, e.g. semi-amicable “it’s not working out”. Fired shows up when somebody really screwed up, e.g. laws were broken or products failed.

Completed? (like in Never let me go[0])

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Let_Me_Go_(novel)

Carousel!

One term I've heard from HR was "Released to the industry."

I always wondered if that was focus grouped or something. It was definitely the running joke for a while.

Fifteen years ago I remember my last employer saying in a division meeting that they had "reallocated a number of roles to the mobility pool". A round of confused "what's that then" from more or less all present forced them to be less euphemistic.

For Sun Microsystems executives in the 90's, it was:

"Promoted to Vice President of Looking for a New Job"

Can’t we all just agree on “shit canned”?

“Today we are announcing that 10% of our company is being shit canned”.

Terminated is to the left of fired.

Playing around at the online etymology dictionary, it appears dismiss is the oldest—early 15th century. Sack and fire are from the 19th century, and laid off in this sense isn’t until the 1960s. Terminate, as in dismiss from a job, is first attested in 1973.

Hard to get more vague than impacted, that could mean anything. I was impacted by reading this bland PR release.

Impacted still implies some causal connection, so the next level of doublespeak must avoid that, then. John was affine to the event.

"Fixed the error"

Selected for new and exciting opportunities!

Role is "disestablished"

Reassigned to an external role

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