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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

Anyone could have done that at any time. The two weeks isn't magic.

It could have been unannounced and they just stop showing up.

You either trust your people or you don't. If you don't, get rid of them and lock them out. If you do and you still have to let them go then don't worry about it.

People are far too inhuman in professional relationships and I strongly dislike that tendency. You likely spend as much time with your colleagues as your spouse, make it a real connection.

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I think it’s a scale thing, honestly.

Yes, most reasonable adults remain reasonable even after fired

But once you hire a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand people… statistically there are gonna be some wackos you didn’t filter out!

It’s tough. I agree that treating each other like humans is the best policy.

Of course it increases. That's why you have permissions and guard rails on the employees in the first place. Those should be sufficient.

Also if you want to work with the people you like again but need to actually downsize because of external pressure, good luck trying to get them to come work for you at your next venture after some fucked up bridge burning ceremony.

You also have the situation where the boss usually KNOWS who might do things that he shouldn’t - but you can’t have policies that only apply to some, so they get applied to all (there are still unofficial ways around this, of course, like letting someone know unofficially before they’re officially laid off).

But once they receive the bad news, their motivation for revenge increases, which is why similar policies exist in many workplaces. Trust isn’t a univariate, piecewise defined function like you suggest.

Right, if you're being a dick then sure. I'm advocating for not being one in the first place. That's the challenge.

If you can't meet that use keycards instead of keys, voip instead of real phones, lock file cabinets, I mean go all the way.

Corporate America loves pretending. Pretending you're part of the family and then treating you like you're trying to rob the place at the drop of a hat.

That's the messed up thing. Be consistent and don't be fake. People can deal with you for being overly formal and paranoid but probably not for being a phony backstabber, that's how you grow haters.

The hardest thing for a brand to shake off is a bad reputation, whether they justly deserved it or not. You don't want haters in the Internet age.

I think people in general are a lot better about being fired if it doesn’t happen at the drop of a hat. Unfortunately in the US it seems like you can go from gainfully employed to jobless in the space of an unfortunate 10 minutes. That’d piss me off too.

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