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Comment by nsksl | Hacker News Reader

How exactly should they be terminated? 150 1:1 meetings?

Not only should my boss behave like he's putting down the family dog, I should be able to face my VP in single combat with my weapon of choice.

I know your comment is going to be deleted because HN is not the place for these kind of comment, but you made me laugh loudly, so thank you.

Best we can do is a 20 frag limit quake 3 deathmatch duel in q3dm17

This but without the irony.

That could work. 15 managers doing 10 1:1 meetings each isn't so hard. It can get tricky with people being on vacation etc. But very possible and normal.

Have you ever had to do these? 10 back to back layoffs is a rough day. I had to do 5 in one day once and had to seek out a very expensive hangover.

Sucks for everyone. I’ve been laid off by email, it’s fine.

maybe doing something wrong should be emotionally painful for managers and HR staff.

Not all layoffs are “wrong”; we maybe kept 200 people employed for a year or two longer than we would have by restructuring and laying off 20-30.

Net positive in my book. Of course on an individual level it sucks, these are people with dependants and so on, but so are the 200 who were saved.

What if their direct manager was also terminated? It could result in a manager's manager having such a large cohort as it to take several days while employees wait to see if they're fired or not (word would get out immediately).

Or some other unrelated manager doing the firing.

That's not so good for the people remaining, or even those laid off but later in the queue. Once the first person gets laid off, everyone will know it's happening and be wondering whether they're included. You're just dragging out the suspense over the hours or (more likely) days those meetings take place, rather than getting it out of the way in a few minutes. That's probably worse than the dubious joy of a personalised message about your termination.

(Though, here in the UK, redundancy procedures can take weeks, so a few days is not much compared to that.)

This is how I have seen it done. You end up with managers firing people they do not know, and employees getting 15 min meeting invites and knowing what it means. But it’s much more compassionate and human.

[JIRA] Your boss assigned HR-5678 to you.

HR: Atlassian / HR-5678

Acknowledge Receipt of Your Termination Notice

I was at Atlassian when a major product was cancelled which was based in the Austin office and MCB flew out to Austin to deliver the news that some would be laid off and others reassigned. I think a town hall over video chat would have been fine.

This is inconsequence!

Hipchat/Stride was a flop, because it was a poor product, poorly executed. Switch to Slack was a huge relief for everyone.

Atlassian support engineers used to be the best part of the service. Poor products + Great support = made Atlassian great

Hipchat was a success, which is why Atlassian purchased it, but Slack leapfrogged it and Stride was too late.

Not doubting the role that support plays for Atlassian. Just highlighting how I witnessed MCB handle a similar situation 7 years ago, by flying to Austin from Australia to deliver the sad news. The article makes him sound heartless or cold but that wasn't my experience. That being said, an async video message is a weird play.

Well they certainly shouldn’t tell everyone that a bunch of people are being fired and then to just wait and sit around and see if you get the email of doom.

Yes.

I suggest a coding challenge, and the first five to submit it and pass the functional tests can stay?

Accounting and marketing are not going to be happy.

But CEO said “Every person should be using AI daily for as many things as they can.”...

Yes? Wtf

A JIRA ticket with hundreds of legal dependencies.

At least a live mass meeting.

I swear there was a post not to long ago about a company that laid off a lot of employees in a live meeting, and it went badly, and people in the comments were saying "a prerecorded video would have been better". The duality of Internet forums, I guess...

I suggest a monster truck derby battle.

And we'll call it "Rehabilitation"

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