Hacker News Reader

Comment by pablobaz | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.)

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com