Treating People Like Human Beings When You Fire Them

Small businesses are more likely to do this

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Recently I heard about people who work for large corporations telling people via email that they were fired. There is also the trend of “quiet firing” — where an employer doesn’t fire someone outright but makes them so miserable that they quit.

I find these trends disgusting. When I worked as an engineer, people who were fired were told face-to-face. They were allowed the dignity of asking questions and actually received some empathy from their manager. It was understood that the person being fired was a human being, not just a cog in the machine.

Thanks to faceless corporations, many of which are run by people who rate low on the empathy scale, more and more people are being treated like machines.

This was already going on decades ago in the tech industry. Companies would have mass layoffs during a rough patch, followed by mass hiring. Dell was notorious for this but it was not alone.

On the surface, it doesn’t make sense. Why lay off a bunch of people if you know you’ll need them again in a few months or a year?

My intuition tells me it has nothing to do with what is actually best for long-term productivity. Instead, it’s about making stockholders happy.