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Comment by Naritai | Hacker News Reader

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Naritai

What's the merit of using 'fired' instead of 'laid off' in this round?

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100% more click baity. If you look at their url it says laid off, so someone changed the title after it was published.

cnn.com/2017/01/06/technology/theranos-layoffs-41-percent/index.html

Theranos said on Friday it has fired 155 employees

If you read the article it says fired. This is also reflected in the title, and in the headline.

Oh really. Well if you actually go read what they said on their website:

https://news.theranos.com/2017/01/06/company-re-engineers-op...

"company has identified a core team of 220 professionals to execute on its business plans, and informed 155 employees that their positions have been eliminated"

The company does not say it fired anyone, they use the word eliminated. Firing usually means someone is terminated for cause. Not that they are being let go because the company does not need them any more.

Good grief. They don't use the word 'terminated' either. They just say the positions were 'eliminated'.

Changing the text is just as easy as changing the title. The URL is harder as they don't want to break external links, so all three probably sail laid off.

You could use a redirect to point from the previous url to the new one.

'Laid off' is ambiguous: it can mean either a temporary suspension (i.e., a factory lays off some workers until conditions improve) or a permanent job loss. I haven't seen any suggestion that these job loses at Theranos are temporary, so I have no problem with the use of the word 'fired' in this context.

I always thought "fired" was the ambiguous word, because a firing can be with or without cause. A layoff is always without cause. In common usage, though, to contrast with "layoff", saying "I was fired" usually means "with cause."

Because of that, this headline actually feels like incorrect usage: a company wouldn't "fire" 41% of its staff unless they were all engaged in some secret after-hours lab-equipment smuggling ring (and probably not even then.)

The egregious misuse of the word "laid off" and "fired", continues to prevail. I suspect, their doing it on purpose, to get more click throughs.

I think some news sources never use the term "laid off." I imagine the thinking is what happened was "fired without cause" and that is independent of what the company would like it to be called.

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