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Comment by hnarn | Hacker News Reader

Even if you elect to "rip off the band aid" there are about thousand ways you could go about this in a more mature and professional way. A couple of things come to mind:

- Deliver your message with empathy and context as to why the decision has to be made for the survival of the company.

- Deliver the message in a way that scales. There's almost no point in having a webinar if there's not going to be a discussion anyway.

- Offer assistance to those being laid off to lessen the blow: paid leave, coaching, extended health benefits etc.

- Preface your message with the good stuff (point above) and explain why the company has taken any type of measure to lessen the impact of this sad but unavoidable news.

- Set up a way for ex-employees to keep in touch instead of locking them out completely. Protecting corporate assets is understandable, treating people like disposable trash is not.

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All this. At a minimum the head of the company or some C-level should have delivered this message themselves, with video on.

Let employees have a way to contact each other for a while, so they can network for their next job, or at least say goodbye.

>- Deliver your message with empathy and context as to why the decision has to be made for the survival of the company. //

Clearly the people in charge don't care about the employees. When they're just using the employees to make them money, IMO, it is worse to lie and pretend otherwise.

Are you saying that it's literally impossible for the CEO of a company to care about the well-being of people that are being fired to keep the company from going bankrupt?

I'm not saying that they should lie about caring, having empathy for someone costs nothing and doesn't require you to solve their problems.

Maybe they cared about the employees but were criminally inept, it's possible. But, if they're that incapable how'd they get to be a CEO?

Occam's ghost is whispering "sociopath" to me.

But they're not their employees anymore. There's no point to doing any of this. The purpose of having a webinar was, presumably, that it should be atomic.

The rest of the things you're describing all cost money. Why spend money when you don't have to?

Look, if you are completely devoid of empathy that's fine but don't act like this is how most people think.

While I would agree that most people don't think this way, the relatively few people that occupy executive level positions certainly do. Haven't you ever wondered why sociopaths are over-represented in positions of power and authority?

Stop saying "atomic" for Christ's sake. Unless the company is literally going under companies usually take the time to have a 1:1 chat with the person being laid off.

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