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Comment by dionidium | Hacker News Reader

I've always thought that the worst thing about a plane crash would be the 30 seconds before you hit the ground when you know what's coming, but it hasn't happened yet. In other words: if you ever have to do this, get on with it. He wastes like 9 weasily hedge sentences before dropping the news everyone on the call could already have guessed was coming. Just get on with it. None of that preamble was necessary.

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Getting fired is bad enough, but if it's being done by someone bad at firing people it's the worst. Moneyball had some solid advice:

"Be straight with them, no fluff, just facts. 'Pete I gotta let you go. Jack's office will handle the details.'" That's it.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTjhHrcyiQI

I don’t want to micro-diagnose his intro, but I think about half of his intro was needed. I don’t need to hear about how this is the second time or how hard it was last time, but I do think a few sentences of context serves as a “hey, pay attention!” intro to the news.

It needs to never be about the manager (CEO in this case) doing the termination, but a few sentences of intro is standard and appropriate I think.

I almost deleted my comment after I wrote it, because, like, I get that he's probably also nervous and it's not an easy thing to do. You're probably right that some kind of "pay attention!" intro is necessary, but, yes, I'd definitely advise skipping over all the stuff about how hard this is for him.

I didn't watch the video myself, but as a general advice this is a very bad idea. People you give the bad news to shouldn't be caught unaware by it, they should at least suspect it and have some time to get used to the idea. There is nothing worse than expecting a good news (raise?) and then learning the possibly devastating one instead. My experience at least.

I'm sorry if that happened to you but entering a meeting hoping for a raise and getting fired instead means there were several big communication issues with your manager.

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