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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

are you serious- I mean, are you talking from experience? You'd fire a person because of a single manager, then fire the manager, and invite back the person who was originally fired?

Maybe you like your employer, but let me tell you: that's sociopathic. It's deeply disrespectful to long-term individual contributors to treat them that way, and if this is in any way representative of the company's leadership's philosophy, then they are bad people who should not be hiring.

Oh wait, they're firing. Not hiring.

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Yes, I speak from experience, I worked at Netflix. But I think you're missing some really important details:

- It was extremely rare. In my four years I only saw it happen once, and only heard about it happening one or two other times in the history of the company.

- The general philosophy was to make it easy to both hire and fire people, to allow for nimbleness. But they were open about this and let people know this wasn't for everyone.

- I think it shows great leadership -- the company admitted it made a mistake and tried to rectify it by inviting them back. Seems better to me than just trying to sweep it under the rug.

The sports team mentality wasn't for everyone, but for a lot of us, we loved it. We loved having coworkers who lifted us up and who we could trust to get things done and do them well, and knowing that if they didn't they wouldn't be around for long.

Oh, so you convolved an anecdote with company culture. If it only happened once, it's an outlier. As you wrote it, you made it sound like a regular thing.

If I was the employee affected and received that invite, I'd ask to speak to the SVP in charge of my division and ask them a few questions about how a good employee got fired. ANd I'd also let them know that as a human, it was a devaluing experience.

Having worked at a number of enterprises and been a manager, I can't say I'd ever want to work in your environment. Hiring and firing quickly isn't a recipe for nimbleness, it's a recipe for a weak foundation. Note: I have vendors and contractors for me, and I can easily hire or fire them. That's entirely different from FTEs.

Where did you get that absurd interpretation? They’re saying: a good IC gets fired by a bad manager. Later bad manager gets fired by their manager (we’ll call them good manager). Good manager then goes back and asks good IC if they want their job back.

Yes, that was my interpretation. I don't understand what you think is absurd about that being sociopathic. Typically, to fire somebody, the manager has to convince at least one or two other people, typically outside of their department, through an extended period that is inspected by multiple different people. This exists to protect employees from vicious, vindictive and arbitrary leaders.

Okay, may have been my bad but it sounded like you thought that the same manager who fired the IC also was the one to offer to re-hire or something. Although your clarification about a firing theoretically needing approval from higher up sheds some light on that.

To your point, in general if you leave a place due to a bad manager (or get fired) and some kind of reform happens and you get invited back, usually the best move is not to come back. The organization already showed it was willing to toss you away at least once. That being said Netflix is probably a bit of an exception because it’s explicitly where you go to work if you want to work with people who are all insanely competent and hardworking and where performance is actually a core focus.

Also I still don’t quite understand the sociopathy element. It doesn’t seem sociopathic to say “hey we got rid of the toxic manager, want your old job back?” although like I said it’s still generally a bad idea to actually take the job back

We're in agreement- it makes sense to return if we feel strongly that it was the right place to work and don't care that we were treated arbitrarily.

The reason it's sociopathic is because companies shouldn't devalue their employees by treating them so callously as allowing a single bad manager to fire them. It speaks volumes about the nature of the company- one that is willing to bring in people and kick them back out without ever considering things like growth potential, job training, life circumstances, and any number of other things that affect employees.

I guess that's the sort of difference between companies that hire people and invest in them, and companies that just sort of churn through employees.

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