Most people do not take criticism well at all and in all honesty, most people don't want a big, honest list of their infractions, even if they claim they do.
Consider also that many times employment decisions are entirely petty and done just because someone in the chain of command doesn't like the "laid off" individual. There are various terms that are corpo-speak for this. Employment in an organization is really professional likeability management, which is a tricky, fickle field.
Lawyers are involved from the very beginning of a layoff. They make the template.
>most people don't want a big, honest list of their infractions, even if they claim they do.
If one's immediate supervisor is doing their job, the employee will already know what would be on the list.
Right, I guess I meant that lawyers don't (or maybe, didn't) become a concern until someone was disgruntled enough to make spurious legal claims. They're involved now as a preventative measure, which I acknowledge in other comments, but what I'm saying is that if people were able to take a list of infractions in stride and improve on them, companies would be much less worried about the potential legal liability incurred by given honest feedback to employees.
Two topics not discussed are leaks and rationalization.
Say someone's getting fired for not being the right race, or being a woman in a mans field, or not being a bro, or not going out drinking with the boys enough after work, she wouldn't date the boss, or being too old, or too gay, or too jewish, or whatever. "Sorry its a budget thing combined with different direction of company and best of luck to you" is legally extremely safe. Happens ALL the time. But if the boss has some deep personal conversation and it leaks out that he doesn't like most black people but he hired you anyway so its clearly not race, he doth protest too much, or how it doesn't matter that she wouldn't date him despite him asking her a couple times it really was something else... Or the rationalization thing, where lets face it, he was fired because he is gay and the boss is a republican, if the boss is smart enough not to leak that topic, but sufficiently dumb enough, in a long personal conversation out will come ridiculous rationalizations about the guys LoC or bug report / fix rates or attendance as a distractor for the boss to avoid talking about homophobia, unfortunately the rationalized metrics can actually be measured and open the company to wrongful termination lawsuits. "Your honor he said the only reason was my attendance wasn't very good, but my documents prove it was the best in the office, note the only day I was gone was a scheduled vacation day for the pride parade and he's out of the office continually attending fund raisers for anti-gay marriage republican candidates" etc etc. Usually that kind of stuff is settled expensively out of court with non-disparagement clauses so future employees can't avoid predatory bosses, which is another problem.
You can pretty much assume if "they" won't tell you why you're fired, and you can't obviously figure it out, then it was some illegal thing like above and they're smart enough not to provide lawsuit fodder on a platter.
Ya gotta realize that half of management is by definition below median, and that half of the population can create very expensive lawsuits.
Please don't generalize about a group of people (either managers, or republicans). Employees can be bad, too.
Nah, we only hire Rockstar Ninjas who are a perfect cultural fit only 4.0+ GPAs and only ivy league grads need apply. And they need 10 years experience in some library where the github repo is only 3 years old. Everyone hires like that and complains there's no workers.
Management aren't hired to standards as high, so yeah, half are going to be below median.
If you ever had any experience managing people you'd know this isn't true. Employment law is a minefield, and managers aren't usually lawyers. If you're a manager and it's time to cut someone loose your boss will tell you "don't say anything beyond x, y, and z", as in "tell them we're having layoffs and they're out. Tell them their remaining vacation time will get cashed out. Tell them about COBRA. If they ask anything about performance, reiterate they're being laid off because the company is downsizing, and nobody should assume performance is involved."
This is true no matter what the situation is, from there being a real shortage of money to performance problems.
>...he was fired because he is gay and the boss is a republican...
I always wonder what's wrong with people that they can write something like this. I'm a Republican and I've had gay people work for me. There are probably millions of gay people working for Republicans who aren't scheming to fire them at this very moment.
As a manager, I figure your sexuality is none of my business unless you force the people around you to deal with it. And that's true no matter how you're oriented.