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I disagree. Firing via email or pre-recorded voicemail saves YOU the embarrassment of having to sit through the employees sobs. In my opinion, firing is a failure of management, and one of the consequences and fixes to ensure a failure like that doesn't occur again is to witness the very real fall out the error has on real people; that is your failure was so grand as to have a grown man in tears.

Firing via email or pre-recorded message is a way to avoid looking your failure of responsibility in the eye

Agreed. Short of termination for criminal or grossly inappropriate behavior--that is, the kind of action that is not within an employer's mandate to handle--a firing is management trying to fix management's mistakes at as little cost to management as possible. The literal least you can do in that position is wield the axe yourself and take a good look at the consequences of your screwup.

I mean, you're welcome to feel that way if you want. I know a lot of people do feel that way. I also know a lot of people would rather not have those personal moments visible to their boss just to prove a point that he failed and that's why he has to watch a grown man cry. I didn't say it's always better to fire asynchronously, I just said it's not objectively worse.

I also understand that your platitude on firing is transparent propaganda, but that's neither here nor there to this discussion -- whoever did or didn't do things that precipitated or mandated the firing, the fact is that it must happen, and that not everyone reacts the same way or prefers the same style.

I should note I also state this from the perspective of one who has been fired (in all occurrences, I'm using "fired" as a catch-all for all instances where a job is involuntarily terminated; this can mean the contract ends, the company or unit is closing, or performance was unsatisfactory to the bosses). I think I would've preferred to be fired remotely in all instances except one (where I wasn't really fired, but my already-turned-in two weeks notice was prematurely ended). I wouldn't think the bosses were "cowards" for depriving me of the opportunity to personally and physically guilt them, but like I said, to each his own.

The takeaway here is that the people doing the firing shouldn't concern themselves too abundantly about whether the employee is going to appreciate the atmosphere of the firing or not, because news flash: they won't.

@cookiecaper, you've basically ignored the argument.

> whoever did or didn't do things that precipitated or mandated the firing, the fact is that it must happen

Oh, but you can't call that a fact, because it fails the verifiability test. I mean, firing is a decision made by management, the same management that placed the company in this position in the first place. And it amuses me that in big corporations, management almost never gets fired.

> not everyone reacts the same way or prefers the same style

This is not subjective, as having the common decency to look a person in the eyes before stabbing is something one should learn at home in order to pass for a human.

Truth be told, I would get pretty mad about such things, but fortunately such companies are usually ran by incompetents and so most of them either go out of business or become completely irrelevant and for me that's justice enough.

> [H]aving the common decency to look a person in the eyes before stabbing is something one should learn at home in order to pass for a human.

You must have had a very interesting childhood.

Its a take on an Oscar Wilde quote:

"A true friend stabs you in the front."

>@cookiecaper, you've basically ignored the argument.

There is no argument. There is only the dogmatic belief that there is some cosmic moral code that states persons must be fired in person. As I've said probably four times now, I accept whole-heartedly there are times when that is the best course of action, and I've acted accordingly and fired these people face-to-face. But I don't believe there is a cosmic moral law violated by considering or performing the firing via alternate, asynchronous means. I believe that circumstances can make this a better option sometimes.

>Oh, but you can't call that a fact, because it fails the verifiability test. I mean, firing is a decision made by management, the same management that placed the company in this position in the first place.

This is nitpicking at semantics. I understand that firing is usually a subjective judgment call, obviously. I guess better phrasing would've been "whoever did or didn't do things... the decision has been made and needs to be executed".

>Truth be told, I would get pretty mad about such things, but fortunately such companies are usually ran by incompetents and so most of them either go out of business or become completely irrelevant and for me that's justice enough.

As I alluded elsewhere, I think it is silly to state that the C-levels at all of these big companies are "incompetents" because they don't meet with every employee individually to fire them. It's a routine way to do mass layoffs and it's easy for employees to say "That guy couldn't look me in the eye", but it's also easy for employees to find all kinds of other things to complain about. Since your employees are going to be unhappy when they're fired anyway, I believe it should be done in the most objectively logical and considerate way, even if it leaves room for petty complaints about the venue, because people who want to complain are going to find something to complain about even if you fire them in the most stately of palaces and most well-pressed of designer suits, with braces that keep your eyelids open so that there is no doubt that you were willing to "look them in the eye" when you fired them.

Sometimes there is no good alternative; like others are saying in this thread, it's often impossible to concoct a graceful firing experience. Saying that people are incompetent for remote firings is ascribing far too much value to what is ultimately a subjective presentation, and ignoring the serious and real logistical issues sometimes involved with a "look-me-in-the-eye" firing.

The point that all your detractors seem to be getting at, that you won't let yourself understand, is that you should do it in person so that it is hard for you to do it. You will never be able to pretend that you aren't doing a great deal of harm to another human being if you have to actually face them and see it.

No, I understand that this is the point they're making, but the point I'm making is that it's not about me. Due to the circumstances of this arrangement, where we only meet in public places, there would've been no way to fire her face-to-face and allow her to retain her dignity. This is why I ultimately decided not to do it in person. Should I have fired her face-to-face just so I could be extra punished for having to fire someone, when it would create a lasting embarrassment and loss of dignity for the employee? I guess a lot of people here think so, and value the punishment of their employer over their own privacy.

As a side note, I don't believe I need to be punished for firing this employee. This didn't enter into my calculation because I don't consider it a punishment to fire someone face-to-face if that's appropriate for the situation.

> ... I don't believe I need to be punished ...

It's not about punishment. It's not: oh, you did something bad, you need to be punished for it. It's that it shouldn't be easy, and doing it in person makes sure of that. That's all it is. And it sounds a lot like you're rationalizing your desire to avoid that situation by telling yourself that it would be better for the employee, as though you won't let yourself consider the idea that it's all about it being easier for you.

You're probably right that the whole thing was vetted by lawyers, but it's still lame.

I've never been fired, but I've fired other people, and I've always believed it's something you should do when looking someone in the eye. That's the way I'd want it done if I were the one packing my stuff. Every time I did it I think there was more stress for me than the person getting fired, but if I were still managing people I'd still do it that way.

The only time I didn't do it that way was when I worked for this sleazy field services body shop that was worried the managers would say something out of school and get the company sued. They had someone from HR who was trained in firing people (love to put that on my resume) by legal do it. And we were not allowed to comment on anything.

I worked at a place where the first inkling something wasn't right is your badge doesn't open the door any more. You go to security to get a replacement (because you think it's broken), and they have all your stuff in a box by the security desk. See ya. Didn't stay there long, though. I kept expecting someone with a broken badge to off himself before he realized he still had a job. Who wants to work at a place like that?

>You're probably right that the whole thing was vetted by lawyers, but it's still lame.

It's lame because firing, both being fired and doing the firing, is lame. Any way it's done, it's going to be lame. "Look me in the eye when you fire me, see if you can stare me down" is really just machismo bloviation, as far as I can tell. Perhaps some people walk away saying "Well, he had the respect to look me in the eye", but somehow I feel that people that get stuck on this would be more inclined to say "That heartless bastard looked me right in the eye as he fired me."

It's a no-win situation. Is it really better to expose the company and the remaining employees to liability by having that meeting 1000 times in one day, repeating the same boilerplate, just so that a few of your ex-employees may walk away with a slightly-more-hospitable opinion of you? Even if they don't have this to mark against you, assuming they were the type of employee inclined to do so, they're still probably not going to like you, because, well, you fired them.

>"Look me in the eye when you fire me, see if you can stare me down" is really just machismo bloviation, as far as I can tell.

Not to me. To me it's a question of respect. To do it by email even over the phone sends the message you didn't think he was worth enough, as a person, to waste any time on.

It takes a lot longer to craft a gracious email than it does to have an in-person meeting. In my experience, termination meetings are very brief (for a couple of reasons that shouldn't be too hard to figure out).

All I'm saying is that it's circumstantial. There are definitely cases where an in-person firing is an important part of showing respect; maybe we'll even say it's the default case. But there are cases where it's more respectful, dependent on circumstances and personalities, to do it in an asynchronous communication channel (taped message, email, etc).

Walk through the logistics of firing 900 people individually, one at a time, looking each in the eye individually each time (and/or having your highest-ranking representative do it at various offices), and you'll notice there are some serious problems with this solution too. Is it better to leave the employee in agony all day, wondering when or if he's going to get called, getting increasingly more angry as his friends drop out one by one while he retains access to internal company systems, etc., just so you can walk around and tell everyone "I looked 'im straight in the eye!" If you think beyond this weird hangup that some people have, you'll see that there is really every reason to do the firing in a more efficient way in these cases. The only thing lost is the good vibes from any recently-fired employees that decide the opportunity to stare down their boss before they get terminated is a critical part of their self-worth, which honestly, probably scarcely existed in the first place.

We should do the best thing for all involved, not the most politically correct thing. It's politically correct to have a final showdown where you stare down the person you're about to fire, but it's not always actually the best option.

Each to his own but I'd never fire someone that way. I think I should be able to look my employees in the eye when making life-altering decisions for them.

That said, I've only had two firings go 'bad' over the years, in one case the person had stolen from the company and it was an 'on the spot' affair, in the other it was someone with a history of instability. But other than that layoffs and firings were dealt with in as calm and constructive a manner as possible, including helping those laid off to find new employment and references specifically tailored to the person.

Being an employer is not always fun, hiring people in a time of growth is great, letting them go when things are bad is terrible, but I always remind myself it is a lot more terrible for the employees than for the employer and shielding myself from their emotions would feel like a terrible cop-out.

I'm surprised how many people think this is about the person doing the firing. In my post, my example wasn't how horrible it was to see the guy break down, but how clearly he wished he hadn't been put in a situation where he had to do that in front of someone else. Such an interesting conjunction of masochism here from employers that feel they need to see the pain they're causing their employees.

In this specific instance, I chose to fire her via email because 90% of our communication was via email, it usually takes weeks to schedule and actually get to an in-person meeting time (since she would cancel meetings probably 70% of the time), and we always meet in public places like coffee shops (her choice, not mine), where any visible emotional shock would be apparent to bystanders. It had much more to do with practicalities and concern for her privacy than any concern about "saving myself" from an adverse reaction (which I still got in a nasty retaliatory email).

There is nothing masochistic about it, it's simply trying to be human in a bad situation for both.

Making time for her and selecting an appropriate venue would have been better - in my opinion, not being in your shoes that's an easy one to hold. But I've been in your shoes in other situations and we seem to have a totally different take on this.

As for the nasty retaliatory email: you fired her by email, what did you expect in return, a personal visit?

I definitely agree that we have differing perspectives on this. To me, the more human thing to do is to give her privacy and time to regain composure before any final words or property are exchanged, instead of blindsiding her with this in a public place and expecting her to maintain professionalism or decorum sufficient to avoid embarrassment.

Is it really nicer to make her walk out of a place where she knows people with mascara running down her face than it is to let her read and handle the news at home, just so I can go around and tell everyone that I wasn't a coward and I "owned up to my mistakes" by making an adult cry in public?

I should note that not everyone cries. Maybe she wouldn't have cried. Maybe she would've jumped up and screamed at me. Maybe she just would've been noticeably sullen. Maybe she would've been completely unphased. I ultimately decided that for her sake, it wasn't the appropriate venue to take that kind of risk, and that the news would be best received via email at a time when I knew she'd be home.

>As for the nasty retaliatory email: you fired her by email, what did you expect in return, a personal visit?

It's not that I didn't expect the email, just that I didn't expect to avoid the "consequences" of my "screw up" by firing her in an asynchronous medium.

Ok. Thinking a bit more about this: I think the basic problem is that this blindsided her. If you are firing someone un-expectedly that alone will cause a reaction. I've never (fortunately) been in a situation where I had to fire someone out of the blue (except for the aforementioned thief), and I can't actually imagine that this would ever happen to me. That may be the root cause of what's going on here rather than the way in which it was done or where it was done.

It may be a cultural difference or maybe it is for legal reasons but I don't believe in getting people fired 'on the spot' unless they've done something quite terrible and in every other case the fact that we will be parting ways at some point is most likely evident to both parties long before it needs to be formalized. So maybe that's why I don't need to resort to firing people from a safe distance because the writing will have been on the wall for quite a while.

Case in point: when I wound down TrueTech Canada Inc (15 employees at its peak) it was obvious to everybody working there that we were doing bad, even so I found the time to try to get those that had trouble finding other employment at least a temporary fix. I'm still in contact with almost everybody that I employed over the years and that's a point of pride with me. If I'd have sent them an email while keeping them in the dark about the situation until the last moment I doubt that that would have been the case.

I don't want to get too far into the specifics of confidential personnel matters, but I'll say it shouldn't have blindsided her, but I think (and she stated) that it did. You can only do so much for some people.

I'll also say that for all the politically-correct management platitudes that people like to throw around like "if someone gets fired, it's always the boss that failed" or "your employee should always know what's coming", real life is frequently somewhat more complex. I completely agree with the principles behind these populist quips, but like most things in the real world, there are imperfections -- mitigating factors -- that can make the application of the principles complex. These are generalizations, and they're good generally, but they're not good all the time.

I've also been able to maintain good relationships across employment status changes, fwiw. I've hired back people I've fired before and maintain a good rapport with most employees I've had to dismiss. I'm in an engagement now with someone who I've hired myself, been hired by, quit on, and been fired by (remotely, for a gig he didn't hire me for) and we've been able to remain friends through all of that, so I don't think it's a generalized issue with my conception around employment relationships.

EDIT: Also, even if people know a termination is coming somewhere along the line, it's easy to forget and they often will have an adverse reaction when it actually comes down. I don't think "employee is so naive they think they'll be kept around after X Y and Z" is the only situation where this kind of consideration is appropriate. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree; we place fundamentally different values on "looking someone in the eye" (maybe because I've done so much telecommute stuff that I don't see this as the MO for "big decision" discussions, at least not with reference to employment). It simply isn't an important independent principle for me, and I try to consider what will make the employee most comfortable, within reason.

> it usually takes weeks to schedule and actually get to an in-person meeting time (since she would cancel meetings probably 70% of the time), and we always meet in public places like coffee shops (her choice, not mine)

That's super-weird, frankly. If you're running a serious business you ought to at least have access to office space for something as important as this, even if it's hiring one for an hour. In the worst case if an in-person meeting takes that long to arrange then something like skype or even a phone call is still a much better fallback than email.

If she doesn't turn up to the meeting where you're firing her then sure, email.

>In the worst case if an in-person meeting takes that long to arrange then something like skype or even a phone call is still a much better fallback than email.

I guess the root of the thing here is that I don't think it's that bad to fire someone over email if that's appropriate for the situation and personality. I didn't give this list as proof that I couldn't've fired her in person if I REALLY wanted to, I gave it to provide just a bit of context around the circumstances that influenced the tradeoff.

Yes, it's possible she'll go around and think about how I'm such a spineless coward because I didn't make her cry in the coffee shop when I fired her, but it's probable she'd go around thinking I was a spineless coward or INSERT_INSULT_HERE even if I met her in person and did it. That's the point. A friend recently fired an employee in person and was informed that he would come back and "rape him [my friend] in the ass". Obviously the setting is not the most important part of the firing; the most important part is that it's happening at all.

At this point it may be worthwhile to indicate that these positions aren't all for well-tempered, highly-compensated hackers or engineers. The worker I fired did not have advanced skills and neither did the worker my friend fired. Some people in these groups are less objective about these involuntary departures than you'd expect in a conventional white-collar setting.

It would've been highly unusual to procure a space that would've been appropriate for this type of meeting and she'd immediately be tipped off that something weird was happening. This could put her in a worse frame of mind; if she enters fancy virtual office and thinks, "Wow, this is a nice place, I wonder if we're going to move here, I bet some really big super cool deals are happening that I'm about to hear about", is that really going to make the situation less volatile?

And again, I'm doing all of this... why, exactly? So she'll have one less checkbox in the "things to hate" list? She can put plenty there if she wants to, "fired me by email" is really immaterial, and again, even though it may look worse to fire via email, I did end up doing it out of concern for her long-term well-being, not mine, since it doesn't really make a big difference to me either way -- it's just an hour or so of my time, for her it's a big life change, and we usually meet at a public place near her home (for her convenience, of course), which is where this would've potentially gone down.

> What it really comes down to is that most people are going to look for "facts" that support their emotional perspective, not emotions that are congruent with the factual perspective.

The really impressive part of your comment is how you summarized it perfectly in the middle of it.

Yes it explains a full range of behaviors in life. It seems we can go over such "facts" in non-challenging situations and dismiss them as non-relevant, but there's a point where we're emotionnaly overwhelmed and take those "facts" as a reference.

Firing someone is never a pretty business. You can't expect it to go smooth and rational. This is a stressful moment for any employee. The least, as a manager, you could do is give them a sense of dignity and comfort by delivering the news in person. Yes, it may be uncomfortable for you, or people may talk crap behind your back, but this is where your qualities as a leader are tested. Let them speak out, process their grief. It's not about you, it's them whose lives are about to change. Them who have to bring the bad news home. Give them some slack. My advice is to worry less about your image and more about people you manage.

Funnily enough, if you read the extensive replies I've already written in this thread, you'll see that this decision was made out of concern for the employee based on the unique circumstances of our arrangement, and has nothing to do with my image.

If I was worried about my image, I would've fired her in person so that I could tell everyone "Oh me, oh my, I would NEVER fire an employee without a full honor guard and 21-gun salute!", and so that she couldn't tell anyone "Oh, that guy didn't even have the balls to fire me in person." I also wouldn't post about this on HN defending the executives of major multinational corporations, known worldwide for their abysmal IQs and inability to perform basic critical reasoning functions.

I'm honestly not seeing how opting not to do this in person can be perceived as "good for image". Can you clarify?

Like I said, I've fired people in person before and I'm not going to shrink from that duty if it's truly the best course of action. But I'm not going to insist on it at the cost of the employee's dignity just so that I can tell everyone "I have never fired someone in a non-sound-bite friendly manner".

The C-level that fired everyone by pre-recorded conference call most likely went through a similar dilemma, and I sympathize with him. I don't think it's an objectively bad way to fire a group of people. Is the alternative, that your peers start getting called into an office and told individually that they're being fired while you sit there in panic with continued access to corporate resources just waiting for your turn, really that much better just because there's some lackey that can stare into your soul and relay the message from corporate HQ? Or could the C-level be seen as a coward for not delivering the message himself and making a lackey take the blame?

I believe people have romanticized this process far too much. I don't believe a staredown is so obviously superior to alternate forms. I understand that you just said it is and that the only reason I didn't do it this time was because I was worried about my image (again, what?), but I don't find that to be a convincing argument. As I said elsewhere, I'd prefer to be fired remotely. A couple of the other guys in this thread have expressed that too. I felt that was the appropriate course in this situation.

It's not easy to be the boss and make these calls. Everyone is going to have an opinion without the information or perspective and there are people that are going to dislike you for the decisions you make, no matter what they are. It's part of the territory. It'd sure help hacker entrepreneurs if we dropped the PC line once in a while and had some real talk.

I worked for awhile on a team that, when new owners came in, was under some scrutiny. It was pretty clear that if the team wasn't completely dissolved, it was about to be downsized. During that time I always hoped if we were fired or laid off it would be via email or phone, simply because I didn't want to waste the time commuting in to go to some grim meeting.

Luckily I moved on to healthier areas before the hammer started falling. That said, I still think about how much of a drag it would be to come in to work only to be fired. Spare me the time and awkward situation, I say.