First: I've never had to fire somebody I hired. I have had to fire people I inherited. It doesn't suck less, but given your odd attempt at turning this into a referendum on people who aren't big on jerkass coworkers, I feel like it helps complete the picture.
Second: firing people is rather unlike "coddling".
Third: that I have fired people does not mean I do not think that they are decent people. It does not mean that I think they are fit for no job. And it does not mean that I, as somebody with a working empathic function, don't want to help them to land as softly as possible in a job where they can be happy and productive.
Fourth: the notion that a reference can't be honest because somebody puts forth the above idea is entirely and only in your goddamn head. You are projecting. On the other hand, I've told somebody who asked (off the record) something along the lines of "I would not hire this person as a team lead because I've observed deficiencies in X, Y, and Z, but their strengths in A, B, and C make them good for role R" because honesty does not require being a prick.
Fifth: somebody who is fired for being an asshole--and, yeah, I've done that, and again, nobody I've ever hired--has no value to my network. I'm not going to inject the toxin I have spat out into somebody I actually like. Because I actually like those people and I want them to succeed. It isn't hard.
Were I in your shoes I'd be looking in the mirror right now. You're projecting something real ugly onto me and its source is worth thinking about.
Edit:
So I address for this being a dig. It is an observation. Those who are empathetic eventually spend all of their time talking about feels rather than addressing issues. Time is a finite resource. Sooner or later ( typically sooner rather than later ) one needs to decide what he or she is going to value more : competency or empathy.
Also, I apologize if me noticing a bad cert was hurtful.
I want to dig, though: is this what you think an argument is, from you? Do you think you're saying something meaningful? I can guarantee you've fucked up something quite a lot bigger and quite a lot more expensive in your career--or you haven't done anything, anything, of note. (Hell, I have. And I talk about it regularly! That's how you learn things.)
And yet that doesn't diminish your argument. Your argument falls on its face on its merits.
There is a pretty obvious difference between "giving feedback in a respectful, polite and constructive manner" and "giving feedback in an aggressive, disrespectful and unhelpful manner". The former isn't "coddling" – it's "being a decent human being".
The problem I see is that too many people seem to confuse "having strong views and standing by them" with "being an unnecessary dick about it". You don't have to do the latter to achieve the former, and I'd argue that it is almost universally harmful.
>It's much better to have "strong views, weakly held" than to have "weak views, strongly held".
Meaning that you should be confident in your opinions but at the same time be willing to concede defeat if someone can show you why your opinion is wrong or not the most optimal one. Rather than persistently defending a view that you also over time come to realise was wrong.
Since you've invested so much time and are holding onto the weak view strongly, you would not want to abandon the view due to the feeling that it was all a waste.