You should be giving constant feedback; firing should not come as a surprise. And if someone is not delivering, the people who depend on that output will know. Totally unrelated people should reserve judgment.

There were 30% layoffs at a company I worked at and one of the 'survivors' was so traumatised by it that they took their own life. It's a known phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_guilt

Layoffs are generally random firing. Especially when we talk about % points.

What's your point? The thread is about how other people being fired is stressful.

> firing should not come as a surprise.

The surprise was for the people around them, not the person being fired.

> Totally unrelated people should reserve judgment.

In the real world, they don't.

You might be surprised how many totally oblivious and un-self-aware people there are out there.

Excellent points. Building on that, if the people who are bothered by that leave or withdraw, won't the workplace come to be dominated by people who aren't bothered by that?

If so, a question is why they aren't bothered by that. Is the culture then cold-hearted? Mercenary? Sociopathic? Oblivious?

People who stayed long enough adjusted, but it didn't mean they were cold-hearted. They just realized that there was more to the story that they saw.

The real challenge was when recent hires would see it and get spooked. One person would get fired and then two people around them would panic and start looking for other jobs. Several people panicked and jumped right back into their previous jobs.

It was also tough when we'd hire someone and they'd discover their predecessor lasted for 2-3 months.

There were also problems with the hire fast part: Often teams would "hire fast" and then lose 3-4 months because they had to deal with someone who lied through the interview, had to be fired, and then another hiring cycle restarted.

Interesting.

What kind of sense of working as a team, and loyalty to the team, developed there? (Among the people who lasted, and how they related to new hires.)

Do you think the hire&fire practices influenced that?

I feel like we're working at the same company. Not just this comment but your others on the same topic. I've seen all the exact same mistakes over the last year. The company wants to grow fast so hires quickly, but then the people hired quickly underperform, so then they're fired quickly, but firing people quickly results in fear, grief and guilt for everyone who hasn't been fired "this time". The top talent never feel comfortable in this cold mercenary culture, so they don't settle in and soon move onto somewhere less cut-throat.

Yikes!

That sounds like a vicious cycle: when people are stressed out, they are less likely to be able to learn successfully, setting them up to under-perform, get fired and then further stress out everyone else around them.

Cortisol has never improved a line of code.

Doing an explicit probationary period could at least reassure people who have been there longer, but it seems like it would be hard to regain trust at that point. The company should probably be praying its employees are unionizing behind the scenes & can save them from the mess they are making.

Maybe? But the idea of being on probation for a few months is basically how employment works in most countries of the world.

So I think what I’m suggesting does have precedence and from my research there’s not that big of an opposition to it.

This seems like a case of not managing expectations. The following should be clear: 1. We fire fast. 2. We don't want to fire people and will do our best to help you succeed. 3. Here are the bars you need to clear in order to stay with us. (They should be reasonable.) 4. We will provide frequent feedback to let you know where you are.

Not sure about everyone else, but to me it's often obvious who wasn't going to make the cut within the first 1-2 months of their employment.