I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand it, the legal distinction is whether you're terminated "with cause." That's what most people refer to as "fired." The implication is that you can't collect unemployment or severance. At a professionally managed company, termination "with cause" will be the culmination of a "progressive discipline" process unless you do something so egregious that they must walk you straight out the door.

In common parlance, "laid off" means that you are not given "cause," and are eligible for those benefits.

Under some conditions, a company that is planning to lay off more than a certain number of people must announce it in advance. This is a "mass layoff." Also, a laid off person is potentially eligible for re-hiring, and the details are often written into union contracts.

I suspect due to the legal implications of mass layoffs, companies will use some other term such as "reduction of force" for routine business-downturn layoffs.

Naturally, if a company needs to reduce its workforce, they will sack the weakest employees, but it will typically be done without "cause" in order to avoid a potential lawsuit for false termination, and because letting people have their unemployment benefit is the decent thing to do.

http://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-employee-review-sy...

Laid off. Done en masse. I could do this for every company and it is exactly the same. No, they don't say "your performance sucks! You're fired!" In fact that would be a legal quagmire because "cause" is somewhat capricious when the reasoning is "doesn't fall in the top 90%". Which is why they settle with nice departure agreements.

Are there some people around here who were laid off and are trying to feel good about it? The reality of lay offs in most situations is that someone intentionally put you in a situation where you would be laid off. It wasn't just accident.

The reality is, companies don't hire for fun, they have a plan, and they need people to execute that plan. If the plan fails, then the people get laid off, but it is the management that failed by hiring people they didn't actually need. Or it is unpredictable market conditions. A lot of people did everything right but still lost their jobs when the NASDAQ crashed, for example. People who did everything right are losing their jobs right now because of the oil price crash. That is part of growing up, to understand that you can do everything right, you can go above and beyond the call of duty, you can even be brilliant - and still lose.

Firstly, to repeat, in most cases in this industry it is performance based. Arbitrary or oddball examples are irrelevant.

When you are laid off, even if it was because the project you were on got axed, take a look around -- did you notice the superstars on the team all got pulled to other parts of the company? Strange, isn't it? Did you notice, in fact, that as things started to look ugly that dregs got transferred to the project?

That's the reality of layoffs. That's how performance based layoffs work. I mean, you're arguing with me despite every single tech example absolutely confirming what I'm saying. People who are valuable to a company will be placed internally, and those who aren't will be jettisoned like unnecessary cargo.

You're trying desperately hard to try to load the word fired and laid off, but the majority of people who are laid off (in this industry) were evaluated and considered not worth keeping.

But talk about steel workers or something.

Nope. Because you are just talking complete nonsense. It just doesn't work like that.

I'll tell you a story, I was laid off about a decade ago, along with about 6000 others. The CEO had decided that offshoring was clearly the future of software development. Only it wasn't, many of my cow-orkers got called back as consultants, for way more money, because that company found itself completely unable to ship any working software with its "CMM level 5" offshore operation. Not me tho', because I can't remember if it took me 1 week or 2 to find a new job and start it, with a nice bump in salary too. I'm neither a "superstar" nor a "dreg". No-one got pulled into other parts of the company in this process as you imagine happens, because those parts of the company didn't exist anymore either.

Another good example is SGI, superstars or dregs (I can guess which one you think you are), they all lost their jobs when the CEO bet the farm on Itanium. Google occupies their campus now. One day, they'll lay people off too. Did their fabled interview process suddenly start letting "dregs" in?

That's the reality of layoffs, they can happen to anyone, and they are decided far, far above the level that anyone knows or cares if you are a "superstar" or a "dreg". When it happens to you - and in a 40-50 year career it is a matter of when not if - try to remember my words and not feel all, ermm, dreggy about it. In the meantime, try to curtail your arrogance a little.

However, it is import to realize that just being excellent at your job will not protect you from being laid off. Just because you want to believe that it will, doesn't make it true.

It's actually a little ironic that this conversation is happening because you're trying to load the term "fired". Fired never meant "because you stole" or "because you sabotaged the PCs". It just means you had your employment terminated, often if not usually for banal reasons of lack of fit or suitability. Life goes on.