I've had it come up and thought it was great. In my case, the timing of other offers meant that the potential employer would have to hire me without all of their normal process. That worried them.

I explained that if it didn't work out, there was no sense for either of us in me staying on when it wasn't a good match. We then had a reasonable, adult conversation about hiring and firing and our approaches thereto.

It was honestly part of what sold me on the place. I think that companies that treat firing as some sort of spooky bogeyman are not so good at management. It's not like failing to talk about it means that firing isn't a possible outcome; it just means that people dance around it.

It's an adult approach to work. Like linkedin / Reid Hoffman's approach to career development: stop pretending you're joining a company for life; instead, treat employment as a tour of duty with limited duration. The company gets X from you, and you get Y from the company. At the end, you may or may not choose to re-up, with new goals for both sides.

ala https://hbr.org/2013/06/tours-of-duty-the-new-employer-emplo...

>But hearing it come up -- and like this -- during an interview without solicitation just reeks of a toxic environment.

That was my thought. As I was reading this, the voice in my head said "Run! Run for the hills!"

You got a trophy for playing soccer in your childhood, right?

As a small employer who has directly employed no more than 2 full-time employees at once, I make a habit to very clearly emphasize in the interview that I am running a small outfit that has a real and serious chance of vanishing overnight, or coming upon unexpected budgetary circumstances that necessitate the instantaneous layoff of some or all employees. Despite this clear warning, I've still had employees get upset when we've needed to part ways. I still think it's a good spiel to rehearse but I've stopped believing anyone will take it seriously.

Getting fired is fundamentally upsetting. It's hard to avoid.

> Wow, this company must have to deal with this quite a bit in order for it to be covered like this during an interview setting.

Or, their hiring managers are very experienced and are basing this on decades of industry experience over many different managerial positions. They have learned the best practices for employee retention and dismissal over time, so they know to mention this now.

We can live in your hypothetical Or world, or we can live in the real world where most sane people would interpret a segment like this as:

"Red flag, red flag, their CEO is a complete nightmare, run away, run away".

>Or World

I like that phrase. I'll be using that.

Even if this were true -- which is debatable -- I think the much more likely scenario is that the employer has had problems in the past, and very possibly in the present (whether the fault of the employer and/or employee(s)).

Regardless, I just don't think it would be worth risking highly talented candidates (rightly) misinterpreting bringing up the topic of firing during an interview as an indicator of a toxic environment, and therefore think this is not very sound advice.

I agree, but imagine if instead of getting this speech during the interview, you got it the first day on the job.

I suppose in that case I'd still have the option of calling my old employer and asking for my job back, or maybe an employer I'd turned down to ask if the job is still available.

I have on 2 separate occasions... when, I against my better judgement, took some consulting work with obvious clients from hell. Immediate not so subtle threats from the beginning. Turned out that all of their previous contracting experiences with others had ended up a disaster, as did my experience with them. It's the threats that pretend not to be threats that really seem to be one of the strongest indicators.

Yeah, at this point I'd assume that anyone who's making any sort of threats from the very start is going to turn into one of these employers from hell. True or not.

Actually, I'd be surprised if the OP isn't the employer from hell. Trust your first instincts on this stuff guys.

I'd follow Gassé to war.

Didn't mean to overreact toward the OP. I really haven't heard or seen about him to judge either way. As you can see, I was rather traumatized by those 2 clients from hell.

100% agreed. This would completely sour me on the position.