I halfway believe this. I’ve known two very good men who were tasked to wiping out hundreds of jobs.
Because they are not sociopaths, they were in agony. Sleeplessness, vomiting, headaches, depression, just extreme unhappiness as they for months had to analyze who had to go (sometimes their best, but in departments they were dripping or parts of teams that were obsolete). Save Pete, ax Paul. Some were men they had recruited and worked with. Many were top notch employees. Transfer them if you can- but then you have to get rid of others…
It’s miserable and the responsibility weighs heavy. They both said it was no problem getting rid of the difficult or underperforming.
I agree with you here. It’s a stressful task.
Looks like we’re in the minority.
I don’t care if censorship nazis are in turmoil getting rid of other censorship nazis.
I agree that there is a lot of stress anguish when having to fire folks. A close family to mine, the dad was the hatchet man for a international company. It was the role he did not want but no one would step up so he became the defacto bad guy. He was overweight, diabetes, heart attacks, and other stress issues during the decades he was that HR department. The stress eased after he moved to a new HR job at a different organization but the long term damage was done. I do feel for the emotional weight put on the manager but HR should be helping with his decision process and racking and stacking the positions. As the previous twitter administration seemed to be so lax in management practices, I will assume they had no real policy for these actions.
In my experience, the better your people are, the easier it is because you know they will come out ahead. Several of them tell me that getting riffed was the best thing that happened for their careers. Working those out who think they can do the job but don’t have the skills and will struggle in the next job as well is what’s tough.
It is why I have never made friends with people I work with. And certainly why I don’t befriend my employees. Sounds harsh but I have seen companies utterly destroyed by a boss refusing to fire a “friend”