Googler... ex-Googler | slacker news

ISTM software engineers have been living in a privileged and elite world. They are then utterly shocked to be treated like employees are treated elsewhere.

Pretty much anywhere if you are let go, your email access and physical access are cut off immediately. Start-ups do this all the time as funding gets tight or there is a need to pivot.

I get that this sucks (and have been on the both the dishing out side of this and the receiving end of it multiple times). It is a fact of life. It would be more mature to move on rather than blog about how you feel wronged by your former employer. The next employer may see this post and reason that it is unsafe to hire this person because they feel a need to damage the company's reputation on the way out (for Google, there isn't much risk here, but for smaller companies, threats to the reputation matter).

Honestly, the problem is not that there are layoffs, the problem is that the process sucks.

you don't need to fire this person immediately - you can talk to him, wind his operations down and then let him go. I.e. in Germany it's often half a year between announcing a layoff and anything happening (besides other stuff like making sure the layoff applies to the newest people first). Even if you don't want such a long period - talking to him and giving him a few weeks to wind down at your firm and starting to search for a new job seems perfectly reasonable. What happens if he wreaks havoc on your firm out of revenge? Really? Happens practically never. If it happens, sue him.

ofc this process applies to reasonable layoff - if it's for something egregious (breaking the law) you can and should fire him immediately.