Ask HN: Who is firing?

Ask.com laid off search engineers within the last month.

Limewire had a big judgment against it recently. They have another product in the works, but they may be doing some downsizing.

Sorry for the lack of sources. I'll try to come back with them later.

My own understanding of what "firing" meant was termination because, essentially, the employer didn't like the employee anymore, usually because they did something "wrong". Whereas if a batch of employees had to be let go, ostensibly purely for financial reasons, nothing very personal or direct, then they are "laid off", not fired. Every once in a while I hear somebody say fire when I think it was layoff, and it irks me a little. Firing generally means "you suck" whereas laying off means "we suck" or "the economy sucks". I hope that's how we collectively use those terms anyway. Because if we instead use them to mean the same thing, it's a waste of words. A distinction without a difference.

(Not criticizing what you said directly, just reacting to that term.)

Bank of America had a round of layoffs today

If you're in the business of concealing responsibility, then by all means, use the word "lay off".

Employers like to use "lay off" to imply that it was not the fault of the management team, it's not because they're bad guys, it's just the unfortunate reality. That's partly true, it's partly bullshit, and the fact is that it affects people profoundly, and calling it a "lay-off" doesn't help things.

Employees who have been terminated like to use "lay off" to imply that it wasn't their fault, to avoid impacting their hireability. But if the ex-employee had been a net asset, they wouldn't be laying that ex-employee off, unless they were liquidating the entire company.

In practice, lean times give management, whether soft-hearted or black-hearted, an opportunity to make hard calls, in the equityholders' favour, at the expense of the employees. You can like that, hate that, whatever.

I prefer to eschew both "lay off" and "fire", and use the word "terminate", as in "one employee was terminated yesterday, and two thousand were terminated at some point last month". I do this in the hopes of being starkly clear about the simple fact of the termination, and avoiding the sugar coat. You can also use "terminated with cause", which is a legal distinction in some jurisdictions, and I think it's an interesting one.

Oh, but... if I wanted to start a thread that contrasts threads called "who's hiring", then I'd be clever and rhyme and call my thread "who's firing". And if I were responding to that thread, I'd use the word in the topic question. And I wouldn't whip out the pedantry unless someone else did it first.

end-of-rant

"lay off" says it is the fault of the management team.

"fire" says it is the fault of employee.

In the US, the standard is employment at will, which means you can terminate without cause at any time (unless you are actually terminating for a disallowed cause, confusingly), so "terminated for cause" is a small minority of "fired".

Of course, within those people who are more or less interchangeable, of course the ones let go are the poorest value, but there's a significant gap between someone who was let go because the company wanted to reduce the number of engineers they employed and someone who was let go because he is incompetent and the employer turns right around and starts advertising to replace him.