>In the worst case if an in-person meeting takes that long to arrange then something like skype or even a phone call is still a much better fallback than email.
I guess the root of the thing here is that I don't think it's that bad to fire someone over email if that's appropriate for the situation and personality. I didn't give this list as proof that I couldn't've fired her in person if I REALLY wanted to, I gave it to provide just a bit of context around the circumstances that influenced the tradeoff.
Yes, it's possible she'll go around and think about how I'm such a spineless coward because I didn't make her cry in the coffee shop when I fired her, but it's probable she'd go around thinking I was a spineless coward or INSERT_INSULT_HERE even if I met her in person and did it. That's the point. A friend recently fired an employee in person and was informed that he would come back and "rape him [my friend] in the ass". Obviously the setting is not the most important part of the firing; the most important part is that it's happening at all.
At this point it may be worthwhile to indicate that these positions aren't all for well-tempered, highly-compensated hackers or engineers. The worker I fired did not have advanced skills and neither did the worker my friend fired. Some people in these groups are less objective about these involuntary departures than you'd expect in a conventional white-collar setting.
It would've been highly unusual to procure a space that would've been appropriate for this type of meeting and she'd immediately be tipped off that something weird was happening. This could put her in a worse frame of mind; if she enters fancy virtual office and thinks, "Wow, this is a nice place, I wonder if we're going to move here, I bet some really big super cool deals are happening that I'm about to hear about", is that really going to make the situation less volatile?
And again, I'm doing all of this... why, exactly? So she'll have one less checkbox in the "things to hate" list? She can put plenty there if she wants to, "fired me by email" is really immaterial, and again, even though it may look worse to fire via email, I did end up doing it out of concern for her long-term well-being, not mine, since it doesn't really make a big difference to me either way -- it's just an hour or so of my time, for her it's a big life change, and we usually meet at a public place near her home (for her convenience, of course), which is where this would've potentially gone down.
I guess the root of the thing here is that I don't think it's that bad to fire someone over email if that's appropriate for the situation and personality. I didn't give this list as proof that I couldn't've fired her in person if I REALLY wanted to, I gave it to provide just a bit of context around the circumstances that influenced the tradeoff.
Yes, it's possible she'll go around and think about how I'm such a spineless coward because I didn't make her cry in the coffee shop when I fired her, but it's probable she'd go around thinking I was a spineless coward or INSERT_INSULT_HERE even if I met her in person and did it. That's the point. A friend recently fired an employee in person and was informed that he would come back and "rape him [my friend] in the ass". Obviously the setting is not the most important part of the firing; the most important part is that it's happening at all.
At this point it may be worthwhile to indicate that these positions aren't all for well-tempered, highly-compensated hackers or engineers. The worker I fired did not have advanced skills and neither did the worker my friend fired. Some people in these groups are less objective about these involuntary departures than you'd expect in a conventional white-collar setting.
It would've been highly unusual to procure a space that would've been appropriate for this type of meeting and she'd immediately be tipped off that something weird was happening. This could put her in a worse frame of mind; if she enters fancy virtual office and thinks, "Wow, this is a nice place, I wonder if we're going to move here, I bet some really big super cool deals are happening that I'm about to hear about", is that really going to make the situation less volatile?
And again, I'm doing all of this... why, exactly? So she'll have one less checkbox in the "things to hate" list? She can put plenty there if she wants to, "fired me by email" is really immaterial, and again, even though it may look worse to fire via email, I did end up doing it out of concern for her long-term well-being, not mine, since it doesn't really make a big difference to me either way -- it's just an hour or so of my time, for her it's a big life change, and we usually meet at a public place near her home (for her convenience, of course), which is where this would've potentially gone down.