It doesn't always work like this. I once took over a team that had an extraordinarily unprepared developer - of the "tough time with fizzbuzz" variety. He was a nice guy, and I felt bad cutting him loose. My predecessor (who had hired him) didn't understand software development and had no way of giving him the kind of feedback that would have prepared him for this. I don't think the guy was totally surprised, and years later (when I met him randomly at a party) he said he had no hard feelings about the incident. But he sure looked disappointed at the time.

Friend of mine took over a team which had a guy with the opposite problem (though he was a pretty nice guy too). He had the skills to do the job. Indeed, he'd been doing it for three or four years. Then one day he just decided he didn't like software development any more.

Now, a normal person would have gone one of two ways. Either they'd start looking around and find something they thought would be more interesting and then leave for whatever that was, or they'd grit their teeth and keep doing the job they didn't like because they need the paycheck and couldn't find anything that paid enough (guys with families, mostly).

This guy, though, figured the things he liked paid less, so there was no hurry to leave. But he didn't have enough personal integrity to actually do the work while he was still drawing a paycheck. So he just stopped working. He'd show up for work every day and surf the web, listen to ball games, talk on the phone, etc.

It took some time, but eventually my buddy sat him down and said "Look, you need to start actually working instead of just showing up to the office," to which the guy replied "No. You're going to have to fire me".

He made my friend grind through all the paperwork to actually fire him. It's a big company, so it took awhile. They gave him verbal warnings, written warnings, put him on a "performance plan", and eventually he was fired. It took months. He wasn't disappointed or resentful or anything. He just took his couple months of free money and waited around for the paperwork to go through.

>As a manager, it's your job to do that BEFORE you have to can them.

Absolutely. And I did so in every case. The problem is the sort of person who's clueless enough to actually get fired is the sort of person who going to ignore what you're saying, either because they think your real problem with them is that their a woman/black/gay/old/whatever or they have a big ego that won't allow them to consider they might be doing something wrong or because they figure they have a lot more slack than they really do between "you need to shape up" and "here's a box for your stuff".

If you're actually going to fire someone for cause you need to need to have a paper trail, which would make that all official. But. If you establish a paper trail and then try to pretend you're getting rid of them because there's no money you're going to get sued. So companies usually don't go the "for cause" route at all.

>> If you establish a paper trail and then try to pretend you're getting rid of them because there's no money you're going to get sued.

Wait what? I know you can get sued for all sorts of things, but what is the reasoning here? Is it that the given reason is money, but there is evidence that the reason is something else? So what? Would they claim you lied because you don't really have a strong case for the real reason? I'm just confused by this.

First off put the thought that the law makes sense out of your mind. It doesn't.

Basically the outline of the suit is going to be "You always wanted to fire me because I'm black/Latino/gay/old/fat/thin/sick/whatever, so you tried to pretend I was doing a bad job. But then when it became clear I was such a good employee you couldn't do that you pretended it was an economic decision."

Now, this may or may not fly in court, but from the company's perspective it's a crap shoot, since you never know what a jury is going to do. They'll settle if they can. Which means lots of people will sue just looking for free money, even if they know it's all bullshit.

I think anti-discrimination laws are probably fundamentally flawed. I think they should be killed, but with an exception allowing the EEOC, anti-trust or similar to order particular sets of companies to stop discrimination for a period of time if necessary.