Boss fires man whose parents just died, 'he'd need months to produce again;' AITA?
Unless your soul is full of darkness, firing people is never an easy task...
Still, it's important to remember than people work to live and don't live to work, and there are extenuating life-related circumstances that often interfere with work performance. There isn't a single spreadsheet that matters more than a family emergency, despite what your boss' off-hours email might say. So, when a frustrated boss decided to vent to the moral compass of the internet, people were ready for a roasting session.
AITA (Am I the As*hole) For Firing An Employee After His Parents Died?
I'm the VP of Sales at a software company and one of our sales development reps parents passed away at the beginning of April, sadly they were involved in a car crash and both lost their lives. Now the employee in question in very young 22 year old guy and has been with us for about 10 months now.
He's a great employee and we were thinking about promotions in the next ~6 months for him. His job is a high paying one for a new grad, about ~90k with commission and base so we expect a lot from this position.
Because of the accident we let him take a 1 month paid leave of absence from work and he's returned a few weeks ago and his performance is severely lacking.
He's super unmotivated, not cold calling, out reaching to prospects for the last 2-3 weeks enough since he's come back. Our whole mgmt team has noticed this and we decided to let him go because we feel like he'd need months and months to be able to produce again and we can't just wait that long.
We called him into a meeting on Friday afternoon and gave him the bad news, he was very calm and rude about it. Told us to go f*ck ourselves and got up and went to his desk grabbed his few things and left. I thought this was very very unprofessional and extremely rude.
I told my boyfriend about all of this and he said myself and my mgmt team are a bunch of as*es and pricks with no hearts. AITA?
Here's what the jury of internet strangers had to say about this workplace nightmare:
milee30 said:
YTA (You're the As*hole) for firing him without first going through the steps of describing his issues to him and giving him a chance to improve. He's been back for only 2-3 weeks. It's not about 'having heart', it's about making a dumb business decision for both you and him.
So much smarter to work with this guy to get him back on track after a temporary setback than to push the eject button and have to find and start over with a new person. Dumb.
queencuntpunt said:
YTA, generally people receive a warning about their performance before they get fired. You gave him bereavement leave and then fired him immediately after because he wasn't performing.
gratespeller said:
Yup, congrats YTA. If this is isn't a shitpost well done, you pulled a poor mourning kid's remaining stability and livelihood out from under him. 4 weeks after his parents passed away. Hope the rest of the team's moral stays high after this one.
queencuntpunt said:
YTA, generally people receive a warning about their performance before they get fired. You gave him bereavement leave and then fired him immediately after because he wasn't performing.
After processing the flood of hate from readers, this VP of sales provided an update:
I know this was sh*tty of me now. And I reached out to him to see how he's holding up. He's staying at his gf's place and she's supporting him a lot right now. I offered to get my head hunter friend in touch with him when he's ready and he accepted.