Yahtzee Croshaw: Today, I formally resigned from The Escapist and Gamurs. I don't have the rights to Zero Punctuation, but whatever happens you'll be hearing my voice again soon, in a new place.
It‘s probably important to mention that the entire video team is gone. Some of them were fired, so the rest walked. They‘re planning to go independent soon.
Edit: Their new channel will be SecondWindGroup. They'll do a livestream on November 8th at 11 AM CT, explaining their plans for the future. (Source)
I love Dropout, but consolidating everything under one roof is just not a good idea. Not only are they different teams with different sensibilities, but it's an unstable industry and if the company with all the "good" content happened to fail, that'd be a disaster.
Is "fired" the right term? Normally someone being "fired" indicates that they are at fault in some way. It's not normal for people to be "fired" in bulk. It sounds more like they were laid off, like the company had to cut costs.
Yeah...I'm sort of wondering where the guy works. There are some places where there are significant financial and legal differences for companies doing an at-fault and not-at-fault termination.
I mean, I'm not saying that it's impossible to fire "many" at once for legit reasons, but it'd be unexpected, unless you had a bunch of people collectively engaging in some sort of improper behavior.
And the fact that you apparently had other people resign in response to the people being terminated makes it sounds like there are other people who felt that whatever was going on with the terminations wasn't okay.
Being "fired" and being "laid off" are both terms that refer to the termination of an individual's employment. A company may lay off an employee when it doesn't have the resources to retain them, while a company may fire an employee who isn't meeting the company's expectations.
Being laid off means that your position is being eliminated through no fault of your own.
Being fired means that you’ve lost your job either because your performance didn’t measure up to expectations or you did something that went against company policy.
When you’re laid off from a job, it happens due to circumstances out of your control. Generally, layoffs occur when a company needs to cut costs, though there can be other reasons for cutting staff. The key part of “laid off” is that you lost your job due to the company’s performance, not your individual performance.
However, when you’re fired, it’s usually due to your performance. Maybe you broke a rule (or several rules). Or, you failed to perform your assigned duties even after being coached and given multiple opportunities to improve. Whatever the reason, you lost your job as a direct result of your behavior.
The key difference between being laid off vs. getting fired is that a layoff is the fault of an employer while a firing occurs because of the employee’s fault. Most workers get laid off because the company is trying to cut costs, reduce the staff, or due to mergers and acquisitions.
For example, let’s say Company A is taken over by new management. If the new owner wants to reorganize the company’s structure, he may resort to laying off workers in order to eliminate redundant tasks.
Getting fired is a little different from being laid off. An employee gets fired because of poor performance, failure to meet the company owner’s expectations, or office theft.
"fired" implies "termination with cause". That is, they believe you screwed up and so you were let go without severance, and in a pinch they're willing to go to court on that.
"Laid off" implies they did bulk downsizing and unless the company finds a way to weasel out of it, there's going to be severance and employment insurance payouts and the like.
In the Southern states this is a distinction without a difference because they just shoot you in the face and toss you into the body pit there regardless of the cause of the termination of your employment, but in the rest of the world this distinction is real.
"To be laid off", or even better "to be let go", are fucking euphemisms for "fired", "kicked out", etc.
That sort of vocabulary is typically used by HR to sound more benevolent, whereas when it's happening to you, you'll use the more aggressive terms.
According to the guys who left, Management forced unrealistic targets on the Editor in Chief, then used him not meeting those targets as an excuse to fire him. Everybody else quit in response.