Corporate America is often described as a soulless machine, but usually, we pretend there are humans operating the gears. We talk about “work-life balance” and claim “we are a family” in those glossy onboarding handbooks. But every once in a while, a boss comes along who rips off the mask and reminds us that for some people, quarterly profits matter infinitely more than the human soul. One VP of Sales on Reddit just admitted to firing a young employee right after a horrific tragedy, and the lack of empathy is truly chilling.
The employee in question is a 22-year-old guy, a recent college grad who had been crushing it at the company for ten months. He was doing so well that management was already eyeing him for a promotion in the next six months. He was earning about $90k, which the OP uses as justification for “expecting a lot” from him. But then, life happened in the cruelest way possible.
Earlier this year, this young man’s parents were involved in a car crash. They both lost their lives. I need you to pause and really sit with that. Imagine being twenty-two years old, just starting your adult life, and becoming an orphan overnight. The trauma, the logistics, the funeral planning, and the sheer weight of that grief is suffocating. The company gave him a one-month paid leave, which is the bare minimum of decency, but what happened next is a horror show.
He returned to work recently, and naturally, he wasn’t exactly jumping for joy or hitting the phones with the enthusiasm of a wolf on Wall Street. He is grieving. The OP notes that his performance was “severely lacking” and he was “unmotivated” regarding cold calling for the last two or three weeks. He isn’t closing deals because he is probably trying to figure out how to exist in a world without his parents.
Instead of having a conversation, offering a lighter workload, or showing a shred of humanity, the management team decided he was broken goods. They concluded he would need “months and months” to produce again and they simply couldn’t wait. They decided that two weeks of low performance after a double bereavement was a fireable offense. So, on a Friday afternoon, they called this grieving orphan into a meeting and fired him.
Here is the part that makes my blood boil. The OP was shocked that the employee didn’t take this well. When they delivered the news, the employee told them to “go f*ck yourselves,” packed his stuff, and left. The OP described this as “very very unprofessional and extremely rude.”
Rude? You just fired a guy whose parents died a month ago because he wasn’t making enough sales calls, and you are worried about his tone? You took away his income, his routine, and his stability right after he lost his family. He had every right to be rude. In fact, telling you to go f*ck yourselves was probably the most professional restraint he could muster given the circumstances.
The OP went home and told her boyfriend, likely expecting validation for making the “tough business decision.” Instead, the boyfriend correctly identified the OP and the management team as “a bunch of azzes and pricks with no hearts.” He is right. You kicked a man while he was down. You traded a human being’s livelihood for a slightly better quarterly report.
Is the OP the ahole? Yes. You are the villain in this story. Cold calling prospects is not life or death. You destroyed a young man’s faith in the workplace during the darkest moment of his life. If “professionalism” means firing a grieving 22-year-old for not bouncing back fast enough from a double funeral, then maybe we should all be a little less professional and a little more human.