Comment by johndhi
6 days ago
the "few illegal reasons" are able to be leveraged by almost any employee to write a letter and/or lawsuit suggesting they were fired for the wrong reasons. if you didn't internally document -- exhaustively -- how bad they were, and also assuming they didn't expertly document -- exhaustively -- how great they were and how unfairly treated they were as an employee -- it winds up being a gigantic pain in the ass and almost always better for the company to simply pay them $200k as a settlement to said lawsuit. And that comes out of the budget of a department who doesn't have $200k to spare.
That's why it's so hard.
> if you didn't internally document -- exhaustively
Even then who knows. I once had to deal with an employee who filed a claim without a leg to stand on. The powers that be had already decided from the get-go I was at fault, even though they clearly didn't even bother to look at what I submitted. When questioned about it they couldn't even speak to it! They initially sided with the worker, but after weeks of phone calls that basically amounted to "read what I gave you already", eventually they relented with "Oh yeah, you are right. I have revised my decision." If it had been a slightly more biased/lazy person instead...
> it winds up being a gigantic pain in the ass and almost always better for the company to simply pay them $200k as a settlement to said lawsuit. And that comes out of the budget of a department who doesn't have $200k to spare.
Lawsuits like this are more common than I expected before I got a peek behind the curtain, but in my experience companies aren’t rolling over for $200K settlements frequently.
The last time I was at a level in a billion dollar company to have some visibility into this, the company had a small team of corporate counsel who were pros at handling these cases. They would get a lot of suits from people hoping to get a quick payday and then spend a minimal amount of time actually engaging them. This either made them go away when the other side realized it wasn’t an easy win, or made them change their tune and ask for a very small settlement (four or five figures, not six).
And I’ve never heard of a company paying these settlements out of the budgets of small departments. That’s weird.
Nevertheless, even paying $200K to separate from a toxic employee would be a long term win relative to paying $200-300K (fully loaded cost with benefits) for multiple years while also risking them making your good team members leave and damaging your product.
I've participated in this too.
You're right that zero or four or five figures is the more common outcome -- usually because most people aren't quite so passionate to really lean into this type of thing.
On "never heard of a company paying these settlements out of the budgets of small departments" -- actually, that is the best practice. For the department the toxic employee was hired into to be 'accountable' for the fact that they hired such a person and did not exit them with adequate documentation to easily defeat a lawsuit.