The Worst Way to Fire Someone: I Was There
Is there a good way to fire people?  A nice severance package and some decency are desirable.  The fired employee will likely never receive what's most valuable: a thorough and actionable analysis about what went wrong.  In this case the company failed, and the laid off employees will probably never thoroughly understand why.  In my own experience, I've seen several engineers fired because they were mis-hired into roles that were obviously bad matches (often intentionally to meet the VP's head count goals).  Those engineers weren't really given enough info to reconstruct what happened to them.I guess the message of the article here is that Tim Armstrong dumped the full weight of failure on his team-- undesirable in the view of almost any philosophy of management.  Furthermore, in light of Armstrong's experience, his acts were reckless as well.