I went through almost the exact same thing working full time for a consulting company in the USA. The situation was even worse since we had to log so many hours a week due to billing hourly. The biggest difference with me is that when I was first put on the PIP, it looked like I was going to successfully complete it. So a 4 week process was extended to 12 and then I was given a new PIP that was impossible to fulfill[0] and the micromanagement was increased to ridiculous levels. I didn't even try to improve at that point and was fired a week later. No severance, no benefits, no nothing. They were nice in that they gave a glowing recommendation that didn't mention any of this. They said we parted ways amicably and that it just wasn't a good fit.
It seems the recurring theme here is if your employees are slacking, more micromanagement isn't the answer. Either give them a reason to get excited about coming to work or fire them. The PIP process is an orwellian farce. The only saving grace is I bet most companies that use them don't actually know they don't work. Or maybe it's like interviewing; they know it doesn't work, but they don't have anything better?
[0]: I won't go into details, but it required getting two or three approvals per day from managers who were already backed up with work.
So I was formally employed and received salary for
another month, although I didn't and couldn't work
during it. Google also produced a stellar reference
letter for future employers, without mentioning any
of this.
Woah.
That's pretty respectable. Mad props to Google for going the extra mile to not destroy people's careers.
They do it to reduce their exposure to lawsuits from former employees. And it cheapens all their reference letters, in particular the ones given to employees that actually got along well there.
Yeah. I can certainly understand avoiding lawsuits, but they don't need to provide positive letters to do that. Just doing/saying nothing at all is sufficient.
I came to the comments section to post something similar. This is probably the most humane, respectable, and generous firing I've ever read. It's left me with a much more favorable view of Google. I mean, he had the entire PIP period plus a month of salary to go find another job. Incredible! I've seen people find out they were fired when their badge stopped working.
Employment laws in Switzerland. I knew a few people who were just walked to the door with their copy of the signed non-disclosure and a page explaining COBRA benefits in the US.
That said, having had to fire people in my career it is always a lose-lose type situation, the manager is losing what ever help they were getting from the person and the person is losing their job.
"In private discussions I was asked why don't I leave by myself, to which I answered that I'm happy with my Google salary. "
He basically stopped working, and when asked why stay and take the huge salary from google when he's not working he said he's satisfied with the salary, and he was given plenty of opportunities. No wonder his managers didn't like him. There are tons of other more competent people who make the same salary as him working hard. It's not a matter of whether the company treats people like a "resource" or not. If I had a guy on my team who doesn't work at all and sticks around AND is proud of it for some reason I would be pissed. I'm sure not just his manager but all other colleagues probably would have been super pissed if he acted like he described in the answer.
For some reason everyone on the thread is talking like Google is in the wrong and he's being noble for sharing it non-anonymously, but I don't really get what's so noble about this. If I was that burned out, I would have asked for a hiatus. And even after that if I can't focus, I would still try hard, and when asked why I don't just leave, I would take that as a sign and leave. I would definitely not say "I'm happy with my Google salary". Normal people don't feel OK with taking someone else's money while not doing anything, and "being burned out" is not an excuse.
Why do you assume he stopped working? He could be working harder than ever, but his productivity dropped.
Also quitting a job is not always an option, there are implications on unemployment support, health insurance etc.. Some people even face a jail, if they quit their job.
It didn't read that way to me. It read as if Google had contractual obligations for how they should part ways if Google felt he wasn't performing. He wanted Google to fire him and keep their end of the contractual obligation.
The reason I work for myself is that I figured out at an early age that no one cares about your job more than you do. I have been fired from plenty of jobs, so I made sure I had a nest egg as soon as possible. I also make it a point to train for my next job while I'm doing the current one. I have worked at some good jobs (Microsoft was life changing in a completely positive sense) but being so dependent on someone else seems for your livelihood never seemed like a sustainable proposition.
This seems like a pretty silly question, and the answers reinforce that. Getting fired by Google is like getting fired anywhere else. One of the commenters mentioned that it's harder to explain a short term at Google to prospective employers, but realistically anyone is going to understand that sometimes a particular job or team just doesn't work out regardless of the company's reputation.
So really this seems like asking what it's like to be kicked in the face by Linus Torvalds. Sure, he's famous, but it feels pretty much the same as being kicked in the face by anyone else.
One of the commenters mentioned that it's harder to explain a short term at Google to prospective employers, but realistically anyone is going to understand that sometimes a particular job or team just doesn't work out regardless of the company's reputation.
Any employer who doesn't understand that closed allocation will not infrequently result in this is probably to be avoided. Worst story I remember as related on HN, but my search fu is not able to find it, was a hardware engineer who was also good at programming and Python. He was put on a team writing Python hardware testing code, and because he found out, as is related by many others (and at many other companies) that the policy of immediate transfers is often fictional, he had to quit to avoid ending his career.
>Apparently my manager and director decided that I was somehow gaming the system and just milk the company while not making any effort to do my job.
>I think the nasty attitude from manager and director was unnecessary: it sucks when superiors don't trust you, treating me as a liar without saying it explicitly.
...
>In private discussions I was asked why don't I leave by myself, to which I answered that I'm happy with my Google salary.
Ugh. I'm not going to defend that. But I'd like to give some background to the attitude.
Like most others, I've seen burnout. Both personally and in others. This happens to a lot of people in life, maybe most, try to recognize the situation early and to have economic margins to take a year off.
I wasn't as bad as some cases I've seen, but I was not a nice person myself then.
Let me give an example about what I learned about practical psychology:
When you're really stressed and don't realize you're physically sick, then you project that pain; whatever is a problem becomes bigger. The mental logic seems to be "You feel bad. So the things that are stressful must be really bad." Afterwards you realize you've been a person you can't stand.
I really hope I won't experience something as bad again, but it taught me a lot. If nothing else, compassion.
(This example might not be relevant for the article, since that guy seems to have broken not from being sick but because of a too large work load after a bunch of years.)
As a business owner, sometimes it can't be helped, and sometimes you have to think that way cause firing someone is never a pleasant task.
Sometimes you know it must be done but you know the person is nice enough but just not competent, or can't do the job, or the job has changed and they're getting fired for no fault of their own.
There are those times when you fire someone but you feel guilty that, as their manager, maybe you could have done better with them but you didn't have time, were too distracted, too tired.
In companies that get big enough, the percentage of people getting fired for cause gets higher. Then firing people becomes part of a routine. If you let your feelings get involved, it will drive you crazy, so you try not to let that happen.
Wow what a wonderful answer. This is the most clear and succinct way of explaining the transition in dealing with employee termination from a small to larger company.
Regarding the guilt, I think you're right -- a lot of people don't realize that every day spent trying to work with an unproductive employee/coworker is a day lost by the productive one. At a certain point or company-size you can't continue doing it.
I wonder if you would mind if your boss got burned out writing pay checks and decided he/she needed a break from writing them for a while? Meeting payroll is a stress that can be so huge, it will make you yearn for the day when you could just write code and wait for your paycheck to come from the magical paycheck tree.
Obviously no middle manager is feeling that specific stress at Google, but the higher up you go the more your issues and stresses involve keeping the company afloat.
Yeah you're right, that's what he should have done. Why would a company voluntarily put someone on a sick leave? There are even legal implications for this. Think about it for a moment. I'm sure a company like Google would have given him a (maybe paid, maybe unpaid) sick leave for reasonable amount of time if he had asked. Instead he stuck around, didn't do work, and told the manager he wants to stay because he's "satisfied with the salary". Imagine you're his coworker, working your ass off while this guy proudly doesn't do shit and still makes the same money as you.
Do you not think maybe with burnout or depression, he may not be thinking straight? A manager is supposed to have people skills. Instead they treated him like a malfunctioning machine. Just normal American management culture perhaps, but it doesn't play well in more enlightened countries.
"Quora is a knowledge-sharing community that depends on everyone being able to pitch in when they know something."
I just cannot stand with Quora keep asking me to continue with Facebook or google. If majority of users in Quora are based on people who obey dictatorship from Quora, then probably it is not the place for true knowledge.
i always get a link like this one, read something, then any link i click i get to some crippled page instead of the content and some bad ui that doesn't even make it clear what weird ritual they expect to show the content.
Adblock seems to block that annoying overlay that covers the page. You can also get rid of it by copying and pasting the following line into your browser's web console or debugger:
(Rant up ahead, mildly directed at parent, but really directed at the average person espousing parent's view on HN, of which there are a surprising number. so, xkiwi - please don't take it personally, it's not really about you, I'm just unloading frustration).
For your own sake, I suggest you take a serious look at your worldview. You are saying that people on Quora are "obeying a dictatorship" because Quora chooses to "force" them (on their own property, mind you) to use Facebook or Google, which is something almost everyone uses.
Your point of view is so far from the mainstream, and might I add so insulting to the people who use Quora, not to mention the people who built this amazing, free of charge site that so many people love, that I think you won't be able to hold a meaningful conversation with almost anyone else.
And might I add, talking in this way shows a complete lack of empathy with almost anyone else in the world. If your base assumption is that Quora is a dictatorship that people obey, it really seems like you have never taken more than 2 seconds to think about someone else's point of view in your life.
I hope things have worked out for the author, but I can't help thinking he would have been so much better off leaving on his own terms. I understand not being able to walk away from a salary, but when you get to the point where you know your attitude and the job are no longer a fit, and you stay for the money, then I guess you own the outcome on that.
That's understandable, but I guess if you're staying for that reason the title of the article might better have been "What it feels like to finally get fired from Google after a couple of years of barely hanging on to my job."
Im going to assume those are big commits.. I personally would do a commit for every little class or method I write. I did 18 last week for example.
Also I'm curious what he means by 'burnout' I'd take that to mean mentally exhausted from too much stress. Sounds like he was more vaguely dissatisfied or unmotivated.
A "commit" at Google tends to be a bit bigger unit of work. To submit a changelist to Piper, you need a code review, your code probably needs unit tests, etc. Probably not 1000 lines of code, but probably not 10 either (unless it's a bug fix)
Obvious caveat: there are 20,000+ engineers and hundreds of teams at Google. Things aren't exactly the same everywhere.
In many cases you'll need to get your code reviewed by an external team, and oftentimes their SLA for one round of code review is 24 hours. That a.) incentivizes big commits and b.) sets a floor on the latency of your commit process.
My long-term average at Google was 5 commits/week, max was IIRC 24/week, and min was 3 months to get one commit written, reviewed, and approved. By contrast, when I'm coding on my own for my startup, my long-term average is 20 commits/week, max was about 14/day, and min is about 1/day.
5 commits a week sounds like a lot, actually. Nothing gets pushed without a code review and it's a rare code review that doesn't require some changes, which therefore require another test run, etc. You'd have to be working steadily and have some very responsive teammates in order to get a commit in every single work day.
At least, that's the way it worked when I was there. I sure as hell didn't get 5 commits in a week.
It also depends on what you mean by commit. Are we talking 5 commits in 1 merge request (Git style), or 5 individual pieces of code to be reviewed separately?
In any case, I think 5 per week is extremely reasonable; I actually do less these days. I used to commit a dozen or more times per week, but these days I tend to work on the larger and harder components that people require. That means more thought and more design. It's not doing less work, it's just doing harder work.
This person may also have had review reponsibilities. Doing a truly thorough code review takes time to complete, and that time is time that you're not coding. It's important though; I may not be coding while I'm reviewing, but I'm sharing knowledge with a dozen other developers who hopefully learn from it (as I learn from others reviewing my own code). In aggregate, I hope that my lack of frequent commits actually helps the company rather than hurts it since hopefully I'm enabling many others to do better work.
"Apparently my manager and director decided that I was somehow gaming the system and just milk the company while not making any effort to do my job"
"In private discussions I was asked why don't I leave by myself, to which I answered that I'm happy with my Google salary. If Google is not happy with my performance - feel free to fire me, but I'm not going to jump myself."
Well, at least the managers read his attitude accurately.
That's not how I read it. I think the guy wasn't "not making any effort to do [his] job", he was burnt out and tried to make the effort but failed.
His reply is not surprising from a Russian perspective (in broad strokes Russian discussion culture is extremely...let's say "honest", to the point of appearing crass or blunt to western ears) & does not mean "I don't give a shit as long as I get money".
I read it as "if you want to fire me, do so", and I don't think that's too bad (as in this case the appropriate response really is firing - not asking the guy to quit).
My mother was born in the former Soviet Union and I have a lot of relatives and friends that immigrated from Russia and nearby countries (Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus) that share some similarities in culture.
My hometown was also originally founded by Russian immigrants and has a large minority (~30% I think) of people of Russian descent.
I think its really unfair to the rest of the team to have dead weight. I understand that it was in his best interest to ride it out as long as he can and try and claim benefits and I can't say for certain what I would have done, but that behavior is really abusing the safety net. He should have tried and find a different role.
> In my particular case (Switzerland), I lose three months of unemployment benefits (80% of salary x3) if I do, and there may be other reasons as well (in my case - work permit). This has nothing to do with responsibility: why should I sacrifice my personal interest and the interests of my family for the interest of the company, as a parting gift? I see no reason to do so.
Was generous unemployment really designed for ex-Googlers who were burned out and forced the hand of management to fire them? IMO, it's pretty sleazy and hopefully sends a bad signal to future employers.
You must be new to Europe. </sarcasm> I confirm that employment laws in France and in that country (Switzerland), if not other countries, are particularly prone for abuse, and the culture is to fully exert the employee's interest. If you quit a job, you may not be entitled for unemployment at all, whereas being dismissed gives you 2 years of 80% benefits.
Most French startups are built on ACCRE: The unemployed asks for a lumpsum instead of monthly benefits at the condition that he creates a company. You can't get it if you quit your last job, so the game for entrepreneurs is to be as disrespectful as legally possible with an employer (e.g. liberally start working on the new company or poaching clients, as long as it's not forbidden), get fired, and create a startup. It makes the ACCRE the #2 source of funding for startups in France (after CIR, another public benefit, but that's a story for another day).
Such schemes mean the startup is created months and months after the opening of the market opportunity; after months of being a bad employee; and out of public benefits. To my opinion it's inefficient on all 3 facets. But that's how the old continent runs.
I've heard that the system in Europe is very "friendly" to workers, but that seems absurd. To me its not even so much the inefficiency, but the general hostile relationship it creates between employee and employer. It probably contributes to the high level of youth unemployment in some European countries. Worse of all, such perverse incentives result in cultural shifts as to whats acceptable. To think that someone readily admits that he would be willing to sabotage his workplace due to a sense of entitlement of 2 years with 80% benefits is really appalling. This isn't some out of work layman, replaced by technology. This is a highly skilled knowledge worker making probably an income probably in the 95 percentile of his country. Just because you can exploit something doesn't make it okay.
It is hard to tell without knowledge of Swiss Labor Law, but if it is anyhow similar to my own country's there most be different procedures for "sacking" and "letting go" people.
You sack people that is either grossly incompetent, in open contempt of workplace discipline or breaking the law. The process is highly confrontational because the former employee will be left with no social security and a big black spot on their record. Government puts the burden of proof on the employer to demonstrate that this is a sacking case.
You may let go anyone at any time whenever business interests are no longer aligned with keeping the employee around. You have to pay severance though, so employers do not like this option. The laws are the way they are because in the past employers would sack anyone on a wimp.
Nowadays, some employers will get rid of people that are marginally undesirable (like underperformers, or pregnant/nursing women, or idealists who express concern for the boss's less than pristine practices) by putting the employee in a frustrating no-win situation and letting them quit on their own.
==
So, if Switzerland is anywhere like this, or if Russia is anywhere like this, you can anything but expect that being asked "why don't you just quit" will trigger flight-or-fight mode on an employee. At this point it hardly matters who's right and who's wrong. This is not how I would expect a competent manager to handle a delicate situation like this, though I can see how someone being overly candid could fall in this mess by accident.
64 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadIt seems the recurring theme here is if your employees are slacking, more micromanagement isn't the answer. Either give them a reason to get excited about coming to work or fire them. The PIP process is an orwellian farce. The only saving grace is I bet most companies that use them don't actually know they don't work. Or maybe it's like interviewing; they know it doesn't work, but they don't have anything better?
[0]: I won't go into details, but it required getting two or three approvals per day from managers who were already backed up with work.
That's pretty respectable. Mad props to Google for going the extra mile to not destroy people's careers.
That said, having had to fire people in my career it is always a lose-lose type situation, the manager is losing what ever help they were getting from the person and the person is losing their job.
He basically stopped working, and when asked why stay and take the huge salary from google when he's not working he said he's satisfied with the salary, and he was given plenty of opportunities. No wonder his managers didn't like him. There are tons of other more competent people who make the same salary as him working hard. It's not a matter of whether the company treats people like a "resource" or not. If I had a guy on my team who doesn't work at all and sticks around AND is proud of it for some reason I would be pissed. I'm sure not just his manager but all other colleagues probably would have been super pissed if he acted like he described in the answer.
For some reason everyone on the thread is talking like Google is in the wrong and he's being noble for sharing it non-anonymously, but I don't really get what's so noble about this. If I was that burned out, I would have asked for a hiatus. And even after that if I can't focus, I would still try hard, and when asked why I don't just leave, I would take that as a sign and leave. I would definitely not say "I'm happy with my Google salary". Normal people don't feel OK with taking someone else's money while not doing anything, and "being burned out" is not an excuse.
Also quitting a job is not always an option, there are implications on unemployment support, health insurance etc.. Some people even face a jail, if they quit their job.
That's one of the cruelties of burnout. It feels like you're working harder than you ever have in your life, but you have nothing to show for it.
So really this seems like asking what it's like to be kicked in the face by Linus Torvalds. Sure, he's famous, but it feels pretty much the same as being kicked in the face by anyone else.
Any employer who doesn't understand that closed allocation will not infrequently result in this is probably to be avoided. Worst story I remember as related on HN, but my search fu is not able to find it, was a hardware engineer who was also good at programming and Python. He was put on a team writing Python hardware testing code, and because he found out, as is related by many others (and at many other companies) that the policy of immediate transfers is often fictional, he had to quit to avoid ending his career.
>I think the nasty attitude from manager and director was unnecessary: it sucks when superiors don't trust you, treating me as a liar without saying it explicitly.
...
>In private discussions I was asked why don't I leave by myself, to which I answered that I'm happy with my Google salary.
Like most others, I've seen burnout. Both personally and in others. This happens to a lot of people in life, maybe most, try to recognize the situation early and to have economic margins to take a year off.
I wasn't as bad as some cases I've seen, but I was not a nice person myself then.
Let me give an example about what I learned about practical psychology:
When you're really stressed and don't realize you're physically sick, then you project that pain; whatever is a problem becomes bigger. The mental logic seems to be "You feel bad. So the things that are stressful must be really bad." Afterwards you realize you've been a person you can't stand.
I really hope I won't experience something as bad again, but it taught me a lot. If nothing else, compassion.
(This example might not be relevant for the article, since that guy seems to have broken not from being sick but because of a too large work load after a bunch of years.)
Sometimes you know it must be done but you know the person is nice enough but just not competent, or can't do the job, or the job has changed and they're getting fired for no fault of their own.
There are those times when you fire someone but you feel guilty that, as their manager, maybe you could have done better with them but you didn't have time, were too distracted, too tired.
In companies that get big enough, the percentage of people getting fired for cause gets higher. Then firing people becomes part of a routine. If you let your feelings get involved, it will drive you crazy, so you try not to let that happen.
Regarding the guilt, I think you're right -- a lot of people don't realize that every day spent trying to work with an unproductive employee/coworker is a day lost by the productive one. At a certain point or company-size you can't continue doing it.
Obviously no middle manager is feeling that specific stress at Google, but the higher up you go the more your issues and stresses involve keeping the company afloat.
The guy was ill, he should have been put on sick leave not a "performance improvement plan".
I just cannot stand with Quora keep asking me to continue with Facebook or google. If majority of users in Quora are based on people who obey dictatorship from Quora, then probably it is not the place for true knowledge.
If you don't want to sign in don't use it. They obviously gain enough value out of having users logged in that it's worth losing those who won't.
The vast majority of people outside of HN don't care.
i always get a link like this one, read something, then any link i click i get to some crippled page instead of the content and some bad ui that doesn't even make it clear what weird ritual they expect to show the content.
(function(){var x=document.querySelector("[id$=modal_signup_wrapper]");x.parentNode.removeChild(x)})();
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quora-share/
For your own sake, I suggest you take a serious look at your worldview. You are saying that people on Quora are "obeying a dictatorship" because Quora chooses to "force" them (on their own property, mind you) to use Facebook or Google, which is something almost everyone uses.
Your point of view is so far from the mainstream, and might I add so insulting to the people who use Quora, not to mention the people who built this amazing, free of charge site that so many people love, that I think you won't be able to hold a meaningful conversation with almost anyone else.
And might I add, talking in this way shows a complete lack of empathy with almost anyone else in the world. If your base assumption is that Quora is a dictatorship that people obey, it really seems like you have never taken more than 2 seconds to think about someone else's point of view in your life.
https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-feel-like-to-be-fired-fro...
I found it pretty interesting.
Im going to assume those are big commits.. I personally would do a commit for every little class or method I write. I did 18 last week for example.
Also I'm curious what he means by 'burnout' I'd take that to mean mentally exhausted from too much stress. Sounds like he was more vaguely dissatisfied or unmotivated.
Obvious caveat: there are 20,000+ engineers and hundreds of teams at Google. Things aren't exactly the same everywhere.
In many cases you'll need to get your code reviewed by an external team, and oftentimes their SLA for one round of code review is 24 hours. That a.) incentivizes big commits and b.) sets a floor on the latency of your commit process.
My long-term average at Google was 5 commits/week, max was IIRC 24/week, and min was 3 months to get one commit written, reviewed, and approved. By contrast, when I'm coding on my own for my startup, my long-term average is 20 commits/week, max was about 14/day, and min is about 1/day.
At least, that's the way it worked when I was there. I sure as hell didn't get 5 commits in a week.
In any case, I think 5 per week is extremely reasonable; I actually do less these days. I used to commit a dozen or more times per week, but these days I tend to work on the larger and harder components that people require. That means more thought and more design. It's not doing less work, it's just doing harder work.
This person may also have had review reponsibilities. Doing a truly thorough code review takes time to complete, and that time is time that you're not coding. It's important though; I may not be coding while I'm reviewing, but I'm sharing knowledge with a dozen other developers who hopefully learn from it (as I learn from others reviewing my own code). In aggregate, I hope that my lack of frequent commits actually helps the company rather than hurts it since hopefully I'm enabling many others to do better work.
"In private discussions I was asked why don't I leave by myself, to which I answered that I'm happy with my Google salary. If Google is not happy with my performance - feel free to fire me, but I'm not going to jump myself."
Well, at least the managers read his attitude accurately.
His reply is not surprising from a Russian perspective (in broad strokes Russian discussion culture is extremely...let's say "honest", to the point of appearing crass or blunt to western ears) & does not mean "I don't give a shit as long as I get money".
I read it as "if you want to fire me, do so", and I don't think that's too bad (as in this case the appropriate response really is firing - not asking the guy to quit).
My hometown was also originally founded by Russian immigrants and has a large minority (~30% I think) of people of Russian descent.
> In my particular case (Switzerland), I lose three months of unemployment benefits (80% of salary x3) if I do, and there may be other reasons as well (in my case - work permit). This has nothing to do with responsibility: why should I sacrifice my personal interest and the interests of my family for the interest of the company, as a parting gift? I see no reason to do so.
Was generous unemployment really designed for ex-Googlers who were burned out and forced the hand of management to fire them? IMO, it's pretty sleazy and hopefully sends a bad signal to future employers.
Most French startups are built on ACCRE: The unemployed asks for a lumpsum instead of monthly benefits at the condition that he creates a company. You can't get it if you quit your last job, so the game for entrepreneurs is to be as disrespectful as legally possible with an employer (e.g. liberally start working on the new company or poaching clients, as long as it's not forbidden), get fired, and create a startup. It makes the ACCRE the #2 source of funding for startups in France (after CIR, another public benefit, but that's a story for another day).
Such schemes mean the startup is created months and months after the opening of the market opportunity; after months of being a bad employee; and out of public benefits. To my opinion it's inefficient on all 3 facets. But that's how the old continent runs.
It is hard to tell without knowledge of Swiss Labor Law, but if it is anyhow similar to my own country's there most be different procedures for "sacking" and "letting go" people.
You sack people that is either grossly incompetent, in open contempt of workplace discipline or breaking the law. The process is highly confrontational because the former employee will be left with no social security and a big black spot on their record. Government puts the burden of proof on the employer to demonstrate that this is a sacking case.
You may let go anyone at any time whenever business interests are no longer aligned with keeping the employee around. You have to pay severance though, so employers do not like this option. The laws are the way they are because in the past employers would sack anyone on a wimp.
Nowadays, some employers will get rid of people that are marginally undesirable (like underperformers, or pregnant/nursing women, or idealists who express concern for the boss's less than pristine practices) by putting the employee in a frustrating no-win situation and letting them quit on their own.
==
So, if Switzerland is anywhere like this, or if Russia is anywhere like this, you can anything but expect that being asked "why don't you just quit" will trigger flight-or-fight mode on an employee. At this point it hardly matters who's right and who's wrong. This is not how I would expect a competent manager to handle a delicate situation like this, though I can see how someone being overly candid could fall in this mess by accident.