Exactly. Customer service jobs are actually increasing in pay and sophistication because there's less overall work to be done but what's left behind after automation is more complex.
Which is why I talked about the concept of basic income. I don't know the answer but people are arguing about whether automation is good or bad which is irrelevant. These jobs will be automated whether you like it or not. If we play our cards right then perhaps more people can pursue their passions. If we don't... well I'd rather focus on making the former happen.
She stays on her job for the next 2-3 years until they figure out how to automate her job.
Then for the next 30 years she is destitute or working a more menial job until the number of marginalized citizens become a large enough to pass a basic income bill.
Then all the people in control of these automated industries ask themselves, why am I going to pay 20% more tax for these deadbeats when I can move to Ireland or Dubai?
I didn't make a request nor did I ever pretend to know the answer.
What I do know though, is wanting someone's job to be automated soon so she can pursue her hobbies on some personal hope for a basic income, which there isn't a historical precedence for either, is not something she should be excited for.
Wow. I hadn't seen that at all. That's simply reflective of the enterprise-focused path they've been on for the last few years. Micro-ISVs and SMBs don't pay real money for community software only the big guys do.
Yeah I could do a whole other article on how we shifted from minimizing friction on the sign up form to actually increasing it. If it's too easy to sign up for your service it's hard to tell if your marketing actually worked and you have qualified leads or if you just have a bunch of people that "clicked here".
My assertion is that you should provide severance in all cases. I chose to attack the most contentious case (poor performance) where one might think not to provide it to prove that point.
I didn't mean this to imply that it's a regular issue I have to deal with :)
PS Priority #1 post any firing is a careful review of the hiring process that got you there.
I did not mean to imply that all firings are the result of employee incompetence or poor performance. Because that's clearly not true. There are often other factors that lead to a bad "fit".
And yes, the first thing you should do post-firing is examine your hiring process to see if it could have been foreseen and prevented. But in some cases it does come down to someone just not having the experience, the talent or the work ethic to meet the performance required. It's those cases, especially with tech workers, where founders are apt to ask "do I really need to provide severance to HIM (or her)". Writing at $20K check to someone to walk out the door is never an easy thing to do especially at a startup where that $20K could go a long way. That's what I was addressing here.
But in some cases it does come down to someone just not having the experience, the talent or the work ethic to meet the performance required
This is all predictated on "some" cases? "On Severance (in some cases)?" From the way you describe it, some cases are those in which the employee was able to rook the entire hiring process despite their inability to do the job, but how did they get an offer in the first place?
This brings up a secondary point: is "the performance required" something that changed between hiring and the decision to fire, i.e. a leadership issue?
Without having illustrated these scenarios, it sounds more like "Ready, Fire, Aim," sweeping employees to the side when it turns out a little-informed guess was wrong.
