[propter_hoc]

This is a fairly terrible article. As anyone who's run a business knows, sometimes you have to let someone go not because you're in economic trouble, or because they're an axe murderer, but just because they're not the right leader for their position. It's not so much "summarily fired for poor performance" as "wrong person for the moment".

[acrooks]

It’s a terrible article because, despite explaining many scenarios well, it missed one example?

[propter_hoc]

By far the most common though, and the one in which you're most likely to need advice.

Publishing an article about firing and only talking about cases where someone went to jail for assaulting his wife, or where the company is about to run out of money, is not exactly helpful to the founder agonizing over what to do about his head of marketing who isn't scaling effectively.

[acrooks]

I agree that is a very common scenario in general, and I have seen it happen myself many times. But intro mentioned that the scope of the article was about firing engineers.

> Now we move on to a completely different topic, and maybe not the most pleasant one: about when engineers get fired.

So in context of the article’s purpose I think it is a fair representation - I very rarely see firings related to “wrong person for the moment” for engineers. But I very commonly do see firings for poor performance in engineering which, as the industry’s overzealous interview practices may suggest, is difficult to discern in an interview.

Even if you disagree with my perspective, I do still think you do yourself a disservice by jumping to the hyperbolic “it’s terrible” instead of writing your feedback in a more constructive manner, like you did in this subsequent comment.