[braza]

It's some low-risk/consequence project/initiative that is designed to receive people that will be fired due to lack of compliance and/or collaboration with the new management.

Once we had a German colleague that was not so collaborative in sharing the knowledge about some specific parts of the application, and the Tech lead replaced her MacBook with a Windows 10, and she only can write PRs related with DocStrings.

[zenethian]

This seems kind of childish to be honest. Why not just fire the person?

[Bratmon]

Because firing people in Germany is a multi-year process that requires (among many other things) paying for a complete training course in all job-relevant skills under the assumption that any incompetence is caused by insufficient training.

[franktankbank]

Psychotic IMO. We will fire you but only after you've been publicly humiliated? Who thinks to do this kind of shit?

[msdz]

As has been stated above, I’m guessing in this specific example it would’ve been due to the rather strict labor laws, which I’m not going to comment my opinion on, just to clarify/explain: Here (Germany), you can basically not fire someone if your company has >10 full-time employees, and they’re not actively misbehaving (or under trainee/probationary status). Yep, this statement means exactly what it reads.

So I’m guessing that’s the reason for this “passive firing” method.

[dust-jacket]

I mean I'd guess it was because it's somewhere with a higher bar to firing. Redundancy or dismissal are both much more complicated (expensive) than simply making it very clear you'd like someone to leave.