This Viral Reddit Thread Is Full of Stories About Companies Firing the Wrong Person and Paying for It

A thread posted to r/AskReddit asked users to describe the most dramatic example they had seen of a company laying off a "load-bearing" employee and watching the business fall apart afterward.

Replies ranged from restaurant kitchens to a well-known media company that lost its entire video staff overnight.

One commenter described an executive chef at a high-end resort who was fired without explanation. According to the commenter, cooks who had worked there for more than a decade later left to follow him to his new job, and the restaurant has reportedly struggled with turnover ever since.

They recalled that the chef "would give cooks raises every year and those cooks deserved every bit of it," and described him shutting down the kitchen entirely after the air conditioning failed and temperatures behind the line hit 105 degrees Fahrenheit.

"Upper management didn't like that," the commenter added, saying the closure came despite the resort clearly having the money to fix the equipment.

Another Reddit user pointed to the 2023 firing of Nick Calandra, the editor-in-chief of gaming outlet The Escapist. The commenter wrote that "nearly every single employee quit in unison" after Calandra was let go, joining him at a new channel called Second Wind.

The Escapist's entire video production team resigned after Calandra's termination, including longtime host Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, who had hosted the site's flagship series for 16 years. The commenter claimed that The Escapist's channel had slowed to roughly 10,000 views per video and gone quiet for a year following the departures.

One reply shared a story about their father's employer, a family-owned office furniture manufacturer. The commenter explained that when one of the owner's sons took over sales accounts from a longtime salesman named "Tom," Tom left and started a competing company using his existing relationships with local hospitals, universities, and architecture firms.

"Tom made a f------ fortune selling those new fangled cubicles," the commenter wrote, adding that the original company lost about 25 percent of its sales within a few years and eventually closed once offshoring became common around 2000.

A separate commenter described a manager who was pushed out just two weeks before an eight-week training handoff was set to begin ahead of his retirement. "The entire business went to sh-t," the commenter wrote, saying the company ended up paying the former manager almost double his old salary to return for a year and retrain the team.

One more reply focused on a manager who struggled to understand basic aspects of the business, including what the IT department did. The commenter wrote that the manager was "crazy incompetent" and that five or six people quit during her tenure before she was forced to 'retire' early after a colleague complained to leadership about her performance.

The Daily Dot was unable to independently verify the identities of the individuals or companies described in the Reddit thread. The details above otherwise reflect the accounts shared by commenters in the original thread.