> … for any reason.

If they give a reason, it had better be a legal reason. “Because you’re Mexican” - not legal. “Because we don’t like you/you don’t fit in” - are you in any way different than management? Differently gendered? Differently skin toned? Different faith? Pregnant? Likely not legal.

They are not required to give a reason. You can be fired without reason.

There’s also mitigating circumstances. If the employee can show retaliation by the employer (say the employee participates in protected activities, like espousing unionization or questioning managerial decisions), they stand a chance of recovering damages from the company.

I guess that's the rub. every time I've been involved in firing someone that wasn't defensible as a 'broad structural layoff', there is a whole process, even in at will states. HR starts to collect documentation describing how the employees performance isn't acceptable, at that they were warned on such and such dates, and that all efforts were made in order to rectify the situation before an actual termination.

whether that's an excess of legal paranoia or not, that's how it seems to work

In practice, at any larger corporation with an HR department, despite the law saying so, you can absolutely not fire anyone for any reason. As a manager you’ll have to go through a 1+ month process of documented coaching, performance improvement plan, etc to gather evidence in case the employee sues after being let go. So not sure if Steve is technically correct here, but he is very much practically correct. It’s been like this in big tech, which is what Steve is talking about, for a long time.

You can, but most places would rather spend months building a legal shield through a PiP rather than risk a lawsuit.

There's the legal world and then there's the world of custom and ethics. They don't always diverge, but in my experience they do.

At least over the last 25 years in the tech spaces I've been part of, I rarely hear of people being dismissed/let go quickly. #anecdata

Dead wrong.

Because I see so many people who believe otherwise, here's a direct quote from a prior contract:

> I UNDERSTAND AND ACKNOWLEDGE THAT MY EMPLOYMENT WITH THE COMPANY IS FOR NO SPECIFIED TERM AND CONSTITUTES "AT-WILL" EMPLOYMENT. I ALSO UNDERSTAND THAT ANY REPRESENTATION TO THE CONTRARY IS UNAUTHORIZED AND NOT VALID UNLESS SIGNED BY THE PRESIDENT OR CEO OF THE COMPANY. ACCORDINGLY, I ACKNOWLEDGE THAT MY EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIP MAY BE TERMINATED AT ANY TIME, WITH OR WITHOUT GOOD CAUSE OR FOR ANY OR NO CAUSE, AT MY OPTION OR AT THE OPTION OF THE COMPANY WITH OR WITHOUT ME NOTICE. I FURTHER ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THE COMPANY MAY MODIFY JOB TITLES, SALARIES, AND BENEFITS FROM TIME TO TIME AS IT IS NECESSARY.

Every job I ever held but the unionized ones had some variation of that.