I’ve been fired three times. I always said I was laid off and no one ever questioned it. (I was never fired “for cause”, though, usually for things like “making room for the owner’s kid”.) I always got unemployment and all but once got severance pay as well. I would never quit unless I had another job ready to walk into; poverty sucks. And I would certainly never tell anyone (except you guys 
) that I was fired.
I didn’t remove any relevant context. You told the OP that he should not train the new person as he was instructed to do, which means he would be disobeying a direct instruction and refusing to do his job, which are both causes for firing and for denying unemployment. The fact that you recommended he couch it with ‘oh, we’ll get to that later’ doesn’t change that, it’s just a cover story that you suggested, and cover stories like that usually don’t stand up to scrutiny.
I am not sure what you are talking about here. What I am saying is that your advice, that he not actually train the replacement as instructed, can turn a situation where he’s getting let go for no particular reason into one where he’s fired for cause, listed as ‘do not rehire’ and unable to draw unemployment.
It’s well documented that it’s easier to get a new job if you currently have a job, a lot of employers will hire someone coming from a job before someone with no job. This was true even at the height of the recession when lots of well-qualified people were out of work because of the economy instead of any personal failing. And essentially everywhere if you quit you can’t draw unemployment, if you stay around until the end you can. Also, someone from the outside can’t distinguish whether you were a toxic employee who quit to avoid being fired for good reasons, or whether you were in a toxic environment that you went ahead and got out of before you got fired for bad reasons, so it’s possible for your situation to look very different to a hiring manager than to you.
It’s not that people here think it’s morally wrong to leave a situation like that before you get fired, it’s that it’s not practically the best choice for you.
If management is telling him that he has an assistant, then the assistant does not need to be trained on everything immediately, there are many tasks that should be delayed till later in any training regiment, until they have mastered all of the tasks that they have been trained in. If management has provided a training schedule, or any sort of rubric that he should follow, then he should follow that. If management has simply instructed him to train the new hire, then he needs to come up with his own training schedule, and the more complex tasks that require other parts as prerequisites will need to come later.
If he follows your advice of just giving all of the training at once, without waiting until he has mastered skills before moving on to things that require those skills, that would actually be sabotaging the training, leaving a poorly trained replacement, and actual grounds for management to be upset.
If management is hiring a replacement, then they need to let him know that that is the case, so the replacement can be brought fully up to speed before he is let go.
If management lies to him, and says that it will be an assistant, and he trains the person as an assistant, and them management lets him go before the assistant is fully trained to be a replacement, that is not in any way his fault.
I’ve spent most of my working life managing others, and now actually own and run my own business. I don’t have a whole lot of respect for management that lies to their employees. I don’t feel that it is an employees fault if they perform tasks incorrectly because management has lied to them.
I do not understand why you are insistent that an employee should know when management is lying to them, and that they should follow direction that is not given due to those lies. If management is being honest with him, then there is no reason to do your half assed crash course training that will inevitably leave stuff out, if management is lying to him, then they cannot really put the cause of termination on him.
Management hasn’t told him that the new hire is either an assistant or a replacement. He asked for an assistant, management hired a person and gave her the same title as the OP and told the OP they will figure how to split the responsibilities later - which essentially means management has said she is the OP’s peer. OP decided the person must be a replacement, because according to him it’s like hiring another head chef when what you need is a server. But the fact that the OP sees it that way doesn’t mean the company does. Maybe they see it as hiring a second worker in the pizzeria to both make pizzas and serve customers -after all, if the OP wants an assistant, he must currently be doing the same tasks that he wants the assistant to take over.
He should absolutely not leave out the things an assistant doesn’t need to know since she wasn’t hired as an assistant. He’s jumping the gun to think she’s a replacement unless there are other issues involved , and he’ll feel pretty stupid if he does a
poor job of training her , gets fired because they realize he didn’t train her properly, and finds out they’re hiring someone else to replace him because they hired her because they decided it is too much work for one person, just as OP has been saying.
All true. He’s also said the manager is a largely incompetent toxic game player and he’s already being sidelined by the (probably unknowing) NH. To the degree the OP reads the situation rightly, his days are numbered.
Those of us who’ve never worked in a non-toxic environment can’t imagine any other kind. Folks who’ve only worked in non-toxic environments also have a hard time believing toxic environments can be that bad.
Does the OP have an accurate understanding of the actual reality? No way for he or us to know until/unless the situation matures.
According to the OP, he’s supposed to train the new person how to do “everything that I [the OP] do”. You told him not to follow that direction, and instead to deliberately avoiding training NH on some of what the OP does. That’s directly contradicting the instruction. All of the stuff about training schedules and rubrics is irrelevant; there is a clear instruction, you advised the OP not to follow it, and I called the advice bad and listed the possible reprecusions of following your advice.
What you feel and who you have respect for are completely irrelevant to the fact that you advised the OP to refuse to comply with clear, direct instructions from his employer, an act that is a cause for firing, denying unemployment, and listing the OP as ineligible for rehire. His company sounds pretty awful, but so is the advise to commit an offense that puts his termination status, rehire status, and eligibilty for unemployment at risk.
I do not understand why you’re making stuff up completely. I have not said anything about whether an employee should know when management is lying to them, that they should follow direction that is not given, or that he should half-assed crash course training. I have objected to your advice that he not follow the direction he was explicitly given, and you are the one arguing that he should leave stuff out of the training (which would make it ‘half-assed’). Whether management is lying to him is irrelevant to whether they can put the cause of termination on him - if he doesn’t do his job, then he didn’t do his job and ‘oh they said this would be an assistant’ is irrelevant. Hell, they could even make the argument that the person wasn’t going to take over for the OP until they had to fire him because he had become insubordinate!
Does what we in the UK call ‘Constructive Dismissal’ come into play here?
It will look a lot worse if you were fired. Put in a two weeks notice.
This is not true at all, UNLESS the Op is “fired with cause” which does not seem likely.
I think people are also assuming that a long period of unemployment wpuld be potentially disastrous. If you have over a year’s living expenses in savings or are a secondary earner with a much higher earning partner, that’s different. But we know it’s not fonna be easy for you to get another job (because if it were, you presumably would have done so.)
If you quit, how long before you hit financial difficulties?
Typically “getting fired” usually means “for cause”, like you showed up drunk or stole from the company while “laid off” in practice means “we don’t need or don’t like you but are fine with just pretending it was a purely economic decision (which it may have been)”.
In my world of “management consulting” we also have the concept of being “counselled out”. Which basically means, most firms have an “up or out” policy and …well…you aren’t moving up.
I’m not sure how much that actually happens.
But regardless, if you are feeling a sensation that you “might get fired”, there is obviously something amiss with your current role. So I would advise looking for a new job. Unless you are being abused at work or are forced to work so hard you literally are unable to conduct a job search, I would suggest not quitting. The only difference between quitting and getting fired is you lose you main source of income that much sooner.
A genuine thank you for the help in this thread. I did not know I could be considered a layoff, under the circumstances. I do have about 8 months’ worth of expenses saved up, but in light of all your comments I agree that it makes little sense to quit now.
I know that for people who have worked in well-run offices, it’s hard to imagine that people can be so petty and disingenuous about something as important as someone’s career, but I assure you, it is very common.
And I want to be clear that I don’t think that there’s a big plot against me or that I’m being singled out for shitty treatment. There’s just shittiness all over the place. It’s not really malice, even – it’s a very small company with inexperienced managers who behave as if they do not realize that employees can see right through them, and the whole place just kind of devolved into a middle-school lunch table. For example, the quality of some of our vendors is too low for the amount we pay them, but they’re the CEO’s friends, so we can’t replace them. Little things too; a lot of our staff resent that the same people receive lavish public praise for minimal contributions and everyone else is ignored.
In Silicon Valley at least being laid off usually has no stigma - in fact company recruiters swoop down on those laid off by major players. Whole divisions get zapped, and job function matters a lot more than if they like you. Plus, many hiring managers have gotten laid off sometime in the past, and so have a very different attitude.
In fact in one layoff we had a job fair where groups with openings tried to get those laid off transferred in. I got someone very good this way, though most of the top people got hired elsewhere, mostly right away.
This, 100%.
I probably would’ve jumped the gun too at the outset but after thinking about it this is probably the scenario management envisioned upon hiring the other person.
If that’s true then why am I being cut out of meetings representing my department, in favor of someone who has been there less than a week?
Exactly. If the OP was attending those meetings with the NH sitting alongside listening, not talking, that would be a huge hint the NH is an assistant to the OP or is a peer.
What’s actually happening screams “replacement”.
What has your boss said about the meetings issue?
Depends on the content of the meetings. I can imagine sending a new person to a meeting not strictly relevant just for info about the company, and letting the OP miss it so someone is present in the department.
It totally depends on the type of meeting - most meetings at my job are the sort where a few people are presenting information, and the participation of the other twenty or thirty people (or more) is limited to asking questions. Those people are mostly attending to bring the information back to their work location.