Is it really true that in general, a manager can just fire you?
Where I work, my manager can report badly about me, but he cannot fire me. Even if the team responsible for hiring/firing concludes they will let me go, they still need to follow the law.
E.g. there needs to be documentation of my (mal) functioning and there has to be attemps to improve performance or behavior. Is this only true in Europe maybe?
And never ever joke about firing someone.<p>Even if there's some technicality where we 'fire' you and rehire under a different entity, don't start the announcement with 'you're all fired. Ha ha, not really'. The cannon anxiety is real.
This is good advice. It doesn’t take many data points, just one or two similar-sounding conversations, to inadvertently establish a pattern that can worry a whole team.