Yeah cause what you want to do, as an employer, is go out to a community of people you have no control over and say, 'Hey we are about to fire one of your favorite admins, one of your friends maybe. But don't freak out it'll be ok. We can't talk about why we want to fire her, but trust us. Oh and can you not mention it to her before we fire her tomorrow.'
I'm curious how this was communicated to the admins. Even in the case where, say, she punched kn0thing in the nose and was currently being carted off to jail, I imagine you could say "Hey mods, something came up, since it's a personnel matter there's unfortunate legal stuff involved, but we needed to terminate Victoria's employment a couple of minutes ago. For now, full responsibility for running AMAs is with so-and-so, who is not going to be as good at it but will try their best. This is what records we have, this is what we don't and we're working on getting them as soon as possible. This sucks and we're really sorry about the impact on AMAs, but so-and-so will try to make things as non-bad as possible, and they will be super easily reachable for you until we figure out what's happening long term."
It appears that there was no communication with the mods[0]. They only found out because someone who was supposed to do an AMA told them Victoria wasn't available to help them[1].
There was no transition or contingency plan announced to the mods[2]. At first, the admins responded dismissively[3][4], but afterwards they took the issue more receptively[5].
It sound like this started the same way it would if someone was hit by a bus. All owns sudden they were just GONE.
Unless the firing was REALLY fast this hasn't been handled well. It's obvious she was important and did a lot of work. If Reddit knew even one day in advance they should have had some sort of plan on how to handle her workload l. Basic business continuity for others.
Instead it sounds like everything got dropped on the floor and Reddit is rushing to pick up the pieces and it's clearly not working.
They could have, and should have, simply stated that she will be gone in a month and laid out at the same time what the handover process would be, given her a generous severance conditional on not stating publicly that she was actually fired until x months or years have passed (by which time nobody will give a shit anymore), and carried on. If they had done this, none of this backlash would have happened at all.
Yeah that will go over well.