Yes, that was my interpretation. I don't understand what you think is absurd about that being sociopathic. Typically, to fire somebody, the manager has to convince at least one or two other people, typically outside of their department, through an extended period that is inspected by multiple different people. This exists to protect employees from vicious, vindictive and arbitrary leaders.
Okay, may have been my bad but it sounded like you thought that the same manager who fired the IC also was the one to offer to re-hire or something. Although your clarification about a firing theoretically needing approval from higher up sheds some light on that.
To your point, in general if you leave a place due to a bad manager (or get fired) and some kind of reform happens and you get invited back, usually the best move is not to come back. The organization already showed it was willing to toss you away at least once. That being said Netflix is probably a bit of an exception because it’s explicitly where you go to work if you want to work with people who are all insanely competent and hardworking and where performance is actually a core focus.
Also I still don’t quite understand the sociopathy element. It doesn’t seem sociopathic to say “hey we got rid of the toxic manager, want your old job back?” although like I said it’s still generally a bad idea to actually take the job back
We're in agreement- it makes sense to return if we feel strongly that it was the right place to work and don't care that we were treated arbitrarily.
The reason it's sociopathic is because companies shouldn't devalue their employees by treating them so callously as allowing a single bad manager to fire them. It speaks volumes about the nature of the company- one that is willing to bring in people and kick them back out without ever considering things like growth potential, job training, life circumstances, and any number of other things that affect employees.
I guess that's the sort of difference between companies that hire people and invest in them, and companies that just sort of churn through employees.
