Last week, online mortgage company Better.com's CEO Vishal Garg fired 900 employees in a Zoom call right before the holidays. It did not go over well! Most people tend to be pretty horrified by that kind of thing. The callous act generated such bad publicity that even Garg, who had previously made headlines for sending out a mass email calling his employees "dumb dolphins," actually sucked it up and issued an apology to his remaining employees promising to "learn" from the situation.

I want to apologize for the way I handled the layoffs last week. I failed to show the appropriate amount of respect and appreciation for the individuals who were affected and for their contributions to Better.

I own the decision to do the layoffs, but in communicating it I blundered the execution. In doing so, I embarrassed you. I realize that the way I communicated this news made a difficult situation worse.

I am deeply sorry and am committed to learning from this situation and doing more to be the leader that you expect me to be.

At Better, your dedication, focus and expertise are essential in the vital work we are doing to unlock the value, joy and opportunity of homeownership for our customers across the country. I couldn’t be more grateful for all you are accomplishing for the customers we serve.

We will talk more at our upcoming All Hands meeting about what to expect for the year ahead. I hope you’ll join me for the discussion. We are also taking fast steps to make sure we are very transparent and aligned as a company on the goals for 2022, the metrics that matter most, and how we can all work together even better to serve our customers and achieve our mission.

I believe in you, I believe in Better, and I believe that working together we can make homeownership better together.

Whether there is enough cognitive behavioral therapy in the world to help someone with such little empathy and compassion for his fellow humans remains to be seen.

But not everyone agreed that his callous mass firing was a bad move. Emily Compagno of Fox's "Outnumbered," for one, was positively overjoyed thinking about how sad all of the "snowflakes" he fired would be upon losing their jobs in such a manner.

Campagno was so jazzed about the firings that although she tried to make a case that he was firing them this way for his own personal safety, she couldn't help but bubble over with joy at the idea of all of the millennial and Gen Z snowflakes with no work ethic being fired for "theft."

I loved this, actually! I love this so much! The productivity of those 900 individuals averaged two hours a day even though they were paid for eight. And I understand the indelicate nature of this, but part of my role as a federal attorney when I was managing and acting director was terminating individuals, and I did it with the utmost respect and care — but I also had to do it with a lot of security measures in place. I love that for 900 people he stayed safe and he let them know that their theft was no longer tolerated. So for me, good riddance, and I feel bad that he's now having to capitulate to the other execs at his company and apologize for it.

Sorry guys, bye! For all of them, they're snowflakes. They're probably millennials and Zs. They need to learn work ethic.

Co-host Harris Faulkner pointed out that the employees (only 250 of whom were even actually accused of this "theft") were very much disputing this characterization of their "work ethic" and thus filing lawsuits at him left and right. Even Kayleigh McEnany of all people pointed out that Garg had previously threatened to staple employees to the wall or door, and that this may suggest he has some issues creating a positive work environment. Meanwhile, Compagno just kept giggling and saying, "I love it!"

If she loves that, I've got a Triangle Shirtwaist Factory to show her that will just send her right over the moon.

It's relatively common for people to believe that the generations following them are lazy jerks who just want everything handed to them, as demonstrated by the timeless classic, "Hired! Part II."

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One might even recall that Compagno's generation, Generation X, was popularly trashed in the media as a generation of "slackers." The Boomers before them were derided as lazy long-haired hippies, and millennials, of course, are snowflakes who just want participation trophies.

While Compagno appears to be singularly sadistic, she's hardly the only person out there who has bought into this mythology. For decades, the line that everyone besides oneself is an evil, lazy, conniving, oversensitive snowflake who wants to take more than they give has undermined worker solidarity, discouraged unions, kept employees from demanding their rights, made people comfortable with chipping away at the social safety net, and created a culture in which all empathy flows to owners and managers over workers.

It's highly unlikely that Vishal Garg has truly learned the error of his ways — but what he is learning is that he probably can't get away with that kind of bullshit as much as he would like to, and if that keeps him from trying, it's as good as anything else. It's a lesson that a lot of people, including Emily Compagno should she ever be in a management position again, would do well to learn themselves.

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