I heard that only happened during the bleak years right after he came back from NeXT, and there were legitimate doubts Apple could survive the cash crunch they were in. I hadn't heard about summary on-the-spot firings since that era, could anyone worked through that era and later comment on this?
Yeah, when I started at Apple shortly after the iMac was introduced, those firings were already being referred to in the past tense. The rest of the Jobs 2.0 era was characterized more by the near-absence of major layoffs, as far as I can tell. I believe the Power Mac G4 Cube Team was decimated for mistakes that were not entirely theirs. The .mac team was reportedly decimated. But those are the instances I can think of, and neither of these were elevator-style summary firings.
