In England, the more senior you are the less likely you are to ever get expicitly fired – you are leaving to spend more time with your family, taking early retirement, or chose to blow your own brains out with a revolver. Whatever arrangement results in the least fuss – because the English establishment abhores a fuss.
Being handed a loaded gun to kill yourself with is more than courtesy.
What the Brits really abhore, is comeback, damages – and ultimately, of course, money loss. Courtesy evolves within a culture because it is advantageous for both the donor and recipient and resignation or suicide imply that a decision was voluntary and so there is no comeback.
In the US, where establishment and money are more closely linked, by virtue of being a newer country, things are more straightforward. If you don’t have money or you don’t have a track record of litigation, then you get fired. If you do, then you get resigned.
There are people that I have worked with, who were fired, for very good reason, who would sue if anyone told the truth and were to say that – like here. So everyone keeps their mouth shut as a ticking bomb is passed on to another unsuspecting company without detection.
Silicon Valley is full of second tier, mediocre executives who are paid enough to afford a good lawyer to bury their track record through threat of litigation but who aren’t quite senior enough to have to be exposed to public shareholder or media scrutiny. Here there is an obvious advantage for both prior employer and employee to be ‘economical with the truth’.
This medocrity flows from one organization to another, its path lubricated by recruiters who like the idea of people moving from company to company. It eventually becomes the dark matter of corporations and the thing that contributes to the inexplicable inneficiencies of certain firms.
Of course Judith Miller was not this kind of dark matter, but it is weird how, even when everyone knows that she was fired, there is still an advantage in it being couched in euphamism.