[braza]

It's some low-risk/consequence project/initiative that is designed to receive people that will be fired due to lack of compliance and/or collaboration with the new management.

Once we had a German colleague that was not so collaborative in sharing the knowledge about some specific parts of the application, and the Tech lead replaced her MacBook with a Windows 10, and she only can write PRs related with DocStrings.

[zenethian]

This seems kind of childish to be honest. Why not just fire the person?

[Bratmon]

Because firing people in Germany is a multi-year process that requires (among many other things) paying for a complete training course in all job-relevant skills under the assumption that any incompetence is caused by insufficient training.

[franktankbank]

Psychotic IMO. We will fire you but only after you've been publicly humiliated? Who thinks to do this kind of shit?

[dust-jacket]

I mean I'd guess it was because it's somewhere with a higher bar to firing. Redundancy or dismissal are both much more complicated (expensive) than simply making it very clear you'd like someone to leave.