And now, fast forward to 2023, they are laying me off, along with another 99 people.
In a way I’m relieved because I was planning to change jobs due to burnout (burnout that my manager referred to during my layoff meeting as being “a little bit stressed”).
However, due to the same said burnout, I couldn’t do much job searching and needed a long vacation.
I got laid off while on vacation, a vacation I took late because of the deadlines set by the company, also a vacation which I spent recovering from burnout (and doing other fun things, don’t get me wrong.)
Mainly I blame their obsession with “growth hacking”. Now this company is a TV company and have canceled a large list of programs viewers like because they aren’t making enough revenue.
And everyone does it with a smile on their face, under the guise of ‘efficiency’.
How does one increase efficiency by reducing the number of workers and not really coming up with any tools so that less workers could do the same job?
The negotiations with the union ended in disagreement about my team’s layoffs but I got the boot anyway.
So what did I get myself burnt out for? Absolutely nothing worth it. I should have just quit-quitted. This didn’t come easy to me because I place a lot of importance on product ownership. I’m early in my career and wanted to build cool stuff that people use and enjoy.
I use to work in HR for a medium sized, publicly traded company. Here’s how it works:
Wall Street banks set quarterly profit targets for companies. If the companies hit the target, stock goes up, if they don’t it goes down.
If stock goes down too much, C-suite is usually fired. This is what motivates them.
There is usually a few weeks between when the company calculates it’s quarterly numbers and when they are legally obligated to report them.
If the profits aren’t up to the Wall Street calculation, the C-suite panics and 95% of the time will go on a firing spree so when the numbers do become public they can claim they analyzed the company and magically found it was overstaffed, and already took care of the “problem”. This is an attempt to save their own jobs.
In truth they did the firings in such a hurry nothing was seriously looked at, no significant problems were discovered, and the employees let go were closer to random than carefully selected based on performance and need. This happens every quarter all across America. It’s rare the Wall Street targets are scrutinized. Often the companies were actually profitable too, just not as profitable as Wall Street wanted them to be.
The human factor is entirely removed at this point. Most people who were fired were perfectly good at their job, and their job was just as relevant as any other. Some analyst on a spreadsheet just calculated how many people from each team would be fired to appease shareholder feelings. It was sad to watch people take it so personally and blame themselves when it had nothing to do with them or their performance. Just a corporate wheel turning around. Many would also be rehired within months too.
This is good insight, thank you.
It seems to me this is all a stalling tactic for unprofitable companies. Is that correct?
Not necessarily. I witnessed this firsthand at a company that was actually VERY profitable, just not as profitable as Wall Street had expected.
When a company underperforms, the first place C-suite looks to cut is headcount.
Hundreds of thousands of real people get anxiety, constant stress, malnutrition, some probably die. All because assholes in suits are playing their game. Rest of society just accepts that “this is how the world works” and “capitalism is not flawless but it’s the best we’ve come up with”. Another year in paradise. Thank god for being alive.
No, it was doomed from the get go. Jack Welch is a symptom of a broken system, not the cause of it.
That being said, fuck that guy.
You know people get all sorts of existential dread thinking about an AI maximizing for paperclip production, but what scares me the most is jerks maximing for money and how they will not stop at anything. And they’re not even AIs yet. Mr. Burns embodied.
Who do you think had a hand training the computer models on expected performance levels
The profit expectations the company itself sets also play a big part of it as well I think. When a company says they’ll be really profitable, but it’s only very profitable, everybody loses their shit.
Once we go higher up, it’s mostly intuition based a d not at all based on data - is what I’ve come to understand. So whatever the higher ups feel is what gets done. And they won’t take any hit because they already have all the savings they may need. They will switch jobs before things come crashing down. All they want to show is a slight uptick in sales or revenue to take credit.
They are basically bringing the company to the ground. Made us recreate our entire platform on all devices from scratch to “rebrand” when our current systems where it’s total chaos to start with. They are totally removed from reality, and that’s the big issue with hierarchical organizations.
Max?
No, but all power to Max.
They will switch jobs before things come crashing down. All they want to show is a slight uptick in sales or revenue to take credit.
I used to work in field service for a machine tool company. One of the machine brands I serviced had a couple years in the late nineties that hated to work on. The machines were always cheap but those years were egregious. Corners cut everywhere and the original parts were so shitty we’d usually have to retrofit shit from a different year. Eventually bumped into a guy who’d worked on them at the time who explained the history. The owners of the company at the time were about to sell out to another manufacturer and they wanted to jack up the profits before the sale so they cut every corner they that they didn’t think would be noticable before the sale.
The brand stayed afloat for another ten years but everyone I know who was in the industry at the time said their was never any coming back from the damage two years of shit machines did to their image.
Worst part about was, because the machines didn’t start having issues until after the company sold, the new owners got all the blame and got stuck with bill for all the warranty work. Literally no incentive for anyone else to not do exactly the same as the original owners.
Not a coincidence that this company and team I’m being laid off from has one manager who resisted (and continues to resist) technical documentation. Everything is just to make things work NOW with a big middle finger to sustainability.
Ooof. Current job has a big problem with that.
I’m in facilities for a company with 2 dozen buildings. We’re big enough that we have a drafting department who needs to sign off on all of our drawings and documentation. For reasons that are always changing, they never want to convert the contractors’ schematics for remodels into something that can be shared. If we’re lucky, the contractors are willing to share prints with us directly more offen, we just have to hope the labels are still there when it breaks and/or ring out individual wires. Huge waste of man hours on our end but every time we suggest fixing it, the drafting department insists that it can’t be done for whatever reason. Our department has offered to handle these schematics several times but, “that’s not in our scope”.
That sounds awful. Maybe one day will dawn on this world when companies will just listen to the professionals doing the work. My manager’s manager (the one resisting docs) seems to be on some kind of power trip. He’s an exceptionally bad listener who treats us like chess pieces in a game he is playing in his own head. I thought he just annoyed me, but after having a chat with my manager about him, it turns out that everyone is having problems with him and he’s unwilling to be flexible.
Ah yes, the good ol’ product ownership.
I once built a product from scratch, put my heart and soul into it, watched it grew from pretty much nothing to a full-featured thing. It almost got canceled a few times, but I fought nail and tooth each time (my some colleagues’ help) to keep the development running.
At some point, we hit a whale, a high profile one, that is. Our sales was working them for at least a couple years. My boss even pitched in, lowering the price more than we would’ve just to get the project going.
Yet, I had to pretty much had to make it work by myself, with some part-time help from colleagues who’s doing other projects. The whole development team (which includes this colleagues) were running on skeleton crew.
I asked my boss to recruit some more people, but he refused, due to budget. At some point we ran into an issue that I couldn’t solve. Weeks went by with our product pretty much being unusable. The whale were losing trust in us every moment, but there’s nothing I could do. The first solution my boss could come up with: for me to try and ask around and find a friend who could help me.
Finally my boss caved in and asked some freelance with whom he had worked with previously. We were able to come up with a working solution, but by then, the whale had lost too much trust. One of the top brass there even told us straight up that it’s pointless. This was after we deployed our solution.
As the project was crumbling beneath our feet, I was able to find a new job and got out of that company. Later of, I heard that this project got terminated.
Although I was somewhat bummed, I was also relieved I wasn’t there by the time shit hit the fan. That thing was my baby, but whatever. Now I got paid much more for doing less work that I did.
If I’m going to be honest movements like that seems to be money laundering.
1 keep the staff moving
2 no one can really tell if a name in the paycheck is a real person or no(if forged right)
3 you can say you hired 300 people or something, and then fired them. Keep doing this in a cycle.(mass fire and contractvis usefull to not know who is real and who is a forgery unless under scrutiny.
4 yhe that feels like the money removing part of the operation, from the legal to the less legal channels.
Could be, though it sounds a bit farfetched.
However this company has been well established since the 90s and are a major television company in the country I live in. Basically we had large organization changes that made no sense and we later found out that there were disputes between upper management and that as soon as one of them leaves their job, the rest take the company and steer it into a whole new direction. Meanwhile the entire staff is trying to manage under all the stress and we’ve had all kinds of bugs and problems with our “new launch”.
They made us build the pyramids then laid off the excess.
Well the best money laundering is Farfetch. When you placed Al your money in a legal company but suddenly you need a large amount of cash this is o e of the ways to withdraw it without drawing to much attention
laid off while on vacation
Oh screw that. I had that happen while I was on a church trip on my first job. They also said I would be better in a job like mcd’s where I was standing still at a register. Jokes on them I can’t do any of those jobs anymore bc of my audhd and all that goes with it. The meltdowns, anxiety/panic attacks, and generally uneducated people on my conditions that refuse to learn are awful…
I appreciate that my manager needed to tell me ASAP because others are nervously waiting in the line to know whether or not they are being laid off and he had to inform us (people being laid off) first. However, what I didn’t appreciate is that that vacation should have been sick leave to recover from burnout but my manager kept thinking that “burnout” meant “stress”, when what it actually means is “the job I used to love and cherish now feels like lifting tons of bricks up a steep slope then rolling down in defeat and crying”.
Yep, esp the burnout. I feel this on so many levels as a audhd person who experiences this so quickly with jobs. Esp since employers just don’t get it or value employee health. Because if they did they’d pay more and give more pto and sick leave. Instead the uppers at all these jobs need their bonuses and raises while we get crumbs or let go at the slightest downturn…
