Sitting at home, isolated from my teammates as they get knocked of one by one (and who are prohibited from saying anything), waiting for my own ax to fall, is some kind of gross, humiliating and completely unnecessary torture.
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@dxz, I was let go yesterday first thing in the morning. Had plenty of time to Slack some goodbyes and cancel my scheduled meetings and decline the invites for the rest.
I don't know when my laptop was bricked because I signed off after letting some key people know and clearing my calendar.
Getting laid off didn't sting at all. I know it's (probably) not about me or my contributions. I wasn't happy with the hassle of MBR, AOP, last-minute no-context high priority requests to provide information or update some BS deck. Not being positioned for success because of stakeholders with completely opposite wishes and multiple engineering teams fighting over turf.
Also, I'm really pleased with the severance. This isn't my first rodeo and previous one (at another company) was stingy.
Want efficiency, do an all hands layoff Zoom call.....wait, that made National news as a spectacularly bad idea. It's funny how quickly people forget.
Understand mass layoffs are now common place, but the approach here to the RIF was a massive fail. Not to sound rude, but 740 isn't a huge number, so it could have been handled more swiftly. This dr-g out for far too long. Meanwhile the org is in dissary and employee moral and mental health have been seriously impacted. To take swift action though, you would need to have a competent group of leaders. Looking at you MM and MF.
The reality is there’s no easy way to do this. If you warn people and give them a timeframe and explain the step-by-step process, it’s torture to have to wait. If you don’t do all that and make it a surprise, people will be mad that it came out of the blue.
My preference would be 1) separate multiple people in a single meeting and 2) do the reorg/title change meetings AFTER all the termination meetings. (I can wait a couple of days to find out my new boss’s name)
Those two things turn this into a few hours rather than 2+ days.
And of course 3) give people 30-40 minutes on Slack to say their goodbyes, and exchange contact info. What is the worst that could happen? Treating people like automatic security threats is unnecessarily humiliating - and you can always make the severance agreement conditional on post-term good behavior.
The notion that anyone at Nike, but your trusted teammates, gives a cr-p about you is gone.
Remember this when a swoosh tattooed Koolaid drinker demands the unreasonable.
The fact that "the all-clear" is a thing, like a coined catchphrase, further likens this to a mass shooting.
@acr - unlikely if you haven't received all clear from your vp
Meetings for today are more likely fine, more likely just a structure reorg
This place will never recover from this. The way they treated people stretching this out so long was terrible.
@gpf I'm so sorry for you and your team.
My manager was let go yesterday along with almost all of my peers. And my team has invites for today morning. This is such a helpless feeling.