Congratulations You’ve Been Fired

Hubspot is a campaign management and lead management tool like Eloqua, Marketo, Unica and dozes of other tools in this space. They are not remotely interesting unless you are interested in b2b marketing tools. One does not need to disparage hubspot, its a decent marketing tool. But it is not remotely world changing in any way. That is hubris so the author appears to be spot on with some of his observations.

Everyone recognizes the fakery and dubiousness of empty and vacuous corporate slogans. A psychological tactic to induce frenzy and artificial value in your workforce is exploitative and disrespects other human beings. Surely there are more respectful and time tested ways to motivate your workforce without making a mockery of them to promoting your own interests.

Repositioning a firing as a graduation is the stuff of comedy scripts, nearly Monty Pythonisque. With material like this anyone would be tempted to write a book. But this is not comedy, these guys are serious. In the real world this can only be interpreted as insensitive, grossly exploitative and dangerously disconnected from reality.

The modern world seems to be a constant case of vocabulary misunderstanding, where we all say "widget", and I mean thing and you mean "an element of a UX".

"Job security" is a specific example that can mean different things based on worldview. It can mean "the business will employ you no matter what you do or how bad you are" - the classic 1970s Union paradigm. "Job security" can mean "the creation of skills that will continue to have value in the market", i.e. "a law degree means you will always have job security. Or "Job security" can even mean something beyond the individual, to mean "working for a company that will survive" i.e. "working for the government provides great job security - they can never go out of business". Dan Lyons' sacking from Newsweek and the dying of traditional media shows how industry viability is in some ways more fundamental than the individual's talents to "job security".

Now, which of those definitions people understand - and which definition your worldview puts front and centre - will dictate how you view a new sort of life/work manifesto.

Dan Lyons idealises a world in which people worked their whole career for one company, had a slow progression of minor promotions and pay rises & retired to a gold watch they took to Florida. That reality makes me personally want to buy a chair, some rope and to Google how to tie a noose, but my view is certainly NOT universal, and I need to accept and recognise that.

I would hope people would go beyond seeing this as "misrepresent our ideas", and get to bottom of the misunderstanding - to the fundamental worldview misunderstanding at the core of the disagreement. Rather than defend against a perceived attack, I think a policy of agree and amplify makes sense. Dan Lyons is correct - the world has changed and in this new reality, 50 years of depressing work for one company is over. The new world may not have a gold watch at the end of the rainbow, but it should have a much brighter and happier journey, and the a world in which employment is for a specific period, the goal changes from work hard and hope, to maximise skill development. That is the heart of "The Alliance" - an acceptance the world has changed, and making it work for you.

In my teams, representing less than 20 people in total, firings were far more common that people leaving. Two business people (marketing focused) left, two developers transferred to other areas (early AWS), while four developers and one business person were fired over the four years (fulfilling the "making hard choices" performance review requirement).