Given this is (almost to the letter) how impersonally "layoffs" went at my company in January I think we could switch to AI severance and not lose anything of value.
The Layoff
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Re: The Layoff
#92Is that really how these layoffs go? The HR person is belittling ("I need you to focus") and the employee passively takes the belittling. Here's a script the employee could have used. "Excuse me, I need to pause. I have never met you before this call. We are strangers. You demand my attention because you say you need it. To be fair, your needs are no more important than mine. One of my needs is to be treated with res…
You might enjoy this TikTok video of an ex-CloudFlare employee getting laid off by people she has never met, and responds as fiercely as your text. Except she's also trying to extract the actual reason she's being laid off, to no avail – yet still impressive how hard she's pressing those random HRs. https://old.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/194v9y8/ae_at...
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Re: The Layoff
#93Hi, author of the story here. Here's the side notes that I put on Patreon:
This story was hard to write.
Well, okay, the story was a lot easier to write after I ended up working in person in San Francisco for a week and after I had a long conversation with Corey Quinn about why things are the way they are.
Either way, this story was hard to write because of the way you have to balance these things very carefully. If you make a satire story like this, you have to be very careful to balance it between plausibility and comedy. If you falter to one side, it’s too realistic and depressing. If you falter to the other side, it’s just an extended stand-up comedy routine and you don’t get the message you’re going after. I think I got the balance right. An earlier draft of it emphasized the “oh god this is a robot isn’t it” a bit more and I don’t think that made it good to read. Generally when you’re making creative works, you know you’re done when you can’t cut anything else away without affecting the bones of the story. I think I got to that point in editing.
One of my biggest inspirations for this story was that one Cloudflare layoff call of the woman who joined Cloudflare in a sales role (https://www.tiktok.com/@brittanypeachhh/video/73230040850436...) right between two major holidays (thanksgiving and christmas). I wanted to take it a step further. What would it be like if an AI did the layoff call for the company? Layoff calls are super taxing to the human psyche afterall, especially in the US where there’s this subtext of “and we’re taking your health insurance coverage with it”.
I did try to make it turn out well for James, the severance package is ridiculously good for the employee in comparison to what you’d probably get on the market today (I think it’d be something like 1.5 years of pay?). Originally the story was gonna end with a little bit like:
> James later attempted to appeal his termination in arbitration due to the legally binding promise the bot had made. It was unsuccessful. James’ use of “prompt injection” proved that James was aware he was talking to an AI system, and thus the bot was therefore not capable of making legally binding promises on behalf of Techaro. James was ordered to pay legal costs and financial damages to Techaro for reputational harm. James was marked as “not eligible for re-hire” in Techaro’s HR system and his severance offer was revoked. > > James later moved to a farm in the countryside and never used a computer again. He was happy.
Or something, but I think that this could actually be its own story a lot better than it could be as a footnote to an existing story. Maybe the arbitration case could be good surrealism fodder. What if the AI gets called to the stand? Absolute hilarity.
I think the next satire story about AI is going to involve an astute observation that a friend of mine made: for some reason people haven’t figured out that people just want a sandbox where you interact with NPC characters. With one glaring exception: japanese VR erotica games. I’ve wanted to try writing something a bit…more mature, and this may be the concept that I use for it.
The ideas I’m working with are VR erotica, mind uploading (how else would you get AGI on the cheap), something written from the perspective of an AI agent that doesn’t realize they are an AI agent, and this one word in Czech that is the reason we have the term “robot”. We have that word because of the play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) adapting the word “robota”, which means forced labour of the kind that serfs had to perform on their masters’ lands.
So, the main character is actually a fully sapient NPC in a VR erotica game that thinks they’re the protagonist in a game where they’re actually there to make the players happy. This concept is probably going to require a fair bit of development to avoid making it too adult because I do have a number of non-adult readers, to my horror.
Might just make it patron-only. I don’t know. Still need to noodle things out.
Re: The Layoff
#94Interestingly, the story fails to load on Chrome 121, actually removing DOM nodes with the story... Worked fine in Firefox though.
That is strange. I'll investigate. What browser extensions do you use?
Re: The Layoff
#95I’d read a book in this style if one was written, Xe! This is both entertaining and very well written
I've been considering compiling my Techaro stories into a book eventually, it'd probably involve a lot of editing and reformatting, but it's a thing I want to work on eventually.
Re: The Layoff
#96"We won't share a list of the affected employees because some of them might not want the information to be public" was the biggest bullshit I've heard recently - no fiction needed. Discovering that people you worked with for years have been laid off only because you randomly notice their slack is deactivated has to be one of 2024s gifts to humanity.
One of the companies in my early career always sent out an email blast with someone's parting words. In the case of a negative termination, the leadership usually wrote something about them. The words were always read by HR before, but I really appreciated it. It felt more humane.
Re: The Layoff
#97"We won't share a list of the affected employees because some of them might not want the information to be public" was the biggest bullshit I've heard recently - no fiction needed. Discovering that people you worked with for years have been laid off only because you randomly notice their slack is deactivated has to be one of 2024s gifts to humanity.
Step 1. A company lays off employees and shares the list. Step 2. The list is shared on social media. Step 3. A former employee that's on that list sues the company.
exactly -if I ran a big company, no way I would send out a notice to people still working there every time someone was let go to say who got fired or laid off.
People who need to know find out who is gone, it just takes a little longer.
Re: The Layoff
#98> get the rest of the year's worth of pay Damn, last time I got laid off I got two weeks severance after five years of employment. I didn’t even get to keep the laptop.
I remember when the first company I worked for did their first round of layoffs, the severance was something like two months. It was good enough that people were asking the CEO "why didn't you ask for volunteers?" The later rounds were not as generous.
Nobody got to keep their laptops or desktops, but few months later the company was liquidating its assets, and some of the former employees got to buy some slightly dated hardware for cheap. If I recall correctly, that was also the only month we were profitable.
Re: The Layoff
#99"We won't share a list of the affected employees because some of them might not want the information to be public" was the biggest bullshit I've heard recently - no fiction needed. Discovering that people you worked with for years have been laid off only because you randomly notice their slack is deactivated has to be one of 2024s gifts to humanity.
Right. I think they just want to avoid being on the front-page of startup news sites with a headline like " lays off % of workforce," so they don't call it a layoff and try to keep a lid on how many people were let go.
Of course, because they can't say that they have to come up with other narratives which wind up sounding disingenuous at best.
Re: The Layoff
#100"the rest of the year's worth of pay in one lump sum, to keep your corporate laptop, and COBRA coverage for the rest of the year should you need it. You will also get double the value of any unspent paid time off, including the time you would have gained during the rest of the year." OMG I would love this kind of severance, in February no less. I'm accustomed to hearing about severance that goes from from jack squat…
hahaha yes. This kind of a layoff is actually winning the lottery.