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The Layoff

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Re: The Layoff

#141

Post by pixl97 »

Frost1x wrote: post #80
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been saying the same thing about off/near-shoring for decades. "X will be replaced by cheaper Y" but that has not materialized in any way. If anything, the opposite has been proven as demand for high-skilled labor continue to push salaries and competition for positions up. The amount of AI is coming for X or AI will replace Y is so unfounded at this point, I'm chalking it up with FSD-levels of hype. It re…

> People have been saying the same thing about off/near-shoring for decades. "X will be replaced by cheaper Y" but that has not materialized in any way. Eh? It absolutely has in many industries. It also has been tried many times in software, it just tends to fail, so the fact the option was there and perceived as an advantage and acted upon is exactly my point. It very well could happen and it absolutely has and has…

Heh, yea, it's like the people arguing with you have not paid attention for the last 50 years. Wages have been mostly stagnant since the 70s with little growth. Piles of jobs (actually production) have been offshored, then later brought back to the US as part of the jobless recovery, instead when a manufacturing job comes back the company employees an order of magnitude less people and uses machines and capital far more intensely.

Simply put, when we look at the trends of AI improvement we are tasked with the question, what is going to cause the sustainment of human labor for its current value across broad areas of all markets?

Re: The Layoff

#142

Post by pixl97 »

omoikane wrote: post #119
x86x87 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of severance is a thing of the past. I predict a new type of employement will emerge as a result of the late stage capitalism we are experiencing: the just in time employment. Where you are technically employed all the time but you are not paid [the same] when the corpo has you in the idle bucket. The drones will stay on for the health insurance, minimum pay, the illusion of work right around the corner. He…

> just in time employment Sounds like making everyone a contractor.

You mean the gig economy, right?

Re: The Layoff

#143

Post by paulddraper »

franciscop wrote: post #24
vasco wrote: post #13

"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.

This has been one of my most surprising/weird experiences working for US startups. In the other two countries I've been, at the very least my manager sat with each of us, or in group, or some sort of announcement when someone I was working with would stop (either voluntarily or involuntarily). Seeing names and 1-1 conversations just disappear from Slack without anyone saying anything is very bizarre. But I had to lea…

I wonder how common this is, % wise.

I've never seen this happen personally (15yrs US tech) but maybe that is unusual

Re: The Layoff

#144

Post by oblio »

Spooky23 wrote: post #60
vasco wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did the same informally with Slack, but it's a great tip :) There's even some automations around leadership calendar meeting titles+invitees that I might or not have heard about. If leadership wants to play games people can play games back.

If the politics internally are nutty enough you can do alot with this sort of skullduggery… It only works if it’s secret or the folks are oblivious. I worked at a place where this sort of thing was done. It became practice to setup fake meetings or conduct real meetings with vague titles as a misdirection. The other scenario is if you let consultants inside the firewall. Big 5 guys always gather intel on org charts a…

> I worked at a place where this sort of thing was done. It became practice to setup fake meetings or conduct real meetings with vague titles as a misdirection.

I don't get it.

Re: The Layoff

#146

Post by htrp »

netsharc wrote: post #137
kgdiem wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My previous job never told us who was laid off —- once I had a meeting with a woman later that day and I only realized after she didn’t show up. I too found slack to be the layoff lookup tool.

Hah, is Slack doing anything with this data, it sounds like Salesforce has a good intel on a lotttt of companies. Things like re-orgs (bunch of new Slack channels, archival of old ones) who's working with whom...

I'm sure it makes its way into the Einstein sales intelligence platform (TM)

Re: The Layoff

#147

Post by dthul »

bruh2 wrote: post #83
joelegner wrote: post #72

Is 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...

Telling someone they got fired for performance reasons when that's not actually true is outright evil. (Of course we don't know for certain whether that's what happened here, but it sure does look like it)

Re: The Layoff

#148

Post by MichaelRo »

x86x87 wrote: post #116
Clubber wrote: post #69

"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…

This kind of severance is a thing of the past. I predict a new type of employement will emerge as a result of the late stage capitalism we are experiencing: the just in time employment. Where you are technically employed all the time but you are not paid [the same] when the corpo has you in the idle bucket. The drones will stay on for the health insurance, minimum pay, the illusion of work right around the corner. He…

Well a guy named SWIM got laid off not long ago with exactly this kind of severance, about 6 months left in the year + compensated for unspent time off + got to keep his laptop and monitor. Getting laid off like this was the best thing that happened in his employment history and not just to him, there was a mass layoff and people were anxious they might end up being kept :)

So I completely stopped reading the story after the severance package since that paragraph completely shattered my suspension of disbelief. Any sane (and competent) person would jump at the opportunity of being laid off like this.

Re: The Layoff

#149

Post by zdragnar »

alemanek wrote: post #71
vasco wrote: post #13

"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.

I really don’t get why companies won’t allow limited access to email at least to send a goodbye message and contact details to their colleagues. You could spin up new email boxes if you are worried about them downloading emails even. It just seems really cold to not let people say goodbye and point their colleagues to their LinkedIn so they can get some recommendations and such. For the companies that allow this I sa…

Security training, usually mandated by some insurance policy, regulation or something else, typically lists "disgruntled employee" as the number one internal security threat.

Cutting off access prior to or immediately following notification of termination is more or less the only remedy to prevent data exfiltration from such a person.

Even if there were some programmatic way to ensure they could only email internal addresses, there are still some risks. I think it'd be worth implementing myself, though I can see it being rather difficult or impossible to set up depending on how the company's email is run.

Re: The Layoff

#150

Post by hdanirwin »

samspenc wrote: post #3

The first 1-2 paragraphs in, I thought: OK this is just a fictional account summarizing most people's layoff experiences. The twist in the middle and end, ha, well done! Didn't see that coming :D Very funny and very well done.

Second this!
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