this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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I didn't realize it at the time but I was part of this horrible trend. I was doing support for a large software company that's big in system administration circles.
I was laid off just prior to the end of the year. December 15, if I recall correctly (somewhere around there regardless). Shortly after me, will into layoff season, my entire support center was decommissioned and all of my co-workers joined me in unemployment. Within a few months the center went from hundreds of employees to zero.
They took the companies name off the building a year later. This was a bit less than 10 years ago and I'm still bitter; especially since the CEO visited the center about a month before he laid off the entire center, directly in the wake of laying off the front line customer support team in my center and outsourcing their jobs to low cost geographies; he had the gall to lecture is about how the layoff of the CS team didn't and shouldn't imply anything about the support team. Blah blah blah, different business unit, different operating criteria, yadda yadda yadda.... All bullshit to try to get us to work harder right up until the bitter end.
They gave everyone two months pay as severance with no consideration to how long you had worked there. Many people were shown the door after the better part of a decade, with no additional consideration than what people who were there less than a year recieved. I still don't like that CEO, and he's doing rounds in the tech circles with people singing his praises. Makes me sick.
I don't understand why we can't name and shame these days. They shamed you. They have tarnished your rep by making you redundant. They showed no professional courtesy. Fuck them. Name and shame.
These cunts continue to do the rounds because no one ever outright calls these cunts out.
Power. Respect for authorities.
You need to be hired somewhere else. The new company you apply at don't know what actually happened, it's all hearsay and bad employees may make shit up to get more pity or make them look less bad if they were fired for legit reasons. In the confusion they'll want to defend their interest, and some may just be bad people to begin with.
And then there might be repercussions because they have more means than you do.
This is the unfortunate truth, I think you can debate how likely you are to encounter this kind of backlash for an anonymous comment on a random Lemmy post, but if you did it more publicly on like LinkedIn or something then definitely.
I'm not so angry about it. It was almost downright traumatic at the time, suddenly being unemployed but bluntly, I wasn't a good fit for the job and I was thinking about quitting after the holidays anyways.
The biggest difference for me was that if I had quit of my own accord, I would have lined up a new job before I did, so the down time between jobs would have been minimal.
The CEO visiting and spouting the crap he did was probably the worst offense in my mind. I can't say that he lied specifically, more like, intentionally misled the workers into a false sense of security. I never bought it and it was one of the minor factors in my decision to leave (even though I hadn't fully committed to that decision yet). The biggest factor to depart for me was that the workload was very high and it was designed like a call center. About halfway through my employment there, which only lasted about a year, they changed cubicles (keeping in mind this happened maybe 6-10 months before the center had no workers), to increase worker density. They crammed us in and loaded us with more work than was reasonable. Most were at some stage of drowning, some were treading water, and only a handful were actually thriving in that environment. I was solidly on the "I'm drowning" side.
The reason why is easy to see. I'm a very detail oriented person, so I usually take a little more time to complete things than most of my counterparts. I also struggle with continually changing contexts that I'm working under. So being customer facing to a company with literally tens or hundreds of thousands of customers, the context was always different.
I didn't handle all that very well. I would have been far better as an escalation resource, but at the time, I lacked the skillet to get that kind of position. That place taught me a lot.... And the lessons learned are things I'll never forget.
I'm now much happier in a senior support role for a much smaller company. It's still customer facing (think managed service provider), but the scale is much less than what I experienced at that job. I'm not bitter and I don't have prejudice towards the company, only that CEO who no longer works there. He's now at a company that makes hardware, with a blue logo and a name that comes to mind when you say "CPU". But you didn't hear that from me.