My normal day at work starts at 8AM in the morning, but today, I started almost two hours earlier, after having worked until 9PM yesterday evening. Working on two projects at the same, I was supposed to sync up with colleagues in the European time zone on the tasks left to do before the product review session for both of them tomorrow.
Curiously, the Slack status of the European colleagues showed that they were not online. I decided to pull the latest Git commits to get an update of their works. The pull operation was denied. I went to Github to check our project task list, and I bumped into a wall of access denied page. I went to Slack channels to see if there was any report of GH service being down, or there was some misconfiguration causing access denied issue to some employees (as this thing happened before).
Then, I saw a message from another colleague, warning people to read their email first, if they haven’t done so yet. As I scanned the subject lines of the three dozens or so new email messages, one of them with the subject line “Your role has been impacted” caught my attention. It was a long message from one of the company executives, I didn’t read the whole message. Ok, I got it, I am being laid off, via a mass email. I saw another message on Slack that there was an announcement of a massive layoff today.
I took a deep breadth, and decided to take an hour to have a thorough breakfast today. Before I went off, I sent a message to the European colleagues, telling them to carry the torch forward, as I am out. But I was unwilling to wake up colleagues on the west coast, trying to leave them with two more hours of peaceful sleep. After some discussion with my wife over the breakfast, we decided to suspend our house shopping for the moment. We are looking for a bigger place so that my mother could move in with us, as her health is deteriorating. We called our agent to cancel the two visits that were scheduled for the coming weekend.
After the breakfast, I saw the messages from the European colleagues: “Haha, I am out too.”. Then came the messages from the west coast folks, telling me that they were also let go. They must have been waken up by the news.
With the recent re-org and the so-called organization flattenning process, and the pivoting to a totally different direction by the CEO as all our previous projects were suddenly cancelled, we kind of saw that coming. However, every week in recent months, we were assured, by our manager, director and all the way up to the VP, that we should not have any worry for our job. The president of the company even went on TV to repeat just that recently.
That was how the day started today. As messages rolled in, we saw that our whole team was let go. And that’s a new team just formed last year, with an ambitious plan.
However, not all things were bad, as there was very uplifting news from the stock market: The company has just announced a profitable quarter, and combined with the news of this massive layoff, the company’s stock has gone up 25% today. As per the company’s slogan, let’s celebrate success together: the sudden increase by the hundreds of millions of the executive team’s wealth is certainly a matter worth celebrating.
How does your trust battery look like?