“We’re making billions of dollars and we have no reason to think we won’t continue making billions but 7% of you can fuck right off.” is surely a play.
Their latest financial filings showed a $32M loss.
As much as that sounds like it was written by a business robot, and as weird as it is that they call their employees “Dutonians,” at least they said exactly what the severance would be and that everyone affected would be notified by the next day.
My company vaguely said layoffs would happen throughout the quarter, which was morale terrorism.
Oh, good lord; that’s truly awful.
That’s basically where I’m at.
The company I work at announced mass layoffs recently.
In the US, the people laid off knew immediately. In Europe, we have to go through a sham negotiation process before they announce who is impacted. The negotiations will not affect how many people or which people are laid off. The list of people already exists, and is probably immutable. The (legal minimum) scope of the negotiations is for the company and the employee representatives to agree on some minor details of the severance package. (In other European countries, the scope of those negotiations will be different, but nobody expects them to change anything.)
Despite being a totally meaningless process, it’ll still take weeks, maybe even months, and obviously during that time anxiety will be through the roof. On an intellectual level, I don’t even care that much if I get laid off! I have permanent residency and don’t need to worry about any visa issues (unlike a lot of my coworkers), and will be financially fine just taking the severance and hibernating for a year or two until the good times are back. But on a gut level, the stress and anxiety is contagious, and I feel like shit.
Hotdamn. Reading that actively pissed me off, and yet I couldn’t stop. It really has all the hallmarks of corporate speak, “We’re all a big familiy!” vibes inclusive. There are at least 4 paragraphs that simply say they need to become more profitable in a different flavor of word salad. Their choice to end it with an MLK quote made laugh out loud. It’s beyond parody.
@jsnell, truly sounds like a shitty situation to be in. Fingers crossed, but good to hear that it wouldn’t be a personal disaster at least if it were to affect you.
Isn’t that better for you though, to give you time to start looking for other work now?
I can read a lot of corporate doublespeak and whatnot but wow that’s just over the top. And it kept going and going and going. Also, though I’ve seen it before, nothing says, “but we care about you,” than announcing layoffs followed by someone getting a raise and new title, followed by praising an exec now departing. A layoff message should be centered around just that.
And as @JD said, to finish with an MLK quote … beyond insane.
I hope it ends up okay for you. Nobody needs additional stress right now even in the best of circumstances, much less job instability. Hang in there, jsnell.
I lived that. New CEO comes in and after some review, rightsizing is announced. It is then done at intervals with different departments each time. I’m in IT, and I knew the writing was one wall when two weeks earlier, all of my key contacts on the business side of my projects were let go.
Google closed its local DeepMind office that was one of the few tech highlights of nowheresville, Canada.
The issue is that nobody knows if they should start applying for other jobs – the chance of getting let go is small, and this is a really bad time to be selling your labor because there’s so many new people looking for work.
Even if you’re confident that your position is safe, you still need to work with people that aren’t as secure, and nobody wants to do work if they think they’re going to be tossed out.
This is easy: yes. Always be looking for another job. Though execs hate it, it’s the culture they create with these sorts of “we’re going to lay off 10k people in the next 5 months” actions.
In fact, I imagine they assume they will lose some % of people just due to them finding new jobs because of the uncertainty. It saves them a severance check.
While I would normally agree, right now is a really bad time to be looking for a tech job. The number of applicants is high and a worker’s ability to negotiate is low. I have to weigh that against the hours of research and product use that I typically invest into a job interview.
You do you. But in my opinion the right time to be looking for a new job is always. Rest assured, your employer isn’t going to think twice if they need to lay you off.
Again, one wonders if this was the intended point.
I’d say this is a bad time to be looking for a job at a big tech firm, but not necessarily a bad time to be looking for a tech job. There are tons of companies out there that need people - probably won’t pay as well as a Microsoft or Google, but it’s a decent job and probably a good deal more stable.
I wonder how much Google paid for DeepMind at Google Edmonton but local wages definitely won’t compare. At least some have been offered the option of relocation to Montreal.
Considering history, I wouldn’t say it is the point, but I’m almost 100% sure it’s one of them.