Eh, slow news day, I guess. I was hired by a Fortune 500 company. In a class of twenty people being trained for three months for an entry-level job, only six w

Eh, slow news day, I guess. I was hired by a Fortune 500 company. In a class of twenty people being trained for three months for an entry-level job, only six were new hires and one of those six could not hack it and washed out of training. The rest were people who previously worked at the company and were returning (one was a military wife, back in the area again) or internal transfers or internal promotions from an even lower level entry-level job. They also went from pages and pages of job listings to only a handful of job listings overnight during a recession. This was followed by a period of little to no hiring and few promotions. My department got shiny new offices and we were moved there because we didn't have enough space for everyone and desk sharing for different shifts was the norm. Then the hiring freeze happened, the department shrank and we couldn't fill all the desks even after eliminating the night shift and the practice of desk sharing. They began repurposing some sections. Hiring takes time. Training and onboarding take time. Best guesses about future needs can be wrong. So far, no one has perfected the art of predicting the future. Business planning at this scale is hard and often looks stupid to outsiders.