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It's a pretty impersonal way to announce layoffs but I think they all tend to be impersonal. I do think the 6 months of pay says a lot more than the fact that t

It's a pretty impersonal way to announce layoffs but I think they all tend to be impersonal. I do think the 6 months of pay says a lot more than the fact that they used a video.

SoftTalker 1y ago
Yeah the severance is nice but the execution is lame. If you don't have the balls to tell an employee to his or her face that they don't have a job anymore, you shouldn't be a manager or executive. Maybe it's a very distributed team, I guess then there's isn't a great way to do that.
- geodel 1y ago
  > If you don't have the balls to tell an employee to his or her face that they don't... This is just bullshit. Managers don't have to do any such thing as it may become unnecessarily confrontational. Similarly lot of people resign via email. There is no need to have "guts" to tell manager in their face.
  - chrisco255 1y ago
    I mean, if you want to burn a bridge you can do so. Sometimes it's warranted. However, if you have a good relationship with your manager then it's absolutely ideal to tell it to their face (or with a 1 on 1 call). It's not about guts it's about mutual respect. Likewise for layoffs.
    - geodel 1y ago
      Right. If situation allows doing face to face is nice. But thing as they are lately doing via canned message or email is perfectly fine and one need not think any less of manager or employee just based on their communication method.
  - ilc 1y ago
    You can do both. You should ALWAYS write a formal resignation letter that's about 3 lines at most, before talking to the manager. It just stops a ton of confusion, hope, etc. It allows that discussion to focus on "Do you want the two weeks?" and "What do you want me to do with those two weeks if you want them." Part of being a good employee is making things clear to your manager.
- mingus88 1y ago
  150 people is huge. The logistics of doing this in person just don’t make sense. Are you going to send out hundreds of calendar invites spread across weeks for the sole purpose of being nice to people? Are affected employees expected to queue up to get their personal “you’re fired” before their access is cut?
  - rdoherty 1y ago
    I worked at Yahoo in 2008 when they laid off thousands and yes every single person got a calendar invite and met in a meeting room 1:1 with a manager. It was difficult but they did it. Times definitely have changed.
    - xp84 1y ago
      Wow, just the logistics of that is impressive. I feel like I would watch a 60-minute documentary on pulling that together because it no doubt took dozens or hundreds of people weeks of logistics to do that, and unlike almost any other major project, literally no one involved was happy about any part of it.
      - resize2996 1y ago
        Doing unhappy work at Yahoo probably wasn't unusual in 2008
    - xmprt 1y ago
      Did the people who got a calendar invite know that they were getting laid off in advance?
      - Macha 1y ago
        I worked at Yahoo some years later and the process was the same when I was there. Yes, people generally put two and two together when there was a calendar invite with their manager and HR. We were in a European office though, so layoffs aren't American-style "escorted from the office with immediate effect".
- dennis_jeeves2 1y ago
  > If you don't have the balls to tell an employee to his or her face that they don't have a job anymore, you shouldn't be a manager or executive. What if your balls get ripped off? Just saying...
- neilv 1y ago
  > Maybe it's a very distributed team, I guess then there's isn't a great way to do that. If you want to do it all at once, for all time zones... If there's overlapping "core hours" for different time zones, or you can schedule an all-hands videoconf time, you can do it then. Or do one for the global West, and one for the global East (which will have different cultural nuances anyway, and possibly separate management structures). It's not that different than in-office. Except, for in-office, remaining colleagues see a person boxing up their stuff and walking out with their stuff in a box, or (worse) security escorting the people off the property. And then there's usually the desk of a terminate colleague there as a visual reminder for awhile. One in-office layoff I saw, they arranged for all the people to be laid off to have impromptu meetings with their managers, and to go to conference rooms, at the same time... and then notified everyone still at their desks to go to an all-(remaining)-hands meeting, in a different office space, where they were told of the layoffs. Most of the axed people were already gone when the others returned. It might have been good intentions, but I'm not sure that was a good move. It's a tricky problem, whether in-office or remote. Partly because the situation isn't right. ICs are more often let go because management failed, rather than any fault of the ICs.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    I was part of one mass layoff. They had two meetings at our site, one for the people being retained and one for the people being let go. We had an idea what was happening but you didn't know until your meeting started which group you were in. It was done in person though not via a video message.
  - xp84 1y ago
    > the situation isn't right. ICs are more often let go because management failed, rather than any fault of the ICs. That is pretty much guaranteed to happen though, unless you have a system where the assumption is employment for life at all costs. Management's job is to make decisions, many decisions won't work out, and for some of those, the consequences mean some change in what roles are going to be needed. Sometimes it's a management success that means a certain role isn't needed too ("we successfully rolled out software to book business trips, so we don't need 17 travel bookers anymore"). And anyway, let's stipulate that managers should also be punished by being sacked for any big mistake: That wouldn't save ICs, since if you're, say, pivoting away from making furniture, you still don't need the furniture makers, even if you sack the "VP of Furniture" or the CEO. And it'd be stupid to appoint a new VP of Furniture over and over to keep trying to 'make furniture happen' just to save the jobs.
- jfengel 1y ago
  Doing that for 150 people is a pretty long, ugly day, while everybody waited for their turn. You could gather everybody in the same room, and announce it there, but that's still not really face-to-face. Delegating it to their direct managers is even worse. They're generally not the ones who made the decision. Even if they were the ones who submitted a list of their people they could live without, it was the higher-ups who approved the layoff en masse. There's just not a great way to give bad news. A video sucks, but it attracts attention only because it's different from the other sucky ways people do it.
- themadturk 1y ago
  I worked for Weyerhaeuser, a major US forest products firm in the Seattle area during the early 2000s. In 2009 they decided to get out of the forestry products business and become nothing more than a land owner. Multiple thousands of workers were let go. At least at the company headquarters, managers met with every worker to tell them whether they'd been laid off or not. The announcement came in the summer, a couple of months before the actual lay-off date, and salary and benefits were extended until year end. It was by far the most humane layoff I'd ever experienced.
belter 1y ago
What about if they upgrade it to 12 months, and a fire by SMS ?
- ozgrakkurt 1y ago
  Pretty sure vast majority of people would prefer that
- Hammershaft 1y ago
  If a company is bigger than Dunbar's Number I would absolutely take that trade as a prospective employee! I think firing by SMS also serves the noble purpose of illustrating to prospective employees that these are purely transactional relationships and that, no, this isn't a family, the exec's heart will not bleed.
- notahacker 1y ago
  Make it 24 months and most people will be happy being fired with a robocalled "fuck you"...
- pmkary 1y ago
  I actually have seen a very random company who fired its employees by SMS in the middle of the night... And not a single penny of severance packaging. They only got their last payment and that was it. It's a shame I forgot the company name to have them face some shame here...
WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
I think it still sucks but at least it’s not made to look personal but not really. When you were sorting your damn spreadsheet where I ranked at the bottom, you cared zilch; you could give my cognitive abilities some credit by not pretending you suddenly got infected with empathy or something.
- xp84 1y ago
  I realize that it sucks to be laid off. But business really is just business and it has nothing to do with how much any person values you. You would rightfully stop working immediately if your company can't pay you even for a week. They stop employing you if it no longer makes economic sense. It's the same thing in the reverse. I could be told tomorrow to lay off some or all of the people who report to me if we can't afford to pay them. I'd hate it, I'd cry and feel sick and not be able to sleep all night wishing I could avoid it. I know that from experience. Nobody wants that and even CEOs feel like shit when they implement layoffs. The alternative to having the 2-sided at-will employment system would need to be a two-way commitment, which seems far worse. Would you want to work under a system where everyone was expected to honor a 3-year employment contract, and to renew it like a New York apartment lease? So that you can't accept a new higher-paying job because you're committed to your company for 2 more years? And if you quit your job "early" you could be sued or be ruled as unemployable by future employers? I don't see how there is much practical room between "anyone can terminate the relationship at any time and it's not personal" and "2-way long-term commitment and neither party can."
  - WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
    Yeah, I was just musing on some companies trying to make "dear John" talks when laying people off. I prefer to work where I might be dehumanized, but with everybody being honest about it. > The alternative to having the 2-sided at-will employment system would need to be a two-way commitment, which seems far worse. You probably just haven't tried it, or have little knowledge of how it works in practice, because your example is way radical. Learn about the actual conditions under which it works over here in Europe (you don't get locked in to a duration of employment, the notice period in Poland, for example, may be up to 3 months if you worked at one place for three years or more — to give time for knowledge transfer).
Hammershaft 1y ago
Yeah I'm personally against the spectacle of empathy theater for layoffs at companies that long outgrew Dunbar's Number. The actual quality of severance packages and the dignity / professionalism of the process should be more central to how the public responds to these layoffs.
- Seattle3503 1y ago
  When I was laid off I was cutoff from all my colleagues because my Slack was cut. In fact everything was cut in the middle of my standup and I just dropped out of my Zoom call. I think you can be big and still grant dignity and closure to folks.
  - throwawaylaptop 1y ago
    I know it probably sucks personally, but you gotta admit that's straight out of a comedy movie.
- AlexandrB 1y ago
  Doesn't a pre-recorded video speak to dignity (or lack thereof)?
  - duskwuff 1y ago
    Any announcement of a mass layoff is going to be a one-way conversation regardless of how it's conveyed. (A 150+ person conference call with the participants unmuted would inevitably be a fiasco.) Making it available to employees as a prerecorded video does at least mean that it's likely to be better rehearsed, and that the recipients can listen to it at their own pace, e.g. by pausing to take notes.
- RowanH 1y ago
  In New Zealand we have an absolutely shit employment law process where the company has to 'propose' a restructure (in a formal fashion). Then 'consult' with employees for feedback. Then 'consider' the feedback. And then 99% of the time it's all just the same and people get made redundant. It is absolutely brutal as it invites the chance of hope during the downsizing - and implies staff will be able to provide alternative suggestions. Which is quite plainly bananas. It's enshrined in law and if you don't follow the process as an employer you can get taken to task by the governing body around it. It's just far easier, and less harmful emotionally, to rip the band aid and provide a good package.
brk 1y ago
At this point a firing or layoff might as well just be a text message: "You're fired. K, thx, bye". Any words beyond that are just fluff anyway. To the person getting let go, it really doesn't matter if the decision caused the CEO to get ulcers, or if it was the easiest decision ever. Executive teams only take responsibility in words.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Someone1234 1y ago
  I understand your point, but employees do need to know a lot of important information that cannot be communicated like that e.g. health/dental benefit lapse, severance, references, etc. It is actually really important in mass layoffs to have this information immediately to hand.
  - xienze 1y ago
    They email you said documents or a link to an employee services website.
  - paxys 1y ago
    I’d much rather get a link to all this information than sit while an HR drone recites it to me for 10 minutes.
- drozycki 1y ago
  Why bother with a text? Just lock them out of their accounts. They'll figure it out. The termination ritual is for the people that stay and who the company may wish to hire in the future.
  - abyssin 1y ago
    Is this sarcasm?
- gosub100 1y ago
  according to this, a 2024 tesla layoff just locked people out the building: https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-staff-locked-out-layoffs https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-staff-locked-out-layoffs
hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
Thank you. I always get frustrated whenever there are layoffs that everyone pounces on "but they didn't say exactly the right things, in exactly the right way, exactly how I expected!" Layoffs suck, period. Like the good advice goes when starting a new relationship "Just ignore everything they say, and only focus on what they do." A generous severance package is loads more important than nitpicking the format of the layoff announcement. Plus, Atlassian famously has a global, distributed team that embraced remote work. Someone somewhere is getting the recorded clip regardless.
- ReptileMan 1y ago
  >"but they didn't say exactly the right things, in exactly the right way, exactly how I expected!" There is no right way to lay off someone. Only different shades of bad.
  - tonyhart7 1y ago
    Yep, only worse and less worse just make it fast and not painful at least
  - armada651 1y ago
    There are right ways and wrong ways to lay off someone. They aren't determined by words, but by actions. If the company has a healthy cashflow it can afford to give the employees that have been laid off a larger runway in terms of how many months of salary they will still pay out. If you've given them stock options, you can give them more time to decide whether to exercise the vested option. I'd gladly take a "Good riddance" with 6 months of salary and 2 years validity of my options over a "We regret that it has come to this point" with just a one-month notice.
    - AtlanticThird 1y ago
      I agree with the theme of your message, but it's actually very challenging legally to change an options expiration date after its issued, and likely has negative tax implications
jackmottatx 1y ago
[dead]
gchamonlive 1y ago
My last layoff was a lot more impersonal and they still called me. I had expressed a couple of months before my desire to leave. They then called me to say it was "a hard decision but it was best for the company to let me go". I almost laughed. How hard is it really to let someone go that wants to go? Worse than using a pre-recorded video is doing a live meeting with a default script. These corpocrats are like robots.
- nomel 1y ago
  > These corpocrats are like robots. I'm from the US, so employment here is at will. There were layoffs at every company that I worked for, and are entirely expect by anyone what has worked a while, when the economy turns down a bit. Out of them all, the "red envelope on your desk" was the best approach, in my opinion. It let people have a moment to themselves to react to and accept something that they were, at that point, unable to change. Then, the manager would have one-on-one with everyone, to explain the packages. In my opinion, I wouldn't want a manager to tell me. It would be awkward and unnecessary, since it's usually entirely out of their control.
burnt-resistor 1y ago
Meta did/does layoffs by email (rather than internal messaging because it disconnects access to everything) and makes everyone in the company WfH that day. Devices get FedEx'ed back. Zero communication other than "Sorry, not sorry" impersonal boilerplate.

It's a pretty impersonal way to announce layoffs but I think they all tend to be impersonal. I do think the 6 months of pay says a lot more than the fact that they used a video.

SoftTalker 1y ago

Yeah the severance is nice but the execution is lame. If you don't have the balls to tell an employee to his or her face that they don't have a job anymore, you shouldn't be a manager or executive. Maybe it's a very distributed team, I guess then there's isn't a great way to do that.

geodel 1y ago
> If you don't have the balls to tell an employee to his or her face that they don't... This is just bullshit. Managers don't have to do any such thing as it may become unnecessarily confrontational. Similarly lot of people resign via email. There is no need to have "guts" to tell manager in their face.
- chrisco255 1y ago
  I mean, if you want to burn a bridge you can do so. Sometimes it's warranted. However, if you have a good relationship with your manager then it's absolutely ideal to tell it to their face (or with a 1 on 1 call). It's not about guts it's about mutual respect. Likewise for layoffs.
  - geodel 1y ago
    Right. If situation allows doing face to face is nice. But thing as they are lately doing via canned message or email is perfectly fine and one need not think any less of manager or employee just based on their communication method.
- ilc 1y ago
  You can do both. You should ALWAYS write a formal resignation letter that's about 3 lines at most, before talking to the manager. It just stops a ton of confusion, hope, etc. It allows that discussion to focus on "Do you want the two weeks?" and "What do you want me to do with those two weeks if you want them." Part of being a good employee is making things clear to your manager.
mingus88 1y ago
150 people is huge. The logistics of doing this in person just don’t make sense. Are you going to send out hundreds of calendar invites spread across weeks for the sole purpose of being nice to people? Are affected employees expected to queue up to get their personal “you’re fired” before their access is cut?
- rdoherty 1y ago
  I worked at Yahoo in 2008 when they laid off thousands and yes every single person got a calendar invite and met in a meeting room 1:1 with a manager. It was difficult but they did it. Times definitely have changed.
  - xp84 1y ago
    Wow, just the logistics of that is impressive. I feel like I would watch a 60-minute documentary on pulling that together because it no doubt took dozens or hundreds of people weeks of logistics to do that, and unlike almost any other major project, literally no one involved was happy about any part of it.
    - resize2996 1y ago
      Doing unhappy work at Yahoo probably wasn't unusual in 2008
  - xmprt 1y ago
    Did the people who got a calendar invite know that they were getting laid off in advance?
    - Macha 1y ago
      I worked at Yahoo some years later and the process was the same when I was there. Yes, people generally put two and two together when there was a calendar invite with their manager and HR. We were in a European office though, so layoffs aren't American-style "escorted from the office with immediate effect".
dennis_jeeves2 1y ago
> If you don't have the balls to tell an employee to his or her face that they don't have a job anymore, you shouldn't be a manager or executive. What if your balls get ripped off? Just saying...
neilv 1y ago
> Maybe it's a very distributed team, I guess then there's isn't a great way to do that. If you want to do it all at once, for all time zones... If there's overlapping "core hours" for different time zones, or you can schedule an all-hands videoconf time, you can do it then. Or do one for the global West, and one for the global East (which will have different cultural nuances anyway, and possibly separate management structures). It's not that different than in-office. Except, for in-office, remaining colleagues see a person boxing up their stuff and walking out with their stuff in a box, or (worse) security escorting the people off the property. And then there's usually the desk of a terminate colleague there as a visual reminder for awhile. One in-office layoff I saw, they arranged for all the people to be laid off to have impromptu meetings with their managers, and to go to conference rooms, at the same time... and then notified everyone still at their desks to go to an all-(remaining)-hands meeting, in a different office space, where they were told of the layoffs. Most of the axed people were already gone when the others returned. It might have been good intentions, but I'm not sure that was a good move. It's a tricky problem, whether in-office or remote. Partly because the situation isn't right. ICs are more often let go because management failed, rather than any fault of the ICs.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  I was part of one mass layoff. They had two meetings at our site, one for the people being retained and one for the people being let go. We had an idea what was happening but you didn't know until your meeting started which group you were in. It was done in person though not via a video message.
- xp84 1y ago
  > the situation isn't right. ICs are more often let go because management failed, rather than any fault of the ICs. That is pretty much guaranteed to happen though, unless you have a system where the assumption is employment for life at all costs. Management's job is to make decisions, many decisions won't work out, and for some of those, the consequences mean some change in what roles are going to be needed. Sometimes it's a management success that means a certain role isn't needed too ("we successfully rolled out software to book business trips, so we don't need 17 travel bookers anymore"). And anyway, let's stipulate that managers should also be punished by being sacked for any big mistake: That wouldn't save ICs, since if you're, say, pivoting away from making furniture, you still don't need the furniture makers, even if you sack the "VP of Furniture" or the CEO. And it'd be stupid to appoint a new VP of Furniture over and over to keep trying to 'make furniture happen' just to save the jobs.
jfengel 1y ago
Doing that for 150 people is a pretty long, ugly day, while everybody waited for their turn. You could gather everybody in the same room, and announce it there, but that's still not really face-to-face. Delegating it to their direct managers is even worse. They're generally not the ones who made the decision. Even if they were the ones who submitted a list of their people they could live without, it was the higher-ups who approved the layoff en masse. There's just not a great way to give bad news. A video sucks, but it attracts attention only because it's different from the other sucky ways people do it.
themadturk 1y ago
I worked for Weyerhaeuser, a major US forest products firm in the Seattle area during the early 2000s. In 2009 they decided to get out of the forestry products business and become nothing more than a land owner. Multiple thousands of workers were let go. At least at the company headquarters, managers met with every worker to tell them whether they'd been laid off or not. The announcement came in the summer, a couple of months before the actual lay-off date, and salary and benefits were extended until year end. It was by far the most humane layoff I'd ever experienced.

belter 1y ago

What about if they upgrade it to 12 months, and a fire by SMS ?

ozgrakkurt 1y ago
Pretty sure vast majority of people would prefer that
Hammershaft 1y ago
If a company is bigger than Dunbar's Number I would absolutely take that trade as a prospective employee! I think firing by SMS also serves the noble purpose of illustrating to prospective employees that these are purely transactional relationships and that, no, this isn't a family, the exec's heart will not bleed.
notahacker 1y ago
Make it 24 months and most people will be happy being fired with a robocalled "fuck you"...
pmkary 1y ago
I actually have seen a very random company who fired its employees by SMS in the middle of the night... And not a single penny of severance packaging. They only got their last payment and that was it. It's a shame I forgot the company name to have them face some shame here...

WesolyKubeczek 1y ago

I think it still sucks but at least it’s not made to look personal but not really. When you were sorting your damn spreadsheet where I ranked at the bottom, you cared zilch; you could give my cognitive abilities some credit by not pretending you suddenly got infected with empathy or something.

xp84 1y ago
I realize that it sucks to be laid off. But business really is just business and it has nothing to do with how much any person values you. You would rightfully stop working immediately if your company can't pay you even for a week. They stop employing you if it no longer makes economic sense. It's the same thing in the reverse. I could be told tomorrow to lay off some or all of the people who report to me if we can't afford to pay them. I'd hate it, I'd cry and feel sick and not be able to sleep all night wishing I could avoid it. I know that from experience. Nobody wants that and even CEOs feel like shit when they implement layoffs. The alternative to having the 2-sided at-will employment system would need to be a two-way commitment, which seems far worse. Would you want to work under a system where everyone was expected to honor a 3-year employment contract, and to renew it like a New York apartment lease? So that you can't accept a new higher-paying job because you're committed to your company for 2 more years? And if you quit your job "early" you could be sued or be ruled as unemployable by future employers? I don't see how there is much practical room between "anyone can terminate the relationship at any time and it's not personal" and "2-way long-term commitment and neither party can."
- WesolyKubeczek 1y ago
  Yeah, I was just musing on some companies trying to make "dear John" talks when laying people off. I prefer to work where I might be dehumanized, but with everybody being honest about it. > The alternative to having the 2-sided at-will employment system would need to be a two-way commitment, which seems far worse. You probably just haven't tried it, or have little knowledge of how it works in practice, because your example is way radical. Learn about the actual conditions under which it works over here in Europe (you don't get locked in to a duration of employment, the notice period in Poland, for example, may be up to 3 months if you worked at one place for three years or more — to give time for knowledge transfer).

Hammershaft 1y ago

Yeah I'm personally against the spectacle of empathy theater for layoffs at companies that long outgrew Dunbar's Number. The actual quality of severance packages and the dignity / professionalism of the process should be more central to how the public responds to these layoffs.

Seattle3503 1y ago
When I was laid off I was cutoff from all my colleagues because my Slack was cut. In fact everything was cut in the middle of my standup and I just dropped out of my Zoom call. I think you can be big and still grant dignity and closure to folks.
- throwawaylaptop 1y ago
  I know it probably sucks personally, but you gotta admit that's straight out of a comedy movie.
AlexandrB 1y ago
Doesn't a pre-recorded video speak to dignity (or lack thereof)?
- duskwuff 1y ago
  Any announcement of a mass layoff is going to be a one-way conversation regardless of how it's conveyed. (A 150+ person conference call with the participants unmuted would inevitably be a fiasco.) Making it available to employees as a prerecorded video does at least mean that it's likely to be better rehearsed, and that the recipients can listen to it at their own pace, e.g. by pausing to take notes.
RowanH 1y ago
In New Zealand we have an absolutely shit employment law process where the company has to 'propose' a restructure (in a formal fashion). Then 'consult' with employees for feedback. Then 'consider' the feedback. And then 99% of the time it's all just the same and people get made redundant. It is absolutely brutal as it invites the chance of hope during the downsizing - and implies staff will be able to provide alternative suggestions. Which is quite plainly bananas. It's enshrined in law and if you don't follow the process as an employer you can get taken to task by the governing body around it. It's just far easier, and less harmful emotionally, to rip the band aid and provide a good package.

brk 1y ago

At this point a firing or layoff might as well just be a text message: "You're fired. K, thx, bye". Any words beyond that are just fluff anyway. To the person getting let go, it really doesn't matter if the decision caused the CEO to get ulcers, or if it was the easiest decision ever. Executive teams only take responsibility in words.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Someone1234 1y ago
I understand your point, but employees do need to know a lot of important information that cannot be communicated like that e.g. health/dental benefit lapse, severance, references, etc. It is actually really important in mass layoffs to have this information immediately to hand.
- xienze 1y ago
  They email you said documents or a link to an employee services website.
- paxys 1y ago
  I’d much rather get a link to all this information than sit while an HR drone recites it to me for 10 minutes.
drozycki 1y ago
Why bother with a text? Just lock them out of their accounts. They'll figure it out. The termination ritual is for the people that stay and who the company may wish to hire in the future.
- abyssin 1y ago
  Is this sarcasm?
gosub100 1y ago
according to this, a 2024 tesla layoff just locked people out the building: https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-staff-locked-out-layoffs https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-staff-locked-out-layoffs

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago

Thank you. I always get frustrated whenever there are layoffs that everyone pounces on "but they didn't say exactly the right things, in exactly the right way, exactly how I expected!" Layoffs suck, period. Like the good advice goes when starting a new relationship "Just ignore everything they say, and only focus on what they do." A generous severance package is loads more important than nitpicking the format of the layoff announcement. Plus, Atlassian famously has a global, distributed team that embraced remote work. Someone somewhere is getting the recorded clip regardless.

ReptileMan 1y ago
>"but they didn't say exactly the right things, in exactly the right way, exactly how I expected!" There is no right way to lay off someone. Only different shades of bad.
- tonyhart7 1y ago
  Yep, only worse and less worse just make it fast and not painful at least
- armada651 1y ago
  There are right ways and wrong ways to lay off someone. They aren't determined by words, but by actions. If the company has a healthy cashflow it can afford to give the employees that have been laid off a larger runway in terms of how many months of salary they will still pay out. If you've given them stock options, you can give them more time to decide whether to exercise the vested option. I'd gladly take a "Good riddance" with 6 months of salary and 2 years validity of my options over a "We regret that it has come to this point" with just a one-month notice.
  - AtlanticThird 1y ago
    I agree with the theme of your message, but it's actually very challenging legally to change an options expiration date after its issued, and likely has negative tax implications

jackmottatx 1y ago

[dead]

gchamonlive 1y ago

My last layoff was a lot more impersonal and they still called me. I had expressed a couple of months before my desire to leave. They then called me to say it was "a hard decision but it was best for the company to let me go". I almost laughed. How hard is it really to let someone go that wants to go? Worse than using a pre-recorded video is doing a live meeting with a default script. These corpocrats are like robots.

nomel 1y ago
> These corpocrats are like robots. I'm from the US, so employment here is at will. There were layoffs at every company that I worked for, and are entirely expect by anyone what has worked a while, when the economy turns down a bit. Out of them all, the "red envelope on your desk" was the best approach, in my opinion. It let people have a moment to themselves to react to and accept something that they were, at that point, unable to change. Then, the manager would have one-on-one with everyone, to explain the packages. In my opinion, I wouldn't want a manager to tell me. It would be awkward and unnecessary, since it's usually entirely out of their control.

burnt-resistor 1y ago

Meta did/does layoffs by email (rather than internal messaging because it disconnects access to everything) and makes everyone in the company WfH that day. Devices get FedEx'ed back. Zero communication other than "Sorry, not sorry" impersonal boilerplate.