"We won't share a list of the affected employees because some of them might not want the information to be public" was the biggest bullshit I've heard recently - no fiction needed.
Discovering that people you worked with for years have been laid off only because you randomly notice their slack is deactivated has to be one of 2024s gifts to humanity.
You think that started in 2024? You sweet summer child
“Hey is Dave working today? We were supposed to groom the backlog today.”
“Dave is no longer with us”
“Oh no! What do we do? Send a condolences card to his partner? Do we have contact information? I worked with Dave for three years”
“Oh.. no he just has been let go.”
“Okay.. uh. So who will be the scrum master now?”
“You will have to take on some extra responsibilities while we transition to the new team structure”
“:sadparrot:”
That's at least better than I've experienced:
Manager at a standup "got some news. Unfortunately Bob has passed out"
Confused looks.
"What do you mean passed out?"
"Oh I mean he's died"
Horror from everyone there.
No further information was ever given.
Personally, I think it’s not the company’s place to give out further information in this case, absent a request from Bob’s family.
I think the issue is rather that the manager tries to sugarcoat the fact that someone has died by using very abstract language.
Might have being going for “passed away”
Managers are people too and will have their own emotions they are dealing with.
At least they weren't announced as 'useless', so there is that.
As a manager you have a responsibility to communicate this to your team and give them resources to deal with the emotions (you, the manager, being one of the resources).
So sure, you have your own stuff to deal with - use the resources you have for that (eg your manager) but when it comes time to face your team, be a professional and don’t shut down in front of them. They need you too.
Source: I’ve been in management positions and had to deal with a bunch of layoffs and yes, the occasional outright actual death.
So why even say he died? Maybe just say he is not working for the company anymore and let the team figure it out for themselves if they are that curious.
If a colleague of mine died, and management described this as "they are no longer with the company", this would create some huge trust issues if I found out. Which in any place I've ever worked, I would find out.
"Passed out" is just a verbal typo for "passed on", an accepted euphemism in English for someone dying. I think that slip is forgivable, clearly not ideal, but human beings make mistakes. I also agree with the parent comment that it isn't management's place to provide details about the death, but IMHO they have a responsibility to say that's what happened.
There aren't many ways to get more condescending than this. Congrats.
Agreed that the condescension is the worst part of this, but a close 2nd-place has to be how cliché this is by now.
Someone at my work created a secret bot that scrapes the outlook contacts list and diffs it from the previous day, each day. This way we get daily updates whenever a new person is onboarded or offboarded.
As employees we now have more clarity about the state of layoffs and hiring decisions that most of the management team does.
I suggest doing the same within your org if you can.
Google has had a very visible tool internally for this for years. It lists every single person that leaves on a given day. It even has a system set up where the person leaving can email it, and the note would be attached to their leaving notice. You can also search the system and see anybody that's left at any point. So I could look for people that left 15 years ago.
The layoffs the last 2 years have been interesting in that the people aren't officially gone when they are laid off, as Google continues to pay them for 60 or 90 days. So a bunch of people who appear on this list all at once 60 days after they let go.
Boy do I miss go/epitaphs; you could actually sort by departures based on tenure as well. But I've heard you could get into trouble for scraping epitaphs or specific ganpati groups to figure out who has left specifically around layoff seaon.
Ganapati? Lord Ganesh is called Ganapati.
Google's access management database is called Ganpati - think ActiveDirectory or LDAP.
We did the same informally with Slack, but it's a great tip :)
There's even some automations around leadership calendar meeting titles+invitees that I might or not have heard about. If leadership wants to play games people can play games back.
If the politics internally are nutty enough you can do alot with this sort of skullduggery… It only works if it’s secret or the folks are oblivious.
I worked at a place where this sort of thing was done. It became practice to setup fake meetings or conduct real meetings with vague titles as a misdirection.
The other scenario is if you let consultants inside the firewall. Big 5 guys always gather intel on org charts and goings on for more business. These guys aren’t very clever and are easy to manipulate with this sort of thing.
There was a recent post about a similar script, the LDAP diff pipeline: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39311507
Someone had done this at a previous company I worked at. You’d subscribe to a mailing list and get a daily/weekly summary of joiners, leavers and title changes. Pretty useful.
When management eventually found out they were seemingly supportive, but in the next layoff they made sure to reach out to the owner to make him “pause” the tool just before the layoffs started.
When the mailing list was unpaused again the laid-off folks weren’t mentioned, as if they’d never existed in the first place. Felt very 1984-esque.
This has been one of my most surprising/weird experiences working for US startups. In the other two countries I've been, at the very least my manager sat with each of us, or in group, or some sort of announcement when someone I was working with would stop (either voluntarily or involuntarily). Seeing names and 1-1 conversations just disappear from Slack without anyone saying anything is very bizarre.
But I had to learn that as a lesson as well, since I might've learned something from them and left e.g. some commands that I use once every few months in the chat, now gone forever. This is also literally the only reason I have Linkedin, so I don't suddenly lose contact with those people (I don't have FB).
I've pushed for 30 day retention in slack for this very reason.
It used to be that way. Work in the office generally requires a face-to-face meeting, and a box to put your stuff in before you are escorted out of the office.
Most recently, during COVID, I was laid off with no contact with my manager and no explanation. My recruiter called right before my access was terminated at 5pm.
I don't know if it became the norm in the US because of remote work, but as a manager I make a point of announcing to my team when one of them just go let go. Like in the next 30min or so.
I guess I don't tell all teams and all our 200 engineers that this random guy is no longer with us.
2024? It happened to me in 2020, right after Covid. I was unable to reach a colleague, thought he was sick (not unusual, he had health issues often). Until the “standup” rolled around and we were told he was laid off.
Apparently he himself found out after most of his logins were shut off.
Corporate world is as gutless as it is soulless
I've heard from a friend that the way they found someone was laid off was by Google Calendar suddenly removing the person that was laid off from invites while in a 1:1 with their manager. The manager had no context. That kind of inhuman feeling is what exemplifies the state of layoffs in the modern day.
Last time I was laid off (2022) it worked this way. It was a remote job - I was pulled into a random 1:1 meeting with my manager and immediately afterward I found all my permissions/access was gone.
My biggest complaint is that lying is just completely endemic. The best liars, who lie so well you question if they're lying when it's right in front of you, are at the top, and you just progress down from there with everyone playing along to known lies. Finding and working in areas with people who care about the truth is like a priceless haven.
Step 1. A company lays off employees and shares the list.
Step 2. The list is shared on social media.
Step 3. A former employee that's on that list sues the company.
Has this ever happened? I know that in the US at least we say that "you can sue anyone for anything," but it seems a stretch to think that a company could face legal liability for disclosing internally that someone was let go.
exactly -if I ran a big company, no way I would send out a notice to people still working there every time someone was let go to say who got fired or laid off.
People who need to know find out who is gone, it just takes a little longer.
We're people really told before, or did everyone simply find out because they were all in the office together?
I know when I worked in a big company 20 years ago I would have no idea who was let go in another office.
Last big layoff I was a part of in the before times, I was working for a huge aerospace company who just lost out on a major gov contract. We were told layoffs were coming, and they would happen on a certain day. You would get a phone call to come to your manager's office for a private meeting, or you wouldn't and that meant you were not laid off.
So everyone is sitting at their desk, too keyed up to do any work, just waiting to hear who's desk phone is going to go off next.
My call came late in the afternoon (about the time I was starting to think I was safe). Everyone in the cube farm knew you just got hit as you walked toward the boss's office where the boss and the HR lady were waiting.
I can't remember lists ever being revealed to employees. I would usually find out when an email bounced back.
I really don’t get why companies won’t allow limited access to email at least to send a goodbye message and contact details to their colleagues. You could spin up new email boxes if you are worried about them downloading emails even.
It just seems really cold to not let people say goodbye and point their colleagues to their LinkedIn so they can get some recommendations and such. For the companies that allow this I salute you.
Could be they want to avoid the remaining employees getting emails saying Turns out the competition pay much better anyway.
You can find most of your coworkers on LinkedIn, if that is your goal.
My previous job never told us who was laid off —- once I had a meeting with a woman later that day and I only realized after she didn’t show up.
I too found slack to be the layoff lookup tool.
Hah, is Slack doing anything with this data, it sounds like Salesforce has a good intel on a lotttt of companies. Things like re-orgs (bunch of new Slack channels, archival of old ones) who's working with whom...
One of the companies in my early career always sent out an email blast with someone's parting words. In the case of a negative termination, the leadership usually wrote something about them. The words were always read by HR before, but I really appreciated it. It felt more humane.
Right. I think they just want to avoid being on the front-page of startup news sites with a headline like "<company> lays off <n>% of workforce," so they don't call it a layoff and try to keep a lid on how many people were let go.
Of course, because they can't say that they have to come up with other narratives which wind up sounding disingenuous at best.
I mean, I've seen a lay off once where all the names of the people affected where listed and taped on the door of the department. People came to work checking the list, just like I did 20 years ago to know if I passed my degree.
Not sure it's much better :D