Well, at least it's out in the open

[cdybedahl]

So, finally, three weeks after we boss-like types got to know about it the board announced to the entire company that people are going to be fired. The Operations division is to be shrunk to half of what it is today. And we're not going to be creative with the employment security laws, so we'll get to lose a few good people and keep some people who occupy space and waste perfectly good oxygen. On the not-so-bad side, they're not doing the traditional "fire all technicians and keep the salescritters" thing, but cutting equally across the board.

Verdict so far: Dilbert still dominant, but both Kafka and Catch-22 are ascendant.

Comments

mew

[seaya.livejournal.com]

I hope you keep your job!

Also, are they fired, or laid off? Here fired means terminated for a bad reason, laid off means terminated for no fault of your own, e.g. pink slip.

Re: mew

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

As long as they're not totally insane, I and my wife (we work for the same company) are quite safe. I'm at the moment the only person we have who knows anything about the equpiment that holds and backs up about six terabytes of data. My wife designed, built and runs (with one assistant) our customer-side mail system with over one million mailboxes in it. If either of those systems break and we're not there to fix them, the entire company is in deep trouble. Our bosses know this, too.

And it's laid off, not fired. As in "Oops, we didn't sell nearly as much as our pipe-dream projections said we would, so we must show our owners that We Are Doing Something About It."

Note: the actual real-life sales results are within 10% of what I guessed back in January they'd be around now. They're 5% of the pipe-dream projections (that is, 95% under budgeted revenue). But I'm just a stupid technician, so of course I can't know anything about sales and economics, so why would they listen to me? I mean, it's just people exactly like me they're trying to sell to. Clearly the marketing idiots must know much better than me what I'd consider buying. Obviously.

[child-of-air.livejournal.com]

Ouch. Good thing you are keeping your job. But laying people off is never a good thing.