Getting let go

It's nothing personal

Yesterday morning I woke up with a job, and by lunch time I no longer had one. I was a technical writer for a software company, and I and some colleagues (some of whom had come from across the country) were summoned a couple of weeks ago to a meeting convened yesterday at our company’s Prague office, which was the first time that all of us had met there in the year I worked for the company. Six of us were brought into a meeting room, and within a couple of minutes told that the company was restructuring, and that our positions were being removed, effective immediately.

Literally while we were in the meeting room receiving this news, our access to all company accounts was revoked. Those of us in the room couldn’t help but laugh when they gave us the news because it felt like a joke, how sudden and final it was - none of us had had any idea that this was on the cards, and although I only worked there for a year, two of the others let go had been there for 9 and 12 years. Unless we already had personal contact details for our colleagues, we had no way of telling them what had happened, or of bidding them farewell.

We were assured that the decision was no reflection on our performance at work, merely a decision that had come down from the top that these positions were no longer necessary. This is the same company that I mentioned in my previous post, the one where an executive made his “climbing a mountain/stabilising the patient” analogy - I tactfully wrote it like it was some company I’d been at in the past, but that ‘Town Hall’ (ugh) was actually only a couple of weeks ago. Seems that my colleagues and I were weighing down the share price and had to be amputated, so that the company could reach Base Camp.

The primary reason why the news came as such a shock to me, was that in the year I worked there I had completely revamped the documentation for the product I was responsible for, taking it from being a collection of sometimes incoherent and often outdated guides to discrete modules of the application, to something a new user could actually use to learn how to use the app. This was no mean feat, given how difficult it could be communicating with the development team in India, and I was moderately proud of what I’d achieved. I was also about to move on to covering a couple more applications, for which I’d been attending meetings for the last couple of weeks in which I was introduced to the new software and the teams working on it. I thought that was going pretty well, too.

It’s been a surreal feeling since yesterday morning, having all of that suddenly pulled from underneath me, even if I had only been there a year. Very technical and esoteric aspects of the software that had been rattling around my mind for weeks, were suddenly rendered completely useless and irrelevant. I’ve worked in companies before that have had reorganisations resulting in redundancies, but I’ve never seen this kind of instant cutoff before; presumably the idea is to prevent angry employees from sabotaging or stealing whatever they have access to, but it betrays a cavalier attitude towards employees that gives the lie to all the motivational claptrap the executive team liked to spout. I’ve never felt so atomised or disposable.

It also makes me wonder how that executive team think this change is going to help the company, considering that they’ve just shed at least six employees who understand how their products work. Maybe they’re going to replace us with AI or people in India, or maybe they just did it because the investors want to sell the company at as high a price as possible, by making the remaining staff look more productive than they actually were.

In the world of corporate work, this kind of ‘churn’ is not unusual. The investors, and the executive team doing the investors’ bidding, don’t actually care about the quality of the products, merely their profitability. Even if all the products fall apart because the employees who know how they work got insta-fired like I was, the investors only care when customers stop paying for those products, at which point they will probably do their best to sell the company rather than invest in it. By that time it will be too late to get back the people who once knew how it worked, even if they wanted to.

It’s silly to feel sympathy for a brand, but a company is made up of people, who are by and large trying their best to do their jobs, and it’s a shame that those people’s work is inevitably undermined and undervalued by the dispassionate logic of capitalism constantly trying to get more out of them for less, and discarding them when their cost exceeds their perceived value. Perhaps it’s my current agitated state of mind, but it feels like this can’t go on much longer on a macro scale, when the logic that pushes a publicly traded company to be ‘more profitable’ ends up destroying the company. As has been observed by others wiser and more knowledgeable than me, capitalism is the parasite that ultimately kills the host. And then what?