Sad Times
By Citronella on Saturday, August 16 2008, 12:33 - Permalink
The Fabulous Feline's company, not having met its previsions last quarter, has just laid off a bunch of people. Some of them, he said, were obviously the first ones in line for this kind of treatment. Others were not.
As, for instance, the senior engineers and developers who, as far as he knows, were the only ones to have the answers to some of the questions he constantly asks.
Or as his own manager, who had just hired three people, formed a new team and got an exciting project going. As the others, he was told on a gloomy Monday morning, without any kind of forewarning (actually, a week from then, the company still seemed to be throwing money through the windows for getting always newer equipment and the last in technologies), that this was his last day and he had until 5pm to pack. "The guy was devastated," the Feline added. Who wouldn't be?
I have no doubt that people high-up had good reasons to decide to fire people and chose to get rid of these particular ones.
But the whole week has been very hectic, the Feline tells me. Logistics are heavily perturbed, teams have been moved around, people do not know who to refer to anymore nor who has the answers to their questions, and everybody fears for their own ass while trying to hide how relieved they are not the ones to have been canned and wondering how badly will the shareholders freak out.
"I have no idea how we are ever going to finish the projects on time now," Simon concluded. "And I had to have a plain bagel because they did not have cranberry ones this morning!"
Comments
Hello Citronella. Sorry to read about unsettling times in Fabulous Feline's company. Unfortunately, the people who remain tend to be sad at the loss of their colleagues, and possibly guilty that they have been spared. Let's hope that this strengthens the organisation and that FF has a good future. But, I assume that he will also be exploring alternatives.
pierre l > Thanks. I doubt the Feline will really start exploring alternatives any time soon, as he has just been hired two weeks ago — obviously firing him right after having hired him would be a useless loss of money for the company. Plus, they really, really like him there (I can't easily go into details, but basically they've moved earth and hell to have him where he is now).
That sounds terrible! Did those employees at least have severance packages to tide them over while they look for another position? Hopefully FF will be safe from this upheaval!
Mad Hatter > They did, but it still came as a shock. I think the Feline's boss, for instance, was more upset about being removed from a project he set up, and an environment he liked a lot, than horribly worried about the months to come (though of course, as long as you haven't secured a new job, things are pretty terrible). Also, this was such a contradiction with the apparent wealth of the company (sure, they did not do as good as expected, but what employees saw was good benefits, new high-tech and expensive hardware, and so on...) that nobody at this level had even started imagining it.