A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work

I've experienced a company not only treating its employees as numbers in a sheet, but also actively lying to them.

I was part of a well performing team in a corporation in the US. Management told us that we've been making a real impact in the company's goals and they are going to increase our capacity to accomplish even more the next year by adding several more engineers in India to help us with tasks. The facade was well maintained - we got expanded goals for the next year, celebratory meeting for exceeding expectations etc. but you could clearly tell something was off in meetings with management. Little did we know that we ended up training our replacements.

Majority of my teammates got kicked out of the company by security, getting paperwork on their way out without a chance to even say goodbye. I was offered a role in another team, but the trust by that point was severed so much that I instead decided to take severance and leave as well.

The lesson for me has been to always act like an independent contractor or business owner, even when employed by a corporation or "family-like" startup. Based on mine and many of my friends' experiences there's no such thing as loyalty in the business setting anymore. You are on your own and you should only engage as much as it makes sense to you. Extra hours beyond what's required (e.g. beyond 40hrs) should directly and clearly benefit you.

I saw IBM uproot an entire support team, persuading them to sell their homes and relocate their children to another U.S. state with more lenient layoff laws. Once the team had moved, the company made everyone redundant.

The proportion of psychopaths on the boards of most companies is off the scale:

"...Hare reports that about 1 percent of the general population meets the clinical criteria for psychopathy.[11] Hare further claims that the prevalence of psychopaths is higher in the business world than in the general population. Figures of around 3–4 percent have been cited for more senior positions in business.[6] A 2011 study of Australian white-collar managers found that 5.76 percent could be classed as psychopathic and another 10.42 percent dysfunctional with psychopathic characteristics..." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace

> but you could clearly tell something was off in meetings with management

What signs were there? Or was it simply some subconscious feeling?

Only one was obvious in the hindsight: management stopped caring and sometimes attending product demos, but really cared about India's part in the deliveries (justified as we want them to level up quickly).

Everything was subtle:

Managers distanced themselves from the team, had more meetings between themselves ("for efficiency - team grew so we cannot include so many people in the meetings anymore"), they were looking at each other often when making decisions (which to me looked as if they were trying to think how to handle requests knowing the team will be laid off soon).

In the final weeks management started suddenly taking/reassigning tasks out of US team's hands in ways that didn't make sense.

Reason #54298 why IBM deserves nothing.

> adding several more engineers in India to help us with tasks

Haha this is what my current company is trying to do now. Bet we are dragging our feet helping the team in India. If they chop our heads off now, you bet they’re gonna be left with ruins. Fuck them.

Come to think of it, this is what our management seems to be trying to do now. If true, that is mildly amusing given that we just managed to avoid major pain resulting from all those helping hands.

In my recent layoff, basically what happened is that another company won the contract as the prime and we became the sub The new company brought it a bunch of their hires, then management combined our teams and suddenly everything became redundant. Two dev leads (me being one of them), two tech leads, two product owners, too many testers, etc. After this, they laid off about half the team, most of them being from the subcontractor. It was sneaky and unethical. In the end they were all like “Woops we hired too many people. So sorry!”.

The kicker is that they used me in the RFP to win the contract since I was a specialized SME.

Not a clinical psychologists, so something about grains of salt.

I use term 'highly functioning sociopaths', you can see them often in management since they are attracted to pay, power and percieved 'prestige'. You know the types - smart, hard working, ruthless, learned to fake genuine nice emotions and human interactions to almost perfection over years at least under normal, controlled, and previously experienced settings. Once some novel bad situation happens, cracks start to show.

Banks and anything re finance is probably the highest concentration. Another areas are those with real power, whatever that means. Its trait like every other, not binary but gradual. In my experience its more 1/3 of these in middle management, C suite most probably majority. Can't be a nice guy and get, survive and even thrive there.

How many people are involved in scheming such strategies? There must be leaks of the planning, right?

That something like this can be legal shows how f*cked up the US is.

Nothings going to change until consequences for this behavior is established.