A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work

The thing that bothers me most about layoffs due to “financial difficulties” is when you observe management wasting absurd amounts of money on something in one year, then announcing the following year that they have to make cuts to baseline, “low level” employees that don’t cost much at all.

This kind of managerial behavior seriously kills employee motivation, because it both communicates that 1) no one has job security and 2) that management is apparently incapable of managing money responsibly.

“Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants and conferences that accomplished nothing, so now we have to cut an employee making $40k” really erodes morale in ways that merely firing people doesn’t.

One thing I learned the other day is to never believe the internal corporate newsletters. For an entire year, pretty much every single day would bring in an e-mail from Company BU A, or Cross-Company Initiative X, or Podcast with CEO, or such. Every single one of them would talk about the great successes in recovering from the economic crisis, the amazing results this quarter, the great product release here, another successful merger there, new perspectives on Bitcoin or AI or such from CEO, whatnot - all giving you the picture of the enterprise being like literal USS Enterprise hitting warp speed. And then a layoff wave finally reaches your department, and you learn that apparently the whole BU is deep in the red and they're forced to cut staff across the board, and it's been like this forever, and that's why there was an emergency meeting last Thursday (called "Financial Update Q3 for BU Y" or something, non-obligatory and otherwise not announced or discussed), and "don't you ever attend town halls?".

(Yeah, no one at PM level or above does, there's nothing relevant in them. Until one day there is.)

Newsletters, meanwhile, continue coming and announcing even greater growth due to digital transformation in the age of blockchain or AI or stuff.

Lesson learned: the first impression was correct - it's all internal marketing, and it's about as truthful and helpful to the recipient as regular marketing, i.e. not at all.