A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work

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 time I was tasked with auditing what my team spent, at a tech startup. During my audit, I found that we'd spent a million dollars to make a single phone call.

Basically:

* We were spending money like it was going out of style

* We were getting the highest level of support contracts on EVERY piece of hardware and software that we bought. This mean that we would routinely purchase hardware, stick it in the corner of our data center, and it would have an expensive support contract, before it had even been installed in a rack and plugged in. In some cases, we bought stuff that never got installed.

* The software support contract from one of our vendors was a million dollars a year. The software was quite reliable. In a single year, we'd made a single support call.