Googler... ex-Googler

Layoffs are a difficult thing for employees and their managers. I have seen people (one was a VP of Engineering) escorted out of the building, sent in a cab to home along with a security guard (this was in India), not allowed access to computer or talk with other employees. But, recently have had a very different experience. The current company I work for announced 30% layoffs. The list was made public within one hour of announcement. The CEO detailed the process of selecting people. The severance was very generous (3-6 months pay) along with health and other benefits. The impacted employees were allowed to keep the laptop and any other assets they took from the company. They even paid the same severance to contractors.

After the announcement, the laid off employees were given a few days in the company to allow them to say good byes. I love the CEOs comment on this ' I trusted them yesterday, I trust them today'. This was by far the kindest way of laying off employees imo. People were treated with dignity and respect.

Weird, as someone from Europe I've never experience anything else.

Layoffs here are always done in conjunction with the unions. People are moved to different jobs, helped with training etc...

Only in very critical jobs they'd walk you out immediately but then you still get the pay.

Having experienced layoffs in both US and EU companies, the difference is massive. In my experience there is very little respect for "the human" being laid off in US companies

People literally would just disappear day to day. I've had several instances where I only found out a colleague had been fired because I tried to write them on Slack only to find that their account had been deactivated

Personally I felt constantly worried working in such an environment and I don't want to work for another US company again if I can help it

There are of course bad cases in the EU, but in my experience it's way less common than in the US

Layoffs in US companies are a BCP event. It's like an earthquake or a tsunami. Weeks of chaos while you figure out who survived, and who's now doing the work previously done by a team that no longer exists.

I watched a layoff take out half the security team during an incident. That was fun.

> A business continuity plan (BCP) is a system of prevention and recovery from potential threats to a company.

I feel like global acronym bankruptcy is overdue.

I'm reminded of the last part of 'TLA' form the Jargon File (I had a hard copy back in college that I read cover to cover).

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/TLA.html

...

The self-effacing phrase “TDM TLA” (Too Damn Many...) is often used to bemoan the plethora of TLAs in use. In 1989, a random of the journalistic persuasion asked hacker Paul Boutin “What do you think will be the biggest problem in computing in the 90s?” Paul's straight-faced response: “There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms.” (To be exact, there are 26^3 = 17,576.) There is probably some karmic justice in the fact that Paul Boutin subsequently became a journalist.