I hate hate HATE that when huge companies make dumb, short-sighted decisions and then lay off people they don’t give a shit about and think of as interchangeable parts, those same people are then forced to go on social media to talk about how their “role has been impacted” and how grateful they are for all the wonderful experiences they have been granted by their former employers.
To be clear, I am not criticizing anyone for making these sorts of posts. We all do what I have to do to get by, and it makes sense not to burn any bridges.
What I am criticizing is the way the market has forced us all to internalize this sort of anodyne, euphemistic, passive-voice HR speak. We are impacted and made redundant. Change makes us stronger. We are excited for our next opportunity.
Bullshit.
Maybe it’s because I am in the tech industry and most of the people I encounter are getting laid off by tech companies, but this behavior seems particularly prevalent among tech and tech-adjacent workers. We have been habituated to think of these boom-bust cycles and constant re-orgs as natural phenomena to which we have to adapt as though they are changes of season or the weather.
But they are not. They are the outcomes of very specific and deliberate decisions by the people who run all these companies. They’re the ones who decide that employees need to be laid off so that the opex numbers sound better on the investor call. They’re the ones who decided that everyone needs to come back into the office so they can justify their bad real estate investments.
If they need to talk about employees made redundant so they can sleep at night, that’s their problem. The rest of us—the people who have to put up with all of this shit—shouldn’t have to cover for that.