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I know this is a joke, but this is why my coworkers and I were muted during the meeting we were laid off.
I received a meeting invite the night before for 9am with two HR people and some middle manager above me that I never met. It was obvious what the meeting was going to be.
No meeting that has an HR person on it is a good thing.
I unequivocally disagree as I once conducted a training session teaching them what Gmail labels were - was very fruitful. ;)
Sorry that you got laid off, it sucks. Hope you are doing better now!
So a black mirror short story, as a meeting notetaker transcript love it!
One cool touch would be a 2 bullet AI summary at the end with em-dashes.
I've been in a few meetings like this. In all cases it was because they, as business leaders, were not able to run a profitable company.
That's the most irritating part.
It’s even more irritating when you’re laid off during record profits
Why that part is most irritating? This is very hard job as evidenced by huge percentage of failing companies.
Are cherry09 and steve_ AI agents?
I thought they were real people, in a near future where everyone is so dependent on AI that not even a company so callous as to fire by video call would even think of depriving another human the tokens they need to get by.
I think the joke is they all are. It's an autonomous company replicating what it was trained on.
"we will provide up to two weeks’ worth of tokens to facilitate your continued operation during the job search. We also partnered with ThriveFlow to furnish, as an option, a collection of expertly-crafted grief counseling prompts" seems like it.
I hope this was made up. But it could actually be real. Satire has a hard time these days reaching the absurdity of reality, let alone surpass it.
I don't think we're quite at the point of laying off AI agents and offering them tokens as severance.
But who knows, some companies do wacky things these days.
“What about health insurance?”
“Your enrollment will end on the last day of this month, and we will be providing every affected employee with information about extending their coverage through COBRA.”
“The last day of the month, so, today?”
“Yes, that is correct. On the other hand, our OpenAI and Anthropic accounts are paid quarterly, so you will retain access to your chats and may continue using these tools until the end of September.”
During an exit interview as I was going to a new job, they let me know my coverage was good until the end of the month.
Me, never able to not say something stupid, "Got it. Don't get hit by a bus on the 1st."
Dead silence. HR playing ping-pong with their eyes. They eventually told me something like that had happened to a person who'd just left a few months prior to this.
One of these days, I'll learn, yeah?
Whenever I voluntarily leave a company, I always give my 2-week notice 13 days before the end of the month, and ask to set my last day for the 1st of the following month. My former managers have never cared what date I pick, and always agree.
Don't forget they lay you off the Thursday before a 3 day weekend, as close to the middle of the month as possible. So the "coverage to the end of the month" is more like 10 days of coverage
I prefer the term "corporate autoscaling".
One time when I was in one of these calls. It was pretty obvious it was coming, the company wasn't doing great and there were plenty of whispers.
Still, I was pretty upset I was laid off, because it's just not a fun feeling. After the HR person explained the severance and COBRA stuff, I said something to the CTO like "I wish you all the best in trying to save this company, and for the sake of this conversation, let's just pretend I'm not lying". Then I hung up.
I wish I could feel guilty over that, but ultimately they were cutting off my livelihood, they can deal with momentary hurt feelings.
Ha, that's a good one. At a job 10 years ago or so I had a similar premonition of upcoming layoffs—lots of closed door meetings between the execs, travel and expansion plans getting cancelled, etc. One day my immediate boss, who I genuinely like, walked into my office, closed the door, and told me he was gonna have to lay me off in two weeks. He said if I would handle x,y,z tasks (a few days of work) I could just stop showing up until the layoff day and he'd make sure I got a good severance. Listen, I appreciated this! it still sucked, but he wasn't supposed to tell me at all.
Anyway, a few weeks after the axe dropped, I went to an industry conference (putting out the feelers for a new job, etc) and during the keynote he walked in. I waved, and he came and sat at the table with me. After the speech, we were chatting with the others around the table, and someone asked where I worked. I said something like "well, I'm between jobs. This guy just fired me <thumb jerk towards him>." They laughed, and he squirmed in his chair! But I didn't let him squirm too long, it really wasn't his fault.
It's their job to endure the discomfort of having to do the job they're paid to do. It's not your job to make it comfortable for them. That's not to say that there aren't personal or professional consequences for how you conduct yourself. Burning bridges and all that. But I feel that's completely up to you.
I dodged layoffs for 20 years, then got caught about 2024. Kinda sucked because I was over employed and had quit my other two jobs to focus on that one because it was the highest paying. Karma is real! I just said “VIP and manager, I appreciate my time here and so long”. They replied graciously clearly appreciating me taking the high road. Felt like I got some karma back in that situation. Been working one job since.
You should have been straightforward and told them to go fuck themselves. Laying people off by a brief call is for cowards.
I don't think you hurt their feelings. I don't think you can have feelings and get into any management position.
Can someone make an AI agent to target automating tasks of upper management already so they feel the pain as well?
You don’t need to even replace them outright, just make your agent so effective that [big tech company] requires fewer VPs and GMs etc.
Modern frontier LLMs are incredibly good at all types of knowledge work - this should be possible with enough elbow grease
I feel like thats impossible - in the end the reason we have those useless roles is to have someone to shift the blame to
Before people were getting fired in AI chats or Video calls, they were getting fired by voicemail - as featured in the track "Exciting New Direction"[0], by The New Deal.
Impacted impacted impacted impacted impacted. You've all been impacted.
God I hate when people say that.
I should start acting surprised, and ask why they're telling me about someone being constipated.
You can always get together, cleanse the code of any IP entanglements, and compete with the company that just laid you off. Calls like this one are a good time to suggest it--even if only to make them squirm.
That assumes that the code itself was what made the company competitive and brought in the money to begin with.
If I were laid off by my current employer, who has a giant sales team and likely thousands of contracts in every state with most of the existing potential clients, the odds of me being able to compete against them somehow dip into negative numbers.
If you do it, don't say so in front of witness or where a call might be recorded.
Legal in California, illegal in New York (typically 2-3 years).
The "macroeconomic" phrase sounds like $AMZN. Kept hearing this until the new buzzword showed up; AI.
Why don't they say "Suprise suckers, we are a BUSINESS and you are a SUPPLIER and we don't need to order from you again. Yes sure we said FAMILY but we meant in the borrow your car keys sense of the word. Enjoy job hunting. BTW we have some open positions, let us know if you know anyone."
I fell for it!
"Is assisted suicide covered by the severance terms?"
"Absolutely. It's covered through the end of the month, per our generous benefits policy.
"
I may actually ask this, and if anyone has already, absolute legend.
I definitely would politely request an AI summary of the meeting.
Severance is a truly amazing tv show
From the first lines I’ve thought the post was set in the series (probably because of the name Mark), but apparently there’s no connection here.
(Though thinking about it... severed people do play a similar role in Severance as LLMs do in our world, don’t they?)
Is this about the Apple TV+ show?
If only there was a way to find out.
Even if you don't want to click on the article, reading the other comments should give you enough context clues.