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Being made to question your own reality. "That never happened." "You're too sensitive." "You misunderstood." Gaslighting at work is a form of psychological abuse — and it is one of the hardest to prove and the hardest to recover from.
If you're here because you're going through this right now
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My mid-year review said "exceeds expectations." I have it in writing. I took a screenshot before my access was cut because I had a feeling I might need it. When the layoff email …
The quarterly earnings call was on a Thursday. Record revenue. Leadership talked about strong demand and resilient growth. The restructuring announcement came the following Tuesda…
I was given what they called an "extended transition period." Sixty days. Presented as generosity. In practice: sixty days of documenting everything I knew, training the contracto…
Boots UK was doing reasonably well. The issues were at Walgreens Boots Alliance level — the American pharmacy business, the debt structure, the decisions made thousands of miles a…
The company was transparent about it, which is unusual. They said clearly that AI would replace many functions, including parts of my function. Then, in the same month, my team wa…
In December my skip-level told me, unprompted, in a one-to-one, that I was one of the most valuable engineers in the org and that I shouldn't worry about any restructuring rumours…
The Activision acquisition was sold to us as a moment of strength. All-hands about synergies and the future of gaming. We were told investment was being maintained. The deal clos…
Amazon's RTO mandate wasn't about collaboration. It was a way to reduce headcount without conducting formal layoffs, without paying severance, without justifying individual decisi…
A week before the layoff announcement, my manager called me into a one-to-one and told me — off the record, she said — that things were going to get difficult and it might be bett…
In October I was put on a Performance Improvement Plan. "Communication style." Vague enough to cover almost anything. I'd never had a negative review. My 360 feedback was positive…
I wasn't struggling with the work. I was struggling with the culture after the first round of layoffs. Overnight, collaboration became competition. I spoke to my manager about it.…
I was hired explicitly as a full-time remote employee. It was in my contract. It was one of the reasons I took the role. Eighteen months later, a new policy required in-office pr…
The announcement came during an earnings call. The CEO said 55,000 jobs would go by 2030. He cited AI and the completion of fibre rollout as the primary drivers. He was calm. The …
I raised a concern through the internal ethics reporting channel. I followed the process exactly as described in the policy documentation. I was told the concern would be investig…
The programme was called simplification. The stated goal was removing management layers to improve agility. Five layers of management became three. Layers four and five — where I …
During the pandemic, delivery workers and those of us supporting the operation were told repeatedly how important we were. Essential workers. Keeping the country fed. Leadership s…
I worked on HoloLens and the broader Mixed Reality division. We were building things that were genuinely technically impressive. The team was extraordinary. The memo used languag…
The Bloomberg story went live at 8:52am. My calendar showed a "check-in" with someone I didn't recognise at 9:00am. By the time I joined the Zoom call I already knew. They read f…
My end-of-year review said I was doing "exceptional work" and that I was being considered for promotion. Six weeks later I was in a layoff round. When I asked HR how to square th…
The all-hands started at 10am. The CEO talked about difficult decisions and investing in AI. By 10:15am, CNBC had named the divisions. We were all watching our phones in the room.…
I joined to build something genuinely new for Goldman — consumer banking, retail products, a business that wasn't just serving institutional clients. The pitch was compelling. The…
A mass email on a Monday morning. System access cut that afternoon. A link at the bottom of the email: "To speak with an HR representative, please use the scheduling link." The e…
I woke up to a notification that Marc Benioff had tweeted about the layoffs. I was still in bed. I hadn't had a single communication from my manager, my HR business partner, or an…
I'd been at Deliveroo Australia for two years. We knew things were difficult — the IPO had been a disaster, the share price was somewhere no one wanted to look. But the message fr…