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I came back from parental leave in January. My manager welcomed me back, told me the team had missed me, said we'd ease back in gradually. Six weeks later I was in the layoff rou…
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…
When you hear "15% of the company" you don't immediately understand what that means at a human level. In our building, it meant the third floor going quiet. The canteen half-empty…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
Eleven years. I joined when the culture felt genuinely different. I turned down other offers. I believed in the company in a way I'm now embarrassed about. The email came at 6:15…
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…
It happens every January. Has done for years. You know it's coming. The firm has never pretended otherwise — it's part of the culture, framed as performance management, a percenta…
Salesforce hired aggressively during the pandemic. When the market turned, leadership stood up and said they needed to "right-size" the organisation. We made those hires because …
I was a contractor at Twitter through a staffing agency. I found out my engagement had ended when my team lead messaged me on WhatsApp — personal phone — to ask if I was okay, bec…