It's a pretty impersonal way to announce layoffs but I think they all tend to be impersonal. I do think the 6 months of pay says a lot more than the fact that they used a video.
Thank you. I always get frustrated whenever there are layoffs that everyone pounces on "but they didn't say exactly the right things, in exactly the right way, exactly how I expected!"
Layoffs suck, period. Like the good advice goes when starting a new relationship "Just ignore everything they say, and only focus on what they do." A generous severance package is loads more important than nitpicking the format of the layoff announcement. Plus, Atlassian famously has a global, distributed team that embraced remote work. Someone somewhere is getting the recorded clip regardless.
> It’s just a way of punishing a company for layoffs, probably a good thing because you want companies to be scared of layoffs.
Why? Because that makes the average editor pleased with themselves? I'm sorry but I can't eat or wear that as a hat.
Personally I don't want companies to self-sabotage by not laying off people when they need to. Worst case you'll have companies file for bankruptcy en masse after turning human resources into hot air useful to nobody: now we've really fucked up. The more efficiently labor is allocated in an economy, the better everyone will be off.
And yes, I recognize that high churn through frequent growth and contraction phases is also inefficient, but bad leadership is a tangential issue at best.
I do, I want them to consider reducing executive pay, reducing overhead by letting people work from home, using more open source software to reduce vendor costs etc. before jumping straight to layoffs.
In a modern tech company, all of those things you mention are virtually inconsequential compared to employee salaries.
But more importantly, layoffs are rarely just about cutting costs. They're often called "restructurings" because that is exactly what happens - usually whole departments or positions are let go when a company decides to exit business lines or make a significant change in direction.
Layoffs suck, but keeping folks around when there is basically no useful work for them to do isn't a solution either, it's just kicking the can down the road.
Which of the recent high profile layoffs were amazon/google/etc exiting business lines and not management choosing to gamble positions chasing money on a recent temporary event (covid)? And did they not have other new products they were starting near the time of the layoffs?
I don’t think companies shouldn’t layoff people, I just want to force them to consider all options rather than defaulting to it on a whim. Company buildings and vendor/licensing costs are a huge portion of a lot of companies.
Good leadership is not going to default to it on a whim - they understand the value of institutional knowledge and the upfront investment new hires represent.
If that sort of firing happens you have bad leadership and the company is screwed anyways.
You're not going to iron out inefficiencies, fix bad leadership, and help them identify the correct course of action by indiscriminately applying fear to everyone. That's complete nonsense. The most likely outcome of that is people getting to use open source software from home - while searching for a new job at a company that wasn't stupid enough to give into that kind of pressure and go tits up. Every time you inflict another inefficiency upon a company, it's more likely they'll get out-competed by another that couldn't care less about your attempts to cancel and shame them on twitter.
Anthropomorphizing a company, or even a role at a company, usually doesn't lead to expected outcomes. I concede your point, that negative public sentiment is an input we can leverage to sway outcomes, but ultimately, I believe it's a weak one given the current climate.
It’s not just snarky comments, it’s general societal perception that the comments are just a small part of. Comments, memes, jokes etc. all add to the global perception of something. If you’re dismissive of them you don’t understand how the modern world works.
There are right ways and wrong ways to lay off someone. They aren't determined by words, but by actions.
If the company has a healthy cashflow it can afford to give the employees that have been laid off a larger runway in terms of how many months of salary they will still pay out. If you've given them stock options, you can give them more time to decide whether to exercise the vested option.
I'd gladly take a "Good riddance" with 6 months of salary and 2 years validity of my options over a "We regret that it has come to this point" with just a one-month notice.
I agree with the theme of your message, but it's actually very challenging legally to change an options expiration date after its issued, and likely has negative tax implications
I agree. Sometimes people don’t know how to deliver bad news.
When I was laid off I appeared stoic throughout the conversation. Because lots of people were laid off so there was no point to discuss “why”. The only question was severance. But then the HR got curious about my lack of reaction. He started questioning if I had job offers at hand and if my access could be cut right then (others were given a week).
I think that there are definitely bad ways to lay people off and those should be avoided. As a manager/company, not trying to do this as best you can reflects very badly in the workplace and in society.
That's true in the current world. But back about 8 years ago I got laid off from my programming job and it was honestly a relief. I was happy. I got a pretty good severance, and I knew I'd have another job soon. I had 5 job offers within 2 weeks of interviews, all paying the same or more. But now? It would be devastating as there are very few jobs available and more competition for them. I used to have 5 recruiters a day contacting me, but now I'm lucky if I get contacted 1 time every 5 months or so.
I don't know what you mean by "bad" or "right" but a layoff isn't necessarily bad. It's inevitable unless you demand incredibly conservative hiring practices, only hiring if you're willing to commit to that role existing for their natural life. So, it happens. There is a right way to do it and that's without any BS. Sadly people don't get much time to say their goodbyes, especially in a remote situation, but if even 1% of laid-off people become disgruntled it's not smart to be really loose with access to important systems after you've laid someone off.
Now, if you mean "bad" as in it's unpleasant to hear or give the news, I agree with you, it's always the opposite of fun.
I mean, there is. Fundamentally it involves recognizing and respecting their humanity. Just like it is incredibly rude to break up with a significant other over text, it is similarly rude to lay someone off with a pre-recorded video message. The only reason one would do either of those things is for their own benefit, because it is easier for them compared to the alternative.
Yeah I'm personally against the spectacle of empathy theater for layoffs at companies that long outgrew Dunbar's Number. The actual quality of severance packages and the dignity / professionalism of the process should be more central to how the public responds to these layoffs.
When I was laid off I was cutoff from all my colleagues because my Slack was cut. In fact everything was cut in the middle of my standup and I just dropped out of my Zoom call. I think you can be big and still grant dignity and closure to folks.
In New Zealand we have an absolutely shit employment law process where the company has to 'propose' a restructure (in a formal fashion). Then 'consult' with employees for feedback. Then 'consider' the feedback. And then 99% of the time it's all just the same and people get made redundant.
It is absolutely brutal as it invites the chance of hope during the downsizing - and implies staff will be able to provide alternative suggestions. Which is quite plainly bananas.
It's enshrined in law and if you don't follow the process as an employer you can get taken to task by the governing body around it.
It's just far easier, and less harmful emotionally, to rip the band aid and provide a good package.
> ...and implies staff will be able to provide alternative suggestions. Which is quite plainly bananas.
Why is that bananas?
When covid hit my country, the national airline fired ~90% of flight attendants. They had been willing to be put on leave with 0 pay until the airline needed them again, but the airline wasn't interested in that. They were very happy to have an excuse to get rid of these long-serving employees and hire fresh-faced 18-25yr olds on starter salaries in their stead.
Having a mandated process like you mentioned (maybe for companies with more than 50 employees) could have made a massive difference in an instance like this.
The flight attendants in my example eventually all got their jobs back, but only after a years-long legal battle during which some lost their homes and most had a very tough time.
Any announcement of a mass layoff is going to be a one-way conversation regardless of how it's conveyed. (A 150+ person conference call with the participants unmuted would inevitably be a fiasco.) Making it available to employees as a prerecorded video does at least mean that it's likely to be better rehearsed, and that the recipients can listen to it at their own pace, e.g. by pausing to take notes.
At this point a firing or layoff might as well just be a text message: "You're fired. K, thx, bye". Any words beyond that are just fluff anyway. To the person getting let go, it really doesn't matter if the decision caused the CEO to get ulcers, or if it was the easiest decision ever. Executive teams only take responsibility in words.
I understand your point, but employees do need to know a lot of important information that cannot be communicated like that e.g. health/dental benefit lapse, severance, references, etc.
It is actually really important in mass layoffs to have this information immediately to hand.
Yeah the severance is nice but the execution is lame. If you don't have the balls to tell an employee to his or her face that they don't have a job anymore, you shouldn't be a manager or executive. Maybe it's a very distributed team, I guess then there's isn't a great way to do that.
150 people is huge. The logistics of doing this in person just don’t make sense.
Are you going to send out hundreds of calendar invites spread across weeks for the sole purpose of being nice to people? Are affected employees expected to queue up to get their personal “you’re fired” before their access is cut?
I worked at Yahoo in 2008 when they laid off thousands and yes every single person got a calendar invite and met in a meeting room 1:1 with a manager. It was difficult but they did it. Times definitely have changed.
Wow, just the logistics of that is impressive. I feel like I would watch a 60-minute documentary on pulling that together because it no doubt took dozens or hundreds of people weeks of logistics to do that, and unlike almost any other major project, literally no one involved was happy about any part of it.
Not explicitly, but there were rumors a few days before. Also the signs were there: every single meeting room was booked, meeting rooms all had water & tissues, etc.
I was once laid off in a group of about 50, and we were all invited to a conference room meeting to be laid off in-person by some higher up director, and a group of our managers. This was long before remote work was popular, and we were all on site, though.
Second time was smaller (maybe 10 people) and fully remote, and I had a surprise meeting with my direct manager over video chat.
I personally don't care so much about how the message is delivered, and more about severance, but it's interesting to see how different people handle the situation differently. Makes you wonder what alternatives they considered that they decided a pre-recorded message was best.
I will say 1:1 layoffs are very tricky logistically, and can be less humane in some ways.
If a manager has several layoffs to do, you have people waiting on pins and needles for the dreaded calendar invite over a few hours or even days.
In a layoff, it’s important to do it humanely, quickly, and let people settle down as soon as you can. It’s bad for both the laid off and the remaining employees you have a trickle layoffs happening over a longer period of time… it’s less bad if you rip the bandaid off quickly.
You want to be able to say to your team, “Hey guys, we had a layoff this morning, and everyone affected has already been notified. It’s all done at this point - everyone in this room is not affected.”
If I hear through the grapevine there’s a layoff happening this morning, and my manager schedules a surprise 1:1 with me in a few hours because he has a few of them to do, I’m going to be a wreck between now and then.
Needing to cut 150 people suggests catastrophic mismanagement. I get that workloads change, orgs pivot, business has to do business shit, but if you've missed your headcount requirement for whatever work you needed to do by a HUNDRED AND FIFTY PEOPLE!? What even.
Management and leadership is practically a lost art these days, so many organizations are just filled with managers who haven't the first fucking idea how to actually manage people.
All that said to be like: "Well how SHOULD we correctly fire 150 people?" I dunno, to me that's like saying how do I hit a tree with my car in such a way as to make sure I'm not paralyzed? Like so much has already gone wrong to bring you to where this is a pertinent question that I don't think there's really a right answer at this point, there's just gradations of bad.
“catastrophic mismanagement”, “a HUNDRED AND FIFTY PEOPLE?”. What is it with all the hyperbole on HN?
Atlassian grew from 3,600 people in 2019 to 12.100 in 2024. Triple in 5 years. Some adjustments are expected. Sucks to lose your job, but you might not have it in the first place.
The total headcount is irrelevant. What specific department overshot their required headcount by a hundred and fifty? Reviewing TFA, it's customer service and the context of it leans to being mass layoffs as Altlassan anticipates replacing those reps with LLM, which I'm sure Altlassan customers are simply thrilled about, and related, means the CEO's heartfelt message is even more hollow.
So, I will fully grant that my original statement doesn't really matter here; this wasn't a department that over-scaled to meet a project that didn't exist, this is in fact, the far shittier kind of layoffs: the ones that are a direct result of a company taking by all accounts a fully functioning department and taking an axe to it to improve their bottom line in 6 months, trading experienced workers who likely have relationships with their clients for soulless chatbots for their customers to now argue with.
So yes, I fully acknowledge I was wrong, and also, this is shittier than I assumed without reading. Take that how you will.
> Maybe it's a very distributed team, I guess then there's isn't a great way to do that.
If you want to do it all at once, for all time zones... If there's overlapping "core hours" for different time zones, or you can schedule an all-hands videoconf time, you can do it then. Or do one for the global West, and one for the global East (which will have different cultural nuances anyway, and possibly separate management structures).
It's not that different than in-office. Except, for in-office, remaining colleagues see a person boxing up their stuff and walking out with their stuff in a box, or (worse) security escorting the people off the property. And then there's usually the desk of a terminate colleague there as a visual reminder for awhile.
One in-office layoff I saw, they arranged for all the people to be laid off to have impromptu meetings with their managers, and to go to conference rooms, at the same time... and then notified everyone still at their desks to go to an all-(remaining)-hands meeting, in a different office space, where they were told of the layoffs. Most of the axed people were already gone when the others returned. It might have been good intentions, but I'm not sure that was a good move.
It's a tricky problem, whether in-office or remote. Partly because the situation isn't right. ICs are more often let go because management failed, rather than any fault of the ICs.
> the situation isn't right. ICs are more often let go because management failed, rather than any fault of the ICs.
That is pretty much guaranteed to happen though, unless you have a system where the assumption is employment for life at all costs. Management's job is to make decisions, many decisions won't work out, and for some of those, the consequences mean some change in what roles are going to be needed. Sometimes it's a management success that means a certain role isn't needed too ("we successfully rolled out software to book business trips, so we don't need 17 travel bookers anymore").
And anyway, let's stipulate that managers should also be punished by being sacked for any big mistake: That wouldn't save ICs, since if you're, say, pivoting away from making furniture, you still don't need the furniture makers, even if you sack the "VP of Furniture" or the CEO. And it'd be stupid to appoint a new VP of Furniture over and over to keep trying to 'make furniture happen' just to save the jobs.
These are traditional textbook examples for layoffs, of the kind told to impressionable young aspiring economists. Sometimes they are true.
Often, the company actually still needs those skills for what it's doing, but it's a bean-counter move, to "appease investors". Knowing that this will put more pressure on remaining employees, and also knowing that they'll soon be hiring for the same roles.
This is another way it's not right. There's little sense of obligation to the employee.
I was part of one mass layoff. They had two meetings at our site, one for the people being retained and one for the people being let go. We had an idea what was happening but you didn't know until your meeting started which group you were in. It was done in person though not via a video message.
I worked for Weyerhaeuser, a major US forest products firm in the Seattle area during the early 2000s. In 2009 they decided to get out of the forestry products business and become nothing more than a land owner. Multiple thousands of workers were let go. At least at the company headquarters, managers met with every worker to tell them whether they'd been laid off or not. The announcement came in the summer, a couple of months before the actual lay-off date, and salary and benefits were extended until year end. It was by far the most humane layoff I'd ever experienced.
Doing that for 150 people is a pretty long, ugly day, while everybody waited for their turn.
You could gather everybody in the same room, and announce it there, but that's still not really face-to-face.
Delegating it to their direct managers is even worse. They're generally not the ones who made the decision. Even if they were the ones who submitted a list of their people they could live without, it was the higher-ups who approved the layoff en masse.
There's just not a great way to give bad news. A video sucks, but it attracts attention only because it's different from the other sucky ways people do it.
> If you don't have the balls to tell an employee to his or her face that they don't...
This is just bullshit. Managers don't have to do any such thing as it may become unnecessarily confrontational. Similarly lot of people resign via email. There is no need to have "guts" to tell manager in their face.
You can do both. You should ALWAYS write a formal resignation letter that's about 3 lines at most, before talking to the manager.
It just stops a ton of confusion, hope, etc. It allows that discussion to focus on "Do you want the two weeks?" and "What do you want me to do with those two weeks if you want them."
Part of being a good employee is making things clear to your manager.
I mean, if you want to burn a bridge you can do so. Sometimes it's warranted. However, if you have a good relationship with your manager then it's absolutely ideal to tell it to their face (or with a 1 on 1 call). It's not about guts it's about mutual respect. Likewise for layoffs.
Right. If situation allows doing face to face is nice. But thing as they are lately doing via canned message or email is perfectly fine and one need not think any less of manager or employee just based on their communication method.
My last layoff was a lot more impersonal and they still called me.
I had expressed a couple of months before my desire to leave. They then called me to say it was "a hard decision but it was best for the company to let me go".
I almost laughed. How hard is it really to let someone go that wants to go?
Worse than using a pre-recorded video is doing a live meeting with a default script. These corpocrats are like robots.
I'm from the US, so employment here is at will. There were layoffs at every company that I worked for, and are entirely expect by anyone what has worked a while, when the economy turns down a bit.
Out of them all, the "red envelope on your desk" was the best approach, in my opinion. It let people have a moment to themselves to react to and accept something that they were, at that point, unable to change. Then, the manager would have one-on-one with everyone, to explain the packages. In my opinion, I wouldn't want a manager to tell me. It would be awkward and unnecessary, since it's usually entirely out of their control.
Meta did/does layoffs by email (rather than internal messaging because it disconnects access to everything) and makes everyone in the company WfH that day. Devices get FedEx'ed back. Zero communication other than "Sorry, not sorry" impersonal boilerplate.
I think it still sucks but at least it’s not made to look personal but not really.
When you were sorting your damn spreadsheet where I ranked at the bottom, you cared zilch; you could give my cognitive abilities some credit by not pretending you suddenly got infected with empathy or something.
I realize that it sucks to be laid off. But business really is just business and it has nothing to do with how much any person values you. You would rightfully stop working immediately if your company can't pay you even for a week. They stop employing you if it no longer makes economic sense. It's the same thing in the reverse.
I could be told tomorrow to lay off some or all of the people who report to me if we can't afford to pay them. I'd hate it, I'd cry and feel sick and not be able to sleep all night wishing I could avoid it. I know that from experience. Nobody wants that and even CEOs feel like shit when they implement layoffs.
The alternative to having the 2-sided at-will employment system would need to be a two-way commitment, which seems far worse. Would you want to work under a system where everyone was expected to honor a 3-year employment contract, and to renew it like a New York apartment lease? So that you can't accept a new higher-paying job because you're committed to your company for 2 more years? And if you quit your job "early" you could be sued or be ruled as unemployable by future employers?
I don't see how there is much practical room between "anyone can terminate the relationship at any time and it's not personal" and "2-way long-term commitment and neither party can."
Yeah, I was just musing on some companies trying to make "dear John" talks when laying people off. I prefer to work where I might be dehumanized, but with everybody being honest about it.
> The alternative to having the 2-sided at-will employment system would need to be a two-way commitment, which seems far worse.
You probably just haven't tried it, or have little knowledge of how it works in practice, because your example is way radical. Learn about the actual conditions under which it works over here in Europe (you don't get locked in to a duration of employment, the notice period in Poland, for example, may be up to 3 months if you worked at one place for three years or more — to give time for knowledge transfer).
If a company is bigger than Dunbar's Number I would absolutely take that trade as a prospective employee!
I think firing by SMS also serves the noble purpose of illustrating to prospective employees that these are purely transactional relationships and that, no, this isn't a family, the exec's heart will not bleed.
I actually have seen a very random company who fired its employees by SMS in the middle of the night... And not a single penny of severance packaging. They only got their last payment and that was it. It's a shame I forgot the company name to have them face some shame here...
6 months severance is very good compared to my last company who gave people a week per year of service when they had layoffs. They did have the direct manager personally deliver the news, but I'd take a slap across the face from the CEO for that 6 months if I was looking at a couple weeks.
In the past I got laid off with 6mo severance and it was legitimately one of the best things to ever happen to me - hated the job and paid off all my credit cards. Found another job in a month.
If it is about the European office as the article mentions, specifically the Netherlands office, 6 months severance is quite low as the layoff is due to an arbitrary reason (moving to AI) instead of a necessary reason (financial difficulties). I would sue them if it was me, get minimum a year pay as severance.
"Why Nintendo's Satoru Iwata refuses to lay off staff"
> "If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease," he said. "I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world."
The people being laid off didn't get told by a video. The video was sent to the general staff and informed everyone that those who were being let go would get an email direct to them shortly after.
So, they announced the layoffs with a pre-recorded video versus a company-wide meeting - or - as is more common in my experience: No warning or explanation beforehand.
Better than one company I was at. Wednesday-evening meeting to announce that there will be layoffs. "If you are affected you will receive an email by 7am EST tomorrow." Which I summarized in slack as
"Sleep well Wesley, I'll likely kill you in the morning."
Nobody is getting good sleep that night, at least until the doom hour has passed without an email.
I took it as they said you’d get an email in 15 minutes but immediately (before then) locked your computer so you wouldn’t be able to read it anyway.
Telling people “wait to see if you’re fired” is absolutely cruel. Hold a virtual meeting, even if it’s just to play a video, and hit send on all those emails the instant it’s over.
What a horrible thing to do to people. Can’t even do it yourself? Gotta pre-record it?
I have yet, in my entire career, to work for an employer that was at all disciplined about sending email that needs to address me, in the capacity of my employment, to the right email address. They almost all default to internal.
When I was involved in a mass layoff, all of the emails went to an email that was going to be cut off.
So let me get this straight, they emailed what? 12,000 employees, and told them they would be fired or not in about 15 minutes? Please tell me they didn't email 12,000 employees this ticking time bomb of a revelation. If I were at Atlassian and survived the lay offs I would be sprucing up my resume. There's no good way to lay off people, but this is even worse.
At a consulting company I worked at, we were told on Wednesday that layoffs affecting around 1/3 of the company would happen on Thursday and Friday and that the company was paying for an all-company event at a nearby pub-restaurant where the execs and senior managers did not attend, but most of the company did.
Much emotion, team reminiscing, and a fair amount of drinking happened and it was an interesting but honestly pretty decent way to handle it I thought. I was largely indifferent to whether I was in the 2/3 or 1/3 and ended up quitting on my own a couple months later.
In case anyone was wondering, the "CSS Team" described in the video's title is Customer Service & Support, rather than Cascading Style Sheets.
My personal hope based on their products' performance would be that they hire some people who know how to make performant code, but that's clearly never going to happen.
Why would being remote mater? If a typical on-site situation would involve HR and your manager bringing you into an office to tell you, I'd assume a remote situation would be the same, just over a video call instead of having to walk down to an office. It shouldn't really take any more time.
Tell your employees as soon as the idea pops into your head, and make sure they know there'll be something in it for them if they stick around until then. A layoff in nine months gives people time to plan.
Sort of a moot point though. Laying off spooled-up knowledge workers is probably the stupidest thing you could do if you're creating software and not investment opportunities.
Soon we shall see headlines of AI HR personnel being deployed to appropriately 'therapise the employees and mentor them for future opportunities' and HR companies which coordinate them for you. The second extreme that follows is one where we do away with HR and operate on a perfectly managed gig market where you will be hired and fired automatically!
I think the layoff sucks, but there are proper ways to communicate it, and this was not the right way.
The proper process is for the manager to carry out this sensitive procedure—quickly, but with empathy. (I'm not a manager, but I'm sure it's easy to be a "Happiness Manager"; the coin has two sides.)
Even if individual meetings weren't possible, they could have just held a 150-to-1 live session. Saying the exact same thing as the video would have been different. Why? Because it wouldn't be a pre-recorded video.
For those who are willing to accept an employer sending a goodbye SMS, I have to wonder how much commitment you really had to that workplace. If you had none, fine, who cares. But if your commitment was more than just a transactional job, like someone selling groceries from 8:00 to 17:00, I don't think you'd want to work for a company that follows such processes.
There’s something oddly fitting about the company that forced the Jira monopoly on so many companies also being cruel and cold with prerecorded firing videos.
That could work. 15 managers doing 10 1:1 meetings each isn't so hard. It can get tricky with people being on vacation etc. But very possible and normal.
That's not so good for the people remaining, or even those laid off but later in the queue. Once the first person gets laid off, everyone will know it's happening and be wondering whether they're included. You're just dragging out the suspense over the hours or (more likely) days those meetings take place, rather than getting it out of the way in a few minutes. That's probably worse than the dubious joy of a personalised message about your termination.
(Though, here in the UK, redundancy procedures can take weeks, so a few days is not much compared to that.)
What if their direct manager was also terminated? It could result in a manager's manager having such a large cohort as it to take several days while employees wait to see if they're fired or not (word would get out immediately).
This is how I have seen it done. You end up with managers firing people they do not know, and employees getting 15 min meeting invites and knowing what it means. But it’s much more compassionate and human.
I was at Atlassian when a major product was cancelled which was based in the Austin office and MCB flew out to Austin to deliver the news that some would be laid off and others reassigned. I think a town hall over video chat would have been fine.
Hipchat was a success, which is why Atlassian purchased it, but Slack leapfrogged it and Stride was too late.
Not doubting the role that support plays for Atlassian. Just highlighting how I witnessed MCB handle a similar situation 7 years ago, by flying to Austin from Australia to deliver the sad news. The article makes him sound heartless or cold but that wasn't my experience. That being said, an async video message is a weird play.
Well they certainly shouldn’t tell everyone that a bunch of people are being fired and then to just wait and sit around and see if you get the email of doom.
I swear there was a post not to long ago about a company that laid off a lot of employees in a live meeting, and it went badly, and people in the comments were saying "a prerecorded video would have been better". The duality of Internet forums, I guess...
honestly this is the least cruel layoff I've seen in recent years. At least someone went through the trouble of recording a video (instead of dismissing people with a chatgpt-generated email) and it includes a 6-month payout...
Pretty much this. I have a great relationship with my boss. If the time comes where he needs to let me go, I need 2 words from him [which could be in email] and then the only things I care about that day are the details of the severance.
No disrespect given nor received, but this is all business at that point. Some other day, we can work out any transition plan we need to work through and I'll happily hang out with him socially afterwards, but the things I need from the company at that moment are the severance details, nothing else. Emailed attachments are perfect.
I don't see what AI has to do with the layoff story. The first mention of AI is "The company has also embedded AI in its customer contact form" and it appears the author decided to include this for no apparent reason.
The article also has a footnote stating "Updated to remove claims of AI replacing jobs." so I suppose there was probably a stronger - but still invented by the author - claim included that has since been removed.
Sadly the time when an org wanted people to excel and really grow at is over, the new normal is peak capitalism of maximizing value.
People develop relationships with coworkers, you care if someone has issues, you're happy if a solution makes customers/coworkers happy but none of that matters to the lawnmower, it just mows lawns.
Yet another tech company sacrifices perfectly useful labor while earning $1.1bn in profit last quarter rather than retraining or reallocating that labor elsewhere within the organization and reducing recruitment costs - costs which will surely be higher, now that they've joined their counterparts in shoving their reputation into a rusty woodchipper.
Unnecessary actions that squander scarce resources (trust, labor that understands the enterprise and its customers) in the name of vague platitudes about AI and shareholder returns. Almost like none of these people actually know how to manage an organization for any length of time longer than a fiscal year.
Well, at least it is a video. Meta had its layoffs with emails when they did all those rounds in 22-23 and 24.
You got an email if you were safe, and another if you were terminated plus some links to some portal etc. Plus, there was some video/zoom call for some I think.
Anyways... modern corp culture, don't expect too much from larger companies. Once a company grows beyond a certain limit, it becomes impersonal as it has to.
It's a pretty impersonal way to announce layoffs but I think they all tend to be impersonal. I do think the 6 months of pay says a lot more than the fact that they used a video.
Thank you. I always get frustrated whenever there are layoffs that everyone pounces on "but they didn't say exactly the right things, in exactly the right way, exactly how I expected!"
Layoffs suck, period. Like the good advice goes when starting a new relationship "Just ignore everything they say, and only focus on what they do." A generous severance package is loads more important than nitpicking the format of the layoff announcement. Plus, Atlassian famously has a global, distributed team that embraced remote work. Someone somewhere is getting the recorded clip regardless.
It’s just a way of punishing a company for layoffs, probably a good thing because you want companies to be scared of layoffs.
> It’s just a way of punishing a company for layoffs, probably a good thing because you want companies to be scared of layoffs.
Why? Because that makes the average editor pleased with themselves? I'm sorry but I can't eat or wear that as a hat.
Personally I don't want companies to self-sabotage by not laying off people when they need to. Worst case you'll have companies file for bankruptcy en masse after turning human resources into hot air useful to nobody: now we've really fucked up. The more efficiently labor is allocated in an economy, the better everyone will be off.
And yes, I recognize that high churn through frequent growth and contraction phases is also inefficient, but bad leadership is a tangential issue at best.
I do, I want them to consider reducing executive pay, reducing overhead by letting people work from home, using more open source software to reduce vendor costs etc. before jumping straight to layoffs.
In a modern tech company, all of those things you mention are virtually inconsequential compared to employee salaries.
But more importantly, layoffs are rarely just about cutting costs. They're often called "restructurings" because that is exactly what happens - usually whole departments or positions are let go when a company decides to exit business lines or make a significant change in direction.
Layoffs suck, but keeping folks around when there is basically no useful work for them to do isn't a solution either, it's just kicking the can down the road.
Which of the recent high profile layoffs were amazon/google/etc exiting business lines and not management choosing to gamble positions chasing money on a recent temporary event (covid)? And did they not have other new products they were starting near the time of the layoffs?
I don’t think companies shouldn’t layoff people, I just want to force them to consider all options rather than defaulting to it on a whim. Company buildings and vendor/licensing costs are a huge portion of a lot of companies.
Good leadership is not going to default to it on a whim - they understand the value of institutional knowledge and the upfront investment new hires represent.
If that sort of firing happens you have bad leadership and the company is screwed anyways.
You're not going to iron out inefficiencies, fix bad leadership, and help them identify the correct course of action by indiscriminately applying fear to everyone. That's complete nonsense. The most likely outcome of that is people getting to use open source software from home - while searching for a new job at a company that wasn't stupid enough to give into that kind of pressure and go tits up. Every time you inflict another inefficiency upon a company, it's more likely they'll get out-competed by another that couldn't care less about your attempts to cancel and shame them on twitter.
Anthropomorphizing a company, or even a role at a company, usually doesn't lead to expected outcomes. I concede your point, that negative public sentiment is an input we can leverage to sway outcomes, but ultimately, I believe it's a weak one given the current climate.
I really, really doubt snarky HN comment sections are “scaring” any companies away from layoffs.
It’s not just snarky comments, it’s general societal perception that the comments are just a small part of. Comments, memes, jokes etc. all add to the global perception of something. If you’re dismissive of them you don’t understand how the modern world works.
No companies will ever be 'scared' of layoffs, especially when it benefits them financially (in the short-term)
>"but they didn't say exactly the right things, in exactly the right way, exactly how I expected!"
There is no right way to lay off someone. Only different shades of bad.
There are right ways and wrong ways to lay off someone. They aren't determined by words, but by actions.
If the company has a healthy cashflow it can afford to give the employees that have been laid off a larger runway in terms of how many months of salary they will still pay out. If you've given them stock options, you can give them more time to decide whether to exercise the vested option.
I'd gladly take a "Good riddance" with 6 months of salary and 2 years validity of my options over a "We regret that it has come to this point" with just a one-month notice.
I agree with the theme of your message, but it's actually very challenging legally to change an options expiration date after its issued, and likely has negative tax implications
I've heard this excuse a lot over my career, mainly from people trying to backtrack on a promise of issuing options to begin with.
I agree. Sometimes people don’t know how to deliver bad news.
When I was laid off I appeared stoic throughout the conversation. Because lots of people were laid off so there was no point to discuss “why”. The only question was severance. But then the HR got curious about my lack of reaction. He started questioning if I had job offers at hand and if my access could be cut right then (others were given a week).
Yep, only worse and less worse
just make it fast and not painful at least
I think that there are definitely bad ways to lay people off and those should be avoided. As a manager/company, not trying to do this as best you can reflects very badly in the workplace and in society.
That's true in the current world. But back about 8 years ago I got laid off from my programming job and it was honestly a relief. I was happy. I got a pretty good severance, and I knew I'd have another job soon. I had 5 job offers within 2 weeks of interviews, all paying the same or more. But now? It would be devastating as there are very few jobs available and more competition for them. I used to have 5 recruiters a day contacting me, but now I'm lucky if I get contacted 1 time every 5 months or so.
I don't know what you mean by "bad" or "right" but a layoff isn't necessarily bad. It's inevitable unless you demand incredibly conservative hiring practices, only hiring if you're willing to commit to that role existing for their natural life. So, it happens. There is a right way to do it and that's without any BS. Sadly people don't get much time to say their goodbyes, especially in a remote situation, but if even 1% of laid-off people become disgruntled it's not smart to be really loose with access to important systems after you've laid someone off.
Now, if you mean "bad" as in it's unpleasant to hear or give the news, I agree with you, it's always the opposite of fun.
I mean, there is. Fundamentally it involves recognizing and respecting their humanity. Just like it is incredibly rude to break up with a significant other over text, it is similarly rude to lay someone off with a pre-recorded video message. The only reason one would do either of those things is for their own benefit, because it is easier for them compared to the alternative.
Yeah I'm personally against the spectacle of empathy theater for layoffs at companies that long outgrew Dunbar's Number. The actual quality of severance packages and the dignity / professionalism of the process should be more central to how the public responds to these layoffs.
When I was laid off I was cutoff from all my colleagues because my Slack was cut. In fact everything was cut in the middle of my standup and I just dropped out of my Zoom call. I think you can be big and still grant dignity and closure to folks.
I know it probably sucks personally, but you gotta admit that's straight out of a comedy movie.
In New Zealand we have an absolutely shit employment law process where the company has to 'propose' a restructure (in a formal fashion). Then 'consult' with employees for feedback. Then 'consider' the feedback. And then 99% of the time it's all just the same and people get made redundant.
It is absolutely brutal as it invites the chance of hope during the downsizing - and implies staff will be able to provide alternative suggestions. Which is quite plainly bananas.
It's enshrined in law and if you don't follow the process as an employer you can get taken to task by the governing body around it.
It's just far easier, and less harmful emotionally, to rip the band aid and provide a good package.
Might it not depend on the industry?
I've heard of unionized factory workers negotiate lower salaries to keep the shop open. Granted that was Europe.
> ...and implies staff will be able to provide alternative suggestions. Which is quite plainly bananas.
Why is that bananas? When covid hit my country, the national airline fired ~90% of flight attendants. They had been willing to be put on leave with 0 pay until the airline needed them again, but the airline wasn't interested in that. They were very happy to have an excuse to get rid of these long-serving employees and hire fresh-faced 18-25yr olds on starter salaries in their stead.
Having a mandated process like you mentioned (maybe for companies with more than 50 employees) could have made a massive difference in an instance like this.
The flight attendants in my example eventually all got their jobs back, but only after a years-long legal battle during which some lost their homes and most had a very tough time.
Doesn't a pre-recorded video speak to dignity (or lack thereof)?
Any announcement of a mass layoff is going to be a one-way conversation regardless of how it's conveyed. (A 150+ person conference call with the participants unmuted would inevitably be a fiasco.) Making it available to employees as a prerecorded video does at least mean that it's likely to be better rehearsed, and that the recipients can listen to it at their own pace, e.g. by pausing to take notes.
At this point a firing or layoff might as well just be a text message: "You're fired. K, thx, bye". Any words beyond that are just fluff anyway. To the person getting let go, it really doesn't matter if the decision caused the CEO to get ulcers, or if it was the easiest decision ever. Executive teams only take responsibility in words.
I understand your point, but employees do need to know a lot of important information that cannot be communicated like that e.g. health/dental benefit lapse, severance, references, etc.
It is actually really important in mass layoffs to have this information immediately to hand.
I’d much rather get a link to all this information than sit while an HR drone recites it to me for 10 minutes.
They email you said documents or a link to an employee services website.
Why bother with a text? Just lock them out of their accounts. They'll figure it out.
The termination ritual is for the people that stay and who the company may wish to hire in the future.
Is this sarcasm?
according to this, a 2024 tesla layoff just locked people out the building:
https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-staff-locked-out-layoffs
Yeah the severance is nice but the execution is lame. If you don't have the balls to tell an employee to his or her face that they don't have a job anymore, you shouldn't be a manager or executive. Maybe it's a very distributed team, I guess then there's isn't a great way to do that.
150 people is huge. The logistics of doing this in person just don’t make sense.
Are you going to send out hundreds of calendar invites spread across weeks for the sole purpose of being nice to people? Are affected employees expected to queue up to get their personal “you’re fired” before their access is cut?
I worked at Yahoo in 2008 when they laid off thousands and yes every single person got a calendar invite and met in a meeting room 1:1 with a manager. It was difficult but they did it. Times definitely have changed.
Wow, just the logistics of that is impressive. I feel like I would watch a 60-minute documentary on pulling that together because it no doubt took dozens or hundreds of people weeks of logistics to do that, and unlike almost any other major project, literally no one involved was happy about any part of it.
Doing unhappy work at Yahoo probably wasn't unusual in 2008
Did the people who got a calendar invite know that they were getting laid off in advance?
I worked at Yahoo some years later and the process was the same when I was there.
Yes, people generally put two and two together when there was a calendar invite with their manager and HR.
We were in a European office though, so layoffs aren't American-style "escorted from the office with immediate effect".
Not explicitly, but there were rumors a few days before. Also the signs were there: every single meeting room was booked, meeting rooms all had water & tissues, etc.
I was once laid off in a group of about 50, and we were all invited to a conference room meeting to be laid off in-person by some higher up director, and a group of our managers. This was long before remote work was popular, and we were all on site, though.
Second time was smaller (maybe 10 people) and fully remote, and I had a surprise meeting with my direct manager over video chat.
I personally don't care so much about how the message is delivered, and more about severance, but it's interesting to see how different people handle the situation differently. Makes you wonder what alternatives they considered that they decided a pre-recorded message was best.
Yes.
I've been through a group, but face-to-face, layoff. 150 people in that scenario would be very doable if you split that into like 3 groups.
1:1 would be even better, and I think that ought to be doable, too, yes.
I will say 1:1 layoffs are very tricky logistically, and can be less humane in some ways.
If a manager has several layoffs to do, you have people waiting on pins and needles for the dreaded calendar invite over a few hours or even days.
In a layoff, it’s important to do it humanely, quickly, and let people settle down as soon as you can. It’s bad for both the laid off and the remaining employees you have a trickle layoffs happening over a longer period of time… it’s less bad if you rip the bandaid off quickly.
You want to be able to say to your team, “Hey guys, we had a layoff this morning, and everyone affected has already been notified. It’s all done at this point - everyone in this room is not affected.”
If I hear through the grapevine there’s a layoff happening this morning, and my manager schedules a surprise 1:1 with me in a few hours because he has a few of them to do, I’m going to be a wreck between now and then.
The "logistics"? What logistics, they're not going to build a base in Mars. It's a non-problem for any half competent manager/executive
Needing to cut 150 people suggests catastrophic mismanagement. I get that workloads change, orgs pivot, business has to do business shit, but if you've missed your headcount requirement for whatever work you needed to do by a HUNDRED AND FIFTY PEOPLE!? What even.
Management and leadership is practically a lost art these days, so many organizations are just filled with managers who haven't the first fucking idea how to actually manage people.
All that said to be like: "Well how SHOULD we correctly fire 150 people?" I dunno, to me that's like saying how do I hit a tree with my car in such a way as to make sure I'm not paralyzed? Like so much has already gone wrong to bring you to where this is a pertinent question that I don't think there's really a right answer at this point, there's just gradations of bad.
“catastrophic mismanagement”, “a HUNDRED AND FIFTY PEOPLE?”. What is it with all the hyperbole on HN?
Atlassian grew from 3,600 people in 2019 to 12.100 in 2024. Triple in 5 years. Some adjustments are expected. Sucks to lose your job, but you might not have it in the first place.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1276817/atlassian-number...
The total headcount is irrelevant. What specific department overshot their required headcount by a hundred and fifty? Reviewing TFA, it's customer service and the context of it leans to being mass layoffs as Altlassan anticipates replacing those reps with LLM, which I'm sure Altlassan customers are simply thrilled about, and related, means the CEO's heartfelt message is even more hollow.
So, I will fully grant that my original statement doesn't really matter here; this wasn't a department that over-scaled to meet a project that didn't exist, this is in fact, the far shittier kind of layoffs: the ones that are a direct result of a company taking by all accounts a fully functioning department and taking an axe to it to improve their bottom line in 6 months, trading experienced workers who likely have relationships with their clients for soulless chatbots for their customers to now argue with.
So yes, I fully acknowledge I was wrong, and also, this is shittier than I assumed without reading. Take that how you will.
150 people is less than 1.5% of their total number of employees (12,157 per google) . That is not a catastrophic overestimation.
> Maybe it's a very distributed team, I guess then there's isn't a great way to do that.
If you want to do it all at once, for all time zones... If there's overlapping "core hours" for different time zones, or you can schedule an all-hands videoconf time, you can do it then. Or do one for the global West, and one for the global East (which will have different cultural nuances anyway, and possibly separate management structures).
It's not that different than in-office. Except, for in-office, remaining colleagues see a person boxing up their stuff and walking out with their stuff in a box, or (worse) security escorting the people off the property. And then there's usually the desk of a terminate colleague there as a visual reminder for awhile.
One in-office layoff I saw, they arranged for all the people to be laid off to have impromptu meetings with their managers, and to go to conference rooms, at the same time... and then notified everyone still at their desks to go to an all-(remaining)-hands meeting, in a different office space, where they were told of the layoffs. Most of the axed people were already gone when the others returned. It might have been good intentions, but I'm not sure that was a good move.
It's a tricky problem, whether in-office or remote. Partly because the situation isn't right. ICs are more often let go because management failed, rather than any fault of the ICs.
> the situation isn't right. ICs are more often let go because management failed, rather than any fault of the ICs.
That is pretty much guaranteed to happen though, unless you have a system where the assumption is employment for life at all costs. Management's job is to make decisions, many decisions won't work out, and for some of those, the consequences mean some change in what roles are going to be needed. Sometimes it's a management success that means a certain role isn't needed too ("we successfully rolled out software to book business trips, so we don't need 17 travel bookers anymore").
And anyway, let's stipulate that managers should also be punished by being sacked for any big mistake: That wouldn't save ICs, since if you're, say, pivoting away from making furniture, you still don't need the furniture makers, even if you sack the "VP of Furniture" or the CEO. And it'd be stupid to appoint a new VP of Furniture over and over to keep trying to 'make furniture happen' just to save the jobs.
These are traditional textbook examples for layoffs, of the kind told to impressionable young aspiring economists. Sometimes they are true.
Often, the company actually still needs those skills for what it's doing, but it's a bean-counter move, to "appease investors". Knowing that this will put more pressure on remaining employees, and also knowing that they'll soon be hiring for the same roles.
This is another way it's not right. There's little sense of obligation to the employee.
I was part of one mass layoff. They had two meetings at our site, one for the people being retained and one for the people being let go. We had an idea what was happening but you didn't know until your meeting started which group you were in. It was done in person though not via a video message.
I worked for Weyerhaeuser, a major US forest products firm in the Seattle area during the early 2000s. In 2009 they decided to get out of the forestry products business and become nothing more than a land owner. Multiple thousands of workers were let go. At least at the company headquarters, managers met with every worker to tell them whether they'd been laid off or not. The announcement came in the summer, a couple of months before the actual lay-off date, and salary and benefits were extended until year end. It was by far the most humane layoff I'd ever experienced.
Doing that for 150 people is a pretty long, ugly day, while everybody waited for their turn.
You could gather everybody in the same room, and announce it there, but that's still not really face-to-face.
Delegating it to their direct managers is even worse. They're generally not the ones who made the decision. Even if they were the ones who submitted a list of their people they could live without, it was the higher-ups who approved the layoff en masse.
There's just not a great way to give bad news. A video sucks, but it attracts attention only because it's different from the other sucky ways people do it.
> If you don't have the balls to tell an employee to his or her face that they don't have a job anymore, you shouldn't be a manager or executive.
What if your balls get ripped off? Just saying...
> If you don't have the balls to tell an employee to his or her face that they don't...
This is just bullshit. Managers don't have to do any such thing as it may become unnecessarily confrontational. Similarly lot of people resign via email. There is no need to have "guts" to tell manager in their face.
You can do both. You should ALWAYS write a formal resignation letter that's about 3 lines at most, before talking to the manager.
It just stops a ton of confusion, hope, etc. It allows that discussion to focus on "Do you want the two weeks?" and "What do you want me to do with those two weeks if you want them."
Part of being a good employee is making things clear to your manager.
I mean, if you want to burn a bridge you can do so. Sometimes it's warranted. However, if you have a good relationship with your manager then it's absolutely ideal to tell it to their face (or with a 1 on 1 call). It's not about guts it's about mutual respect. Likewise for layoffs.
Right. If situation allows doing face to face is nice. But thing as they are lately doing via canned message or email is perfectly fine and one need not think any less of manager or employee just based on their communication method.
My last layoff was a lot more impersonal and they still called me.
I had expressed a couple of months before my desire to leave. They then called me to say it was "a hard decision but it was best for the company to let me go".
I almost laughed. How hard is it really to let someone go that wants to go?
Worse than using a pre-recorded video is doing a live meeting with a default script. These corpocrats are like robots.
> These corpocrats are like robots.
I'm from the US, so employment here is at will. There were layoffs at every company that I worked for, and are entirely expect by anyone what has worked a while, when the economy turns down a bit.
Out of them all, the "red envelope on your desk" was the best approach, in my opinion. It let people have a moment to themselves to react to and accept something that they were, at that point, unable to change. Then, the manager would have one-on-one with everyone, to explain the packages. In my opinion, I wouldn't want a manager to tell me. It would be awkward and unnecessary, since it's usually entirely out of their control.
Meta did/does layoffs by email (rather than internal messaging because it disconnects access to everything) and makes everyone in the company WfH that day. Devices get FedEx'ed back. Zero communication other than "Sorry, not sorry" impersonal boilerplate.
I think it still sucks but at least it’s not made to look personal but not really.
When you were sorting your damn spreadsheet where I ranked at the bottom, you cared zilch; you could give my cognitive abilities some credit by not pretending you suddenly got infected with empathy or something.
I realize that it sucks to be laid off. But business really is just business and it has nothing to do with how much any person values you. You would rightfully stop working immediately if your company can't pay you even for a week. They stop employing you if it no longer makes economic sense. It's the same thing in the reverse.
I could be told tomorrow to lay off some or all of the people who report to me if we can't afford to pay them. I'd hate it, I'd cry and feel sick and not be able to sleep all night wishing I could avoid it. I know that from experience. Nobody wants that and even CEOs feel like shit when they implement layoffs.
The alternative to having the 2-sided at-will employment system would need to be a two-way commitment, which seems far worse. Would you want to work under a system where everyone was expected to honor a 3-year employment contract, and to renew it like a New York apartment lease? So that you can't accept a new higher-paying job because you're committed to your company for 2 more years? And if you quit your job "early" you could be sued or be ruled as unemployable by future employers?
I don't see how there is much practical room between "anyone can terminate the relationship at any time and it's not personal" and "2-way long-term commitment and neither party can."
Yeah, I was just musing on some companies trying to make "dear John" talks when laying people off. I prefer to work where I might be dehumanized, but with everybody being honest about it.
> The alternative to having the 2-sided at-will employment system would need to be a two-way commitment, which seems far worse.
You probably just haven't tried it, or have little knowledge of how it works in practice, because your example is way radical. Learn about the actual conditions under which it works over here in Europe (you don't get locked in to a duration of employment, the notice period in Poland, for example, may be up to 3 months if you worked at one place for three years or more — to give time for knowledge transfer).
What about if they upgrade it to 12 months, and a fire by SMS ?
If a company is bigger than Dunbar's Number I would absolutely take that trade as a prospective employee!
I think firing by SMS also serves the noble purpose of illustrating to prospective employees that these are purely transactional relationships and that, no, this isn't a family, the exec's heart will not bleed.
Pretty sure vast majority of people would prefer that
Make it 24 months and most people will be happy being fired with a robocalled "fuck you"...
I actually have seen a very random company who fired its employees by SMS in the middle of the night... And not a single penny of severance packaging. They only got their last payment and that was it. It's a shame I forgot the company name to have them face some shame here...
[dead]
6 months severance is very good compared to my last company who gave people a week per year of service when they had layoffs. They did have the direct manager personally deliver the news, but I'd take a slap across the face from the CEO for that 6 months if I was looking at a couple weeks.
Give me 6 months severance and I'd be unhappy if I didn't get laid off.
Seriously, someone laying me off right now with 6 months severance could be one of the best things that ever happened to me.
In the past I got laid off with 6mo severance and it was legitimately one of the best things to ever happen to me - hated the job and paid off all my credit cards. Found another job in a month.
If it is about the European office as the article mentions, specifically the Netherlands office, 6 months severance is quite low as the layoff is due to an arbitrary reason (moving to AI) instead of a necessary reason (financial difficulties). I would sue them if it was me, get minimum a year pay as severance.
A couple of questions:
a) why a year? why a 6 months is not enough?
b) if this was a burger joint and people were replaced with a robots would you require a year too?
"Why Nintendo's Satoru Iwata refuses to lay off staff"
> "If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease," he said. "I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world."
https://www.polygon.com/2013/7/5/4496512/why-nintendos-sator...
Just something to think about. I get that every company is different.
This is Atlassian. The only way their software impresses people is with how bad it is.
The people being laid off didn't get told by a video. The video was sent to the general staff and informed everyone that those who were being let go would get an email direct to them shortly after.
So, they announced the layoffs with a pre-recorded video versus a company-wide meeting - or - as is more common in my experience: No warning or explanation beforehand.
> employees they would have to wait 15 minutes for an email about their employment. Those who were terminated had their laptops blocked immediately.
So you get an email explaining you were made redundant and halfway through reading that your laptop locks itself out?
Better than one company I was at. Wednesday-evening meeting to announce that there will be layoffs. "If you are affected you will receive an email by 7am EST tomorrow." Which I summarized in slack as
"Sleep well Wesley, I'll likely kill you in the morning."
Nobody is getting good sleep that night, at least until the doom hour has passed without an email.
I took it as they said you’d get an email in 15 minutes but immediately (before then) locked your computer so you wouldn’t be able to read it anyway.
Telling people “wait to see if you’re fired” is absolutely cruel. Hold a virtual meeting, even if it’s just to play a video, and hit send on all those emails the instant it’s over.
What a horrible thing to do to people. Can’t even do it yourself? Gotta pre-record it?
> is absolutely cruel.
> What a horrible thing
They offered 6 months severance which dispels any serious notion of 'cruelty'. Substance over form.
Sure I stabbed you, but I gave you a million dollars!
> and hit send on all those emails the instant it’s over.
Ever sent an email and not had it arrive instantly? 15 minutes is enough wiggle room to clarify that.
Startup idea: developing a custom login screen for each OS, that is able to display a farewell video, so the user can be immediately locked out.
Microsoft is working on this because they'd be the primary user.
Presumably it was sent to both corporate and personal email addresses?
I have yet, in my entire career, to work for an employer that was at all disciplined about sending email that needs to address me, in the capacity of my employment, to the right email address. They almost all default to internal.
When I was involved in a mass layoff, all of the emails went to an email that was going to be cut off.
So let me get this straight, they emailed what? 12,000 employees, and told them they would be fired or not in about 15 minutes? Please tell me they didn't email 12,000 employees this ticking time bomb of a revelation. If I were at Atlassian and survived the lay offs I would be sprucing up my resume. There's no good way to lay off people, but this is even worse.
At a consulting company I worked at, we were told on Wednesday that layoffs affecting around 1/3 of the company would happen on Thursday and Friday and that the company was paying for an all-company event at a nearby pub-restaurant where the execs and senior managers did not attend, but most of the company did.
Much emotion, team reminiscing, and a fair amount of drinking happened and it was an interesting but honestly pretty decent way to handle it I thought. I was largely indifferent to whether I was in the 2/3 or 1/3 and ended up quitting on my own a couple months later.
In case anyone was wondering, the "CSS Team" described in the video's title is Customer Service & Support, rather than Cascading Style Sheets.
My personal hope based on their products' performance would be that they hire some people who know how to make performant code, but that's clearly never going to happen.
Genuinely curious: for remote based company with large numbers of employees - what is the best way to handle this?
Note: you typically want it to all happen on the same day, which makes it impractical for someone in HR to call 150 separate people.
Note2: I’m not saying I agree with how this was handled. Just curious.
Why would being remote mater? If a typical on-site situation would involve HR and your manager bringing you into an office to tell you, I'd assume a remote situation would be the same, just over a video call instead of having to walk down to an office. It shouldn't really take any more time.
Tell your employees as soon as the idea pops into your head, and make sure they know there'll be something in it for them if they stick around until then. A layoff in nine months gives people time to plan.
Sort of a moot point though. Laying off spooled-up knowledge workers is probably the stupidest thing you could do if you're creating software and not investment opportunities.
Soon we shall see headlines of AI HR personnel being deployed to appropriately 'therapise the employees and mentor them for future opportunities' and HR companies which coordinate them for you. The second extreme that follows is one where we do away with HR and operate on a perfectly managed gig market where you will be hired and fired automatically!
“Every person should be using AI daily for as many things as they can.”
and not Atlassian products , but that part didn't make it to the final cut.
I think the layoff sucks, but there are proper ways to communicate it, and this was not the right way. The proper process is for the manager to carry out this sensitive procedure—quickly, but with empathy. (I'm not a manager, but I'm sure it's easy to be a "Happiness Manager"; the coin has two sides.) Even if individual meetings weren't possible, they could have just held a 150-to-1 live session. Saying the exact same thing as the video would have been different. Why? Because it wouldn't be a pre-recorded video. For those who are willing to accept an employer sending a goodbye SMS, I have to wonder how much commitment you really had to that workplace. If you had none, fine, who cares. But if your commitment was more than just a transactional job, like someone selling groceries from 8:00 to 17:00, I don't think you'd want to work for a company that follows such processes.
There’s something oddly fitting about the company that forced the Jira monopoly on so many companies also being cruel and cold with prerecorded firing videos.
This is good news for customers though. I'm sure those savings will be passed on, right? Right?
LOL! Passed on to the AI company is more like it.
Because their software never gets tired of giving you the run around, while actual people do.
How exactly should they be terminated? 150 1:1 meetings?
Not only should my boss behave like he's putting down the family dog, I should be able to face my VP in single combat with my weapon of choice.
Best we can do is a 20 frag limit quake 3 deathmatch duel in q3dm17
I know your comment is going to be deleted because HN is not the place for these kind of comment, but you made me laugh loudly, so thank you.
This but without the irony.
That could work. 15 managers doing 10 1:1 meetings each isn't so hard. It can get tricky with people being on vacation etc. But very possible and normal.
Have you ever had to do these? 10 back to back layoffs is a rough day. I had to do 5 in one day once and had to seek out a very expensive hangover.
Sucks for everyone. I’ve been laid off by email, it’s fine.
maybe doing something wrong should be emotionally painful for managers and HR staff.
That's not so good for the people remaining, or even those laid off but later in the queue. Once the first person gets laid off, everyone will know it's happening and be wondering whether they're included. You're just dragging out the suspense over the hours or (more likely) days those meetings take place, rather than getting it out of the way in a few minutes. That's probably worse than the dubious joy of a personalised message about your termination.
(Though, here in the UK, redundancy procedures can take weeks, so a few days is not much compared to that.)
What if their direct manager was also terminated? It could result in a manager's manager having such a large cohort as it to take several days while employees wait to see if they're fired or not (word would get out immediately).
Or some other unrelated manager doing the firing.
This is how I have seen it done. You end up with managers firing people they do not know, and employees getting 15 min meeting invites and knowing what it means. But it’s much more compassionate and human.
[JIRA] Your boss assigned HR-5678 to you.
HR: Atlassian / HR-5678
Acknowledge Receipt of Your Termination Notice
I was at Atlassian when a major product was cancelled which was based in the Austin office and MCB flew out to Austin to deliver the news that some would be laid off and others reassigned. I think a town hall over video chat would have been fine.
This is inconsequence!
Hipchat/Stride was a flop, because it was a poor product, poorly executed. Switch to Slack was a huge relief for everyone.
Atlassian support engineers used to be the best part of the service. Poor products + Great support = made Atlassian great
Hipchat was a success, which is why Atlassian purchased it, but Slack leapfrogged it and Stride was too late.
Not doubting the role that support plays for Atlassian. Just highlighting how I witnessed MCB handle a similar situation 7 years ago, by flying to Austin from Australia to deliver the sad news. The article makes him sound heartless or cold but that wasn't my experience. That being said, an async video message is a weird play.
Well they certainly shouldn’t tell everyone that a bunch of people are being fired and then to just wait and sit around and see if you get the email of doom.
Yes.
Yes? Wtf
At least a live mass meeting.
I swear there was a post not to long ago about a company that laid off a lot of employees in a live meeting, and it went badly, and people in the comments were saying "a prerecorded video would have been better". The duality of Internet forums, I guess...
A JIRA ticket with hundreds of legal dependencies.
I suggest a coding challenge, and the first five to submit it and pass the functional tests can stay?
Accounting and marketing are not going to be happy.
But CEO said “Every person should be using AI daily for as many things as they can.”...
I suggest a monster truck derby battle.
And we'll call it "Rehabilitation"
Every problem I ever had with an Atlassian product turned out to be related to an unimplemented 5+ year old feature request.
A simple chatbot could pass along that information.
Have we had the first layoff announced by an AI yet?
Small discussion (5 points, 2 days ago, 10 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44740709
Best of luck to all employees. I almost accepted an offer there but decided to go elsewhere. The remote work was very appealing.
> “Every person should be using AI daily for as many things as they can.”
This is getting even more ridiculous than I had previously expected.
honestly this is the least cruel layoff I've seen in recent years. At least someone went through the trouble of recording a video (instead of dismissing people with a chatgpt-generated email) and it includes a 6-month payout...
6 months severance speaks volumes more about this layoff than the video does.
Interesting how this is downvoted when the top comment is essentially saying the same thing.
Stay classy Atlassian
You have issues, you open JIRA ticket.
Now thats the spirit!
If I got laid off I would want it in an email. I’m losing my job no matter what might as well have it in writing and no bullshit
Pretty much this. I have a great relationship with my boss. If the time comes where he needs to let me go, I need 2 words from him [which could be in email] and then the only things I care about that day are the details of the severance.
No disrespect given nor received, but this is all business at that point. Some other day, we can work out any transition plan we need to work through and I'll happily hang out with him socially afterwards, but the things I need from the company at that moment are the severance details, nothing else. Emailed attachments are perfect.
Is there a good way to lay off 150 people?
1% layoff why does this even matter. They have more than that in natural attrition in a quarter
I suspect it’s more about how they gave the announcement than the size of the layoff itself.
Plus general AI hate, and they’re obviously blaming this on not needing people because of AI.
I don't see what AI has to do with the layoff story. The first mention of AI is "The company has also embedded AI in its customer contact form" and it appears the author decided to include this for no apparent reason.
The article also has a footnote stating "Updated to remove claims of AI replacing jobs." so I suppose there was probably a stronger - but still invented by the author - claim included that has since been removed.
The original version appeared to claim that they were doing it because AI made the people unnecessary, or at least they might think so.
Presumably because the layoff is targeted at a specific (set of) teams in customer service, rather than a 1% haircut across the company?
Sadly the time when an org wanted people to excel and really grow at is over, the new normal is peak capitalism of maximizing value.
People develop relationships with coworkers, you care if someone has issues, you're happy if a solution makes customers/coworkers happy but none of that matters to the lawnmower, it just mows lawns.
Yet another tech company sacrifices perfectly useful labor while earning $1.1bn in profit last quarter rather than retraining or reallocating that labor elsewhere within the organization and reducing recruitment costs - costs which will surely be higher, now that they've joined their counterparts in shoving their reputation into a rusty woodchipper.
Unnecessary actions that squander scarce resources (trust, labor that understands the enterprise and its customers) in the name of vague platitudes about AI and shareholder returns. Almost like none of these people actually know how to manage an organization for any length of time longer than a fiscal year.
I wish they’d lay off Jira
Well, at least it is a video. Meta had its layoffs with emails when they did all those rounds in 22-23 and 24. You got an email if you were safe, and another if you were terminated plus some links to some portal etc. Plus, there was some video/zoom call for some I think.
Anyways... modern corp culture, don't expect too much from larger companies. Once a company grows beyond a certain limit, it becomes impersonal as it has to.
1% layoff, 6 months severance. There, saved you the trouble.
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