But I still find it disturbing considering current inflation and many struggling just to make ends meet.
The layoffs in tech are starting to remind me of the 1973 or 1974 (it's hazy to me at this point) layoffs during the severe recession of that era. Weirdly, techies were actually doing ok at that time, it was a period when businesses were only beginning to get on board really computerizing their workflows and had begun to downsize some of their workforce as a result of that, but this was way different. Corporate layoffs in November that year were horrendous, and got tagged "The Thanksgiving Massacres" around water coolers and probably in the media as well. A lot of them literally happened on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. It was just awful.
My group as consultants had just the prior week been contracted to start some business planning project, and the idea had been to just settle in a bit on the pre-holiday Wednesday, figure out where the in house clients 'offices were, where the copy and printer rooms were etc., and then start the following Monday, since the company was giving employees the Friday off to extend the Thanksgiving holiday.
But when we showed up on Wednesday, people were wandering around with packing boxes, crying, the open area of cubes and a few utilitarian offices and conference rooms that we were supposed to have occupied were being used by HR clerks busy terminating in-house workers... and so I and the others on my team ended up in some hastily vacated HR middle-management offices with mahogany desks and credenzas and leather sofas. They were to be our offices for project duration. And there was nothing to do that day, no clients to meet. It was beyond bizarre. We left on the dot of 5pm, eager to escape the stink of desperation and confusion that had greeted us.
It was difficult to feel celebratory about our good luck having landed our contract and even having a job, what with the in-house clients of any and all external consulting groups still unsettled by departure of many of their colleagues and in some cases their managers. The project ended up being difficult thanks to gaps in the client-side residual knowledge bases. Every single department had been forced to slash its headcount, by how much I don't know but it left holes of around 25% in the groups I worked with. Anyway they way overdid the cuts, or made them willy-nilly and axed people they needed, for sure.
www.wsj.com
