Most companies are scummy..
Although IBM excels at it. The company I work for did something similar--we all had to take part of our vacation, plus a work reduction of 1 day/week, plus a pay cut. The temporary pay cut hurts, but I wasn't that upset with it, as between vacation and the work reduction, it's the most stress-free I've been in a decade.
Of course, 2 months later and still dealing with Coronavirus, there were sudden unexpected layoffs, actually terminations, where people were made redundant. Which really sucks, but I do have my eyes open and have noticed that the economy is not great, and many companies are doing this. One thing I had respected up to that point was that my employer seemed to be doing everything in their power to not reduce staff to cope. Oh, did I mention that these layoffs were permanent? No chance of people getting their jobs back after the dust settles? And a few very senior people, who are going to be hard to replace.
But what really galls me about the situation though is the global conference call the next day talking about how financially healthy we are and how everything is going great. Our department, chronically understaffed and overworked, like so many IT departments, lost 2 employees to natural attrition, not layoffs. But the positions are not being backfilled--we all just get more work. Yay. And our budget for new equipment is cut to the bone. Of course I'm just grateful to have a job at this point when so many do not.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
