Reply to post: Double-edged sword

She was praised by the CEO and promoted. After her brother and mom died, she returned from compassionate leave. IBM laid her off

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Double-edged sword

Big tech companies hire thousands at a time -- but they also fire people at scale. My second day at HP, they laid off more people (by two orders of magnitude) than the total headcount of every other employer I had worked for up to that time.

Stalin (allegedly) said that "a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." Layoffs obviously don't equal murder, and I don't mean to imply that they do. But I understood the underlying principle a lot more clearly when swathes of nearby cube dwellers disappeared in one fell swoop, campus buildings closed & sold, etc. with no mention on the local TV news and a single bullet-list paragraph in the business section of the newspaper.

A few years later, I became a statistic as well.

(AC, out of an abundance of caution.)

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