alt Hacker NewsSeverance
Comments
So a black mirror short story, as a meeting notetaker transcript love it!
One cool touch would be a 2 bullet AI summary at the end with em-dashes.
The "macroeconomic" phrase sounds like $AMZN. Kept hearing this until the new buzzword showed up; AI.
One time when I was in one of these calls. It was pretty obvious it was coming, the company wasn't doing great and there were plenty of whispers.
Still, I was pretty upset I was laid off, because it's just not a fun feeling. After the HR person explained the severance and COBRA stuff, I said something to the CTO like "I wish you all the best in trying to save this company, and for the sake of this conversation, let's just pretend I'm not lying". Then I hung up.
I wish I could feel guilty over that, but ultimately they were cutting off my livelihood, they can deal with momentary hurt feelings.
“What about health insurance?”
“Your enrollment will end on the last day of this month, and we will be providing every affected employee with information about extending their coverage through COBRA.”
“The last day of the month, so, today?”
“Yes, that is correct. On the other hand, our OpenAI and Anthropic accounts are paid quarterly, so you will retain access to your chats and may continue using these tools until the end of September.”
I hope this was made up. But it could actually be real. Satire has a hard time these days reaching the absurdity of reality, let alone surpass it.
You can always get together, cleanse the code of any IP entanglements, and compete with the company that just laid you off. Calls like this one are a good time to suggest it--even if only to make them squirm.
I fell for it!
I know this is a joke, but this is why my coworkers and I were muted during the meeting we were laid off.
I received a meeting invite the night before for 9am with two HR people and some middle manager above me that I never met. It was obvious what the meeting was going to be.