Real callous firings are when you wake up to your entire company no longer existing, your pension gone and corporate raiders walking off with billions.
Not being able to say goodbye on the internal message board is not a violation of your human rights.
Enjoy your many months of severance - something almost nobody else in your country enjoys.
- when Enron took over Portland Gas and Electric, they folded in the PG&E employee 401ks into their stock, so many people retired with nothing after years of hard labor [1]
- AT&T recently cut life / death insurance benefits promised to retirees for employees retiring after 2022 (but those cuts don't apply to top executives) [2]
There are many instances of this, it happens all the time.
Don't get me wrong, getting laid off is terrible, but we can bounce back faster than most.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/01/20/f...
[2] https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/benefits/pa...
"The 55-year-old electrical troubleshooter ignored his financial planner's advice, keeping 100 percent of his 401(k) money invested in Enron stock. He purchased more Enron shares with his savings and annual bonus"
"In addition to contributing the maximum 15 percent to their 401(k) funds, the Stevenses were buying $600 a month in Enron stock. Cathie Stevens, who had been so poor as a teenager that she picked strawberries for clothing money, even flipped her annual bonus money back into the purchase of Enron options."
Not sure who you're really blaming for people "retiring with nothing" if they put all their eggs in one basket like that, against experts' advice.
Sure, it could be worse, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t callous.
I can only imagine what other countries might be like--I would expect ageism, local laws, market maturity, and even factors like origin and upbringing to still be significant risk factors if people were to be laid off in the casual manner the US seems to take for granted.
But the context of this article is a person getting let go from Google, not from a job digging ditches. From that point of view, yes, I think there is definitely privilege, compared to places elsewhere that you mentioned.
At age 39, I think I've had a traditional salaried job for about 6 months of my life so far and that was around age 23. It didn't suit me and I've always loooked for alternative forms of making money since. I've had a great run as a freelancer for the last twelve years or so. For the last few years in tech, and before that as a performer and dancer.
It's important when you're part of an online community not to generalize the other people there. I am not like you, you are not like me. We come from different countries, have different backgrounds and outlooks on life.
The thing bringing us together is a shared interest in the topic of this forum. Don't expand on that and assume it means we have similarities in other areas, that's groupthink territory. It's our differences that make this place interesting.
"You need to detach and psychologically recover from work, professors say. The solution: commuting."
Which was not exactly the summary of the article, but it was clearly framed this way for generating reactions and engagement from RTO and WFH crowd ( and clearly I belong to one of those groups since I noticed ). The author eventually asked the website to change the title to:
"You need to detach and ‘psychologically recover’ from work, professors say. Commuting is a ‘liminal space’ where that can happen"
As always, there are levels. Callous may be too strong, but I would not say 'nothing was callous'.
> “This just drives home that work is not your life, and employers—especially big, faceless ones like Google—see you as 100% disposable”
It’s unfortunate and rather sad that it takes a firing to cause someone to realize that work is not their life. Work is a transaction. You do work and you get paid. If you want to find meaning in your life, there are better places to look than in some corporation.
In terms of being “disposable”, again, it’s not that you’re disposable. It’s transactional. For years the standard advice to tech workers has been to switch jobs frequently to gain pay raises. That was viewed as sensible economics, not a betrayal of one’s employer.
What's the difference. The same mentality makes both happen. If Google was financially in dire straits, what you said would be exactly what they were doing.
In a sense, this is worse - Google is not in financial straits. Its gigantic. Its ginormous revenue only slowed a bit. The entire purpose of this stampede was to appease hedge funds and investors by propping up the stock price. Employees and users be damned.