The Layoff | Hacker News Reader

The Layoff

xeiaso.net

452 pointssigna11167 comments

"We won't share a list of the affected employees because some of them might not want the information to be public" was the biggest bullshit I've heard recently - no fiction needed.

Discovering that people you worked with for years have been laid off only because you randomly notice their slack is deactivated has to be one of 2024s gifts to humanity.

> one of 2024s gifts to humanity

You think that started in 2024? You sweet summer child

“Hey is Dave working today? We were supposed to groom the backlog today.”

“Dave is no longer with us”

“Oh no! What do we do? Send a condolences card to his partner? Do we have contact information? I worked with Dave for three years”

“Oh.. no he just has been let go.”

“Okay.. uh. So who will be the scrum master now?”

“You will have to take on some extra responsibilities while we transition to the new team structure”

“:sadparrot:”

That's at least better than I've experienced:

Manager at a standup "got some news. Unfortunately Bob has passed out"

Confused looks.

"What do you mean passed out?"

"Oh I mean he's died"

Horror from everyone there.

No further information was ever given.

Personally, I think it’s not the company’s place to give out further information in this case, absent a request from Bob’s family.

I think the issue is rather that the manager tries to sugarcoat the fact that someone has died by using very abstract language.

Might have being going for “passed away”

Managers are people too and will have their own emotions they are dealing with.

At least they weren't announced as 'useless', so there is that.

As a manager you have a responsibility to communicate this to your team and give them resources to deal with the emotions (you, the manager, being one of the resources).

So sure, you have your own stuff to deal with - use the resources you have for that (eg your manager) but when it comes time to face your team, be a professional and don’t shut down in front of them. They need you too.

Source: I’ve been in management positions and had to deal with a bunch of layoffs and yes, the occasional outright actual death.

So why even say he died? Maybe just say he is not working for the company anymore and let the team figure it out for themselves if they are that curious.

If a colleague of mine died, and management described this as "they are no longer with the company", this would create some huge trust issues if I found out. Which in any place I've ever worked, I would find out.

"Passed out" is just a verbal typo for "passed on", an accepted euphemism in English for someone dying. I think that slip is forgivable, clearly not ideal, but human beings make mistakes. I also agree with the parent comment that it isn't management's place to provide details about the death, but IMHO they have a responsibility to say that's what happened.

There aren't many ways to get more condescending than this. Congrats.

>> You sweet summer child

Agreed that the condescension is the worst part of this, but a close 2nd-place has to be how cliché this is by now.

It was just an offhand comment. The first time I remember it happening to me was 2012, and I know it wasn't new then.

This has been one of my most surprising/weird experiences working for US startups. In the other two countries I've been, at the very least my manager sat with each of us, or in group, or some sort of announcement when someone I was working with would stop (either voluntarily or involuntarily). Seeing names and 1-1 conversations just disappear from Slack without anyone saying anything is very bizarre.

But I had to learn that as a lesson as well, since I might've learned something from them and left e.g. some commands that I use once every few months in the chat, now gone forever. This is also literally the only reason I have Linkedin, so I don't suddenly lose contact with those people (I don't have FB).

I've pushed for 30 day retention in slack for this very reason.

It used to be that way. Work in the office generally requires a face-to-face meeting, and a box to put your stuff in before you are escorted out of the office.

Most recently, during COVID, I was laid off with no contact with my manager and no explanation. My recruiter called right before my access was terminated at 5pm.

I don't know if it became the norm in the US because of remote work, but as a manager I make a point of announcing to my team when one of them just got let go. Like in the next 30min or so.

I guess I don't tell all teams and all our 200 engineers that this random guy is no longer with us.

I haven't had a US-based office job since 2018. I'm as thrown by it as you. It always used to be the norm that at the next standup or meeting it would be acknowledged. I don't know what changed in the intervening years.

I wonder how common this is, % wise.

I've never seen this happen personally (15yrs US tech) but maybe that is unusual

I mean, I've seen a lay off once where all the names of the people affected where listed and taped on the door of the department. People came to work checking the list, just like I did 20 years ago to know if I passed my degree.

Not sure it's much better :D

My previous job never told us who was laid off —- once I had a meeting with a woman later that day and I only realized after she didn’t show up.

I too found slack to be the layoff lookup tool.

Hah, is Slack doing anything with this data, it sounds like Salesforce has a good intel on a lotttt of companies. Things like re-orgs (bunch of new Slack channels, archival of old ones) who's working with whom...

I'm sure it makes its way into the Einstein sales intelligence platform (TM)

Someone at my work created a secret bot that scrapes the outlook contacts list and diffs it from the previous day, each day. This way we get daily updates whenever a new person is onboarded or offboarded.

As employees we now have more clarity about the state of layoffs and hiring decisions that most of the management team does.

I suggest doing the same within your org if you can.

We did the same informally with Slack, but it's a great tip :)

There's even some automations around leadership calendar meeting titles+invitees that I might or not have heard about. If leadership wants to play games people can play games back.

If the politics internally are nutty enough you can do alot with this sort of skullduggery… It only works if it’s secret or the folks are oblivious.

I worked at a place where this sort of thing was done. It became practice to setup fake meetings or conduct real meetings with vague titles as a misdirection.

The other scenario is if you let consultants inside the firewall. Big 5 guys always gather intel on org charts and goings on for more business. These guys aren’t very clever and are easy to manipulate with this sort of thing.

> I worked at a place where this sort of thing was done. It became practice to setup fake meetings or conduct real meetings with vague titles as a misdirection.

I don't get it.

You’re negotiating with Cisco. “Terms discussion / Arista” with key players.

You’re fighting with Big Consultant A. “Team Sync / Big Consultant B Principal”

When competing for resources, we’d sometimes imply that fake skunk works projects exist.

It depends on an environment toxic enough that people are spying on your calendar. Many big companies are.

That can be fixed by adjusting calendar meeting name visibility. They don't need to see what you're doing in detail.

Vague titles are bad news 99% of the time.

I say 99 not 100 because a certain VP in my org chart likes to schedule meetings called "News and updates" which is actually very innocent. Maybe he's playing the long con.

There's nothing worse than an unscheduled meeting with HR called "Sync" appearing in your calendar at short notice.

There was a recent post about a similar script, the LDAP diff pipeline: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39311507

Someone had done this at a previous company I worked at. You’d subscribe to a mailing list and get a daily/weekly summary of joiners, leavers and title changes. Pretty useful.

When management eventually found out they were seemingly supportive, but in the next layoff they made sure to reach out to the owner to make him “pause” the tool just before the layoffs started.

When the mailing list was unpaused again the laid-off folks weren’t mentioned, as if they’d never existed in the first place. Felt very 1984-esque.

That’s really dystopian. “We’ve always been at war with Sales and Accounting”.

Google has had a very visible tool internally for this for years. It lists every single person that leaves on a given day. It even has a system set up where the person leaving can email it, and the note would be attached to their leaving notice. You can also search the system and see anybody that's left at any point. So I could look for people that left 15 years ago.

The layoffs the last 2 years have been interesting in that the people aren't officially gone when they are laid off, as Google continues to pay them for 60 or 90 days. So a bunch of people who appear on this list all at once 60 days after they let go.

Boy do I miss go/epitaphs; you could actually sort by departures based on tenure as well. But I've heard you could get into trouble for scraping epitaphs or specific ganpati groups to figure out who has left specifically around layoff seaon.

Ganapati? Lord Ganesh is called Ganapati.

Google's access management database is called Ganpati - think ActiveDirectory or LDAP.

At one unnamed startup I worked at, one of the sysadmins would just read the CEO's email and let us know o_O

I remember one email he sent me, paraphrasing: "You know that tech demo you gave the C-Suite last week for that really cool thing you invented in your off-time? Yeah, well they are having their lawyers figure out if your employment contract means that they own it already."

We're people really told before, or did everyone simply find out because they were all in the office together?

I know when I worked in a big company 20 years ago I would have no idea who was let go in another office.

I can't remember lists ever being revealed to employees. I would usually find out when an email bounced back.

Last big layoff I was a part of in the before times, I was working for a huge aerospace company who just lost out on a major gov contract. We were told layoffs were coming, and they would happen on a certain day. You would get a phone call to come to your manager's office for a private meeting, or you wouldn't and that meant you were not laid off.

So everyone is sitting at their desk, too keyed up to do any work, just waiting to hear who's desk phone is going to go off next.

My call came late in the afternoon (about the time I was starting to think I was safe). Everyone in the cube farm knew you just got hit as you walked toward the boss's office where the boss and the HR lady were waiting.

I really don’t get why companies won’t allow limited access to email at least to send a goodbye message and contact details to their colleagues. You could spin up new email boxes if you are worried about them downloading emails even.

It just seems really cold to not let people say goodbye and point their colleagues to their LinkedIn so they can get some recommendations and such. For the companies that allow this I salute you.

Could be they want to avoid the remaining employees getting emails saying Turns out the competition pay much better anyway.

You can find most of your coworkers on LinkedIn, if that is your goal.

Could be but the few that will send out nasty grams on broadcast just hurt themselves. Professionals will inform their colleagues privately so as to not burn bridges.

I guess I just wish the US borrowed some parts of European work culture when it comes to stuff like this.

Security training, usually mandated by some insurance policy, regulation or something else, typically lists "disgruntled employee" as the number one internal security threat.

Cutting off access prior to or immediately following notification of termination is more or less the only remedy to prevent data exfiltration from such a person.

Even if there were some programmatic way to ensure they could only email internal addresses, there are still some risks. I think it'd be worth implementing myself, though I can see it being rather difficult or impossible to set up depending on how the company's email is run.

2024? It happened to me in 2020, right after Covid. I was unable to reach a colleague, thought he was sick (not unusual, he had health issues often). Until the “standup” rolled around and we were told he was laid off.

Apparently he himself found out after most of his logins were shut off.

Corporate world is as gutless as it is soulless

I've heard from a friend that the way they found someone was laid off was by Google Calendar suddenly removing the person that was laid off from invites while in a 1:1 with their manager. The manager had no context. That kind of inhuman feeling is what exemplifies the state of layoffs in the modern day.

Last time I was laid off (2022) it worked this way. It was a remote job - I was pulled into a random 1:1 meeting with my manager and immediately afterward I found all my permissions/access was gone.

Last time I was laid off (exactly 1 month ago) even my manager (allegedly) didn't know I was laid off until after my offboarding meeting with HR. Neither did the manager of the consulting engagement to which I was assigned (thankfully my now-former employer didn't terminate my accounts until noon, which gave me time to reach out to her on Slack and coordinate returning the client-issued laptop I had just received days prior).

My biggest complaint is that lying is just completely endemic. The best liars, who lie so well you question if they're lying when it's right in front of you, are at the top, and you just progress down from there with everyone playing along to known lies. Finding and working in areas with people who care about the truth is like a priceless haven.

Apply that to academia and education lol

I found out I was let go around 3:15 on a Thursday because the person sitting across from me emailed me something, then told me it just bounced back as 'undeliverable'. 3 minutes later someone showed up with a box and gave me 5 minutes to pack my things. This was 1999. Corporate world has been gutless/soulless for a long time ;)

Step 1. A company lays off employees and shares the list.

Step 2. The list is shared on social media.

Step 3. A former employee that's on that list sues the company.

exactly -if I ran a big company, no way I would send out a notice to people still working there every time someone was let go to say who got fired or laid off.

People who need to know find out who is gone, it just takes a little longer.

Has this ever happened? I know that in the US at least we say that "you can sue anyone for anything," but it seems a stretch to think that a company could face legal liability for disclosing internally that someone was let go.

One of the companies in my early career always sent out an email blast with someone's parting words. In the case of a negative termination, the leadership usually wrote something about them. The words were always read by HR before, but I really appreciated it. It felt more humane.

Right. I think they just want to avoid being on the front-page of startup news sites with a headline like "<company> lays off <n>% of workforce," so they don't call it a layoff and try to keep a lid on how many people were let go.

Of course, because they can't say that they have to come up with other narratives which wind up sounding disingenuous at best.

my employer did this last year. randomly laid off 100s of top contributors and project champions then spent the following year wondering why everything is slipping. that company and this entire market is so incredibly stupid.

That was interesting. I'm reminded of the sci-fi story called "Manna" that I read a while ago, which explored a bit of a dystopian future, where advancements in technology eventually made a lot of people unemployed: https://marshallbrain.com/manna

Actually, the Wiki page has more info on it, for those that don't have the time to read it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel)

The story is from 2003, but hearing about people being laid off due to AI/LLM advances suddenly reminds me of it, as well as AI gradually encroaching upon more positions. After all, letting an AI of some sort handle layoffs would almost make sense.

That's not to say that the early attempts at replacing writers or artists, or even some developers won't backfire pretty badly.

I've been "enjoying" watching that story come true since he published it. It's a great summation of all the trends that have been going on for a long time now.

SO where is the near-real-time country-wide system that ratchets down the standard (statutory) work week in sync with the overall decline in aggregate work ?

Governments need us busy and distracted, they'll never willingly give us free time like that.

First there would need to be signs of greatly increased productivity where it counts (customer facing). Somehow I have my doubts we will see that with the current crop of LLM.

The most unrealistic part of this is Australia being a utopia of universal basic income.

Unfortunately we've gone the way of the USA in many ways, though at least centrelink (unemployment/dole) still exists as a minimal safety net.

> The most unrealistic part of this is Australia being a utopia of universal basic income.

To be fair, a corporation had to raise a trillion dollars of capital and build that society from scratch before anyone else even seemed interested. How it progressed from that point to "the rest of Australia signed on" is entirely hand-waved away.

Just like real life, where nobody cares about programs like this and everyone refuses to help until they're already taking off. Which may or may not ever happen.

This was an extremely good read, thank you!

A choice of two dystopia - one where your brain is controlled by a computer, the other where you are locked in a room.

That is like traditions chicken farming vs free range chicken farming.

Keep in mind while free range chicken farming is better to market, it is also more messy.

https://thehensloft.com/free-range-chicken-pros-cons/

Have you ever been inside of an industrial chicken house? Its absolutely, without a doubt, the most disgusting and depressing place I've ever personally seen. Even worse if you're unlucky enough to be there after a single case of avian flu is found anywhere in the area.

Chickens can be messy, but that's only an issue with free ranged birds if you don't have enough space for them. Most chickens won't venture too dar from their coop, usually on the order of a couple hundred feet. If you don't want chickens pooping all over your lawn and barn, just put their coop further out in the field (preferably near some trees for cover).

Rotational grazing is also really effective with chickens. Its more work, but you keep the birds where you want them and end up fertilizing your fields as you move them around.

It's also a joy at feeding time to see them running home by the dozens.

Manna(one of my favorite writings on AI), is incredibly optimistic and sugar-coated. All the "basic income" parts and Australia would have to be realistically fought tooth-and-nail with people viewing welfare recipients as "lazy" and "entitled"..

People can only view welfare recipients as lazy and entitled from the pedestal of a decent job. 80% of the white collar middle class is going to have to learn to become AI "composers" or learn trades, and I'm guessing trades will be vastly more accessible for the majority of the displaced. The mass influx of tradespeople is going to depress earnings due to competition (which already weren't great unless you were a master tradesman with employees), so we're going to end up with 75% of the population below average income and people struggling to afford rent and food. When that happens I don't expect the pushback against some form of social service or basic income to be so great.

Do you have any sources for layoffs "due to AI/LLM advances" other than layoffs-in-one-sector-to-replace-with-AI-experts which I can find plenty of, but which are not really due to efficiency improvements?

What’s the difference? AI-motivated job cuts are widespread in all sectors, and companies are phrasing them as “efficiency improvements.” This is only possible because of recent advances in LLM capability. If anything, skilled experts are slightly less likely to be replaced by AI (with notable exceptions for visual artists)

“IBM Plans To Replace Nearly 8,000 Jobs With AI” https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-plans-replace-nearly-8-17...

“Around four in 10 [business leaders surveyed by ResumeBuilder] said they'll conduct layoffs as they replace workers with AI, with Dropbox, Google, and IBM have already announced job cuts for that very reason“ https://www.businessinsider.com/layoffs-sweeping-us-these-ar...

“A recent Goldman Sachs study found that generative AI tools could, in fact, impact 300 million full-time jobs worldwide, which could lead to a "significant disruption" in the job market” https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-jobs-at-risk-replace...

Reality is that knowing LLM and other AI tech now is going to be a long term distinct advantage for software engineers of all stripes and those that don’t know will fall behind

To me that does not sound like a "reality", but a hypothesis that many are willing to bet on today.

It may turn out to be true, but I don't see any proof of that yet, not even in the social sciences-style of proof (which is admittedly a lower bar to clear than mathematical-style proofs, but that would do for now).

I share your skepticism about AI tools being effective. However, when we look at it from a labor relations perspective, what's important is the threat of being replaced, and that's happening now. I think the threat itself is (currently) far more damaging to workers' psychological safety (thus team performance) than whatever outcomes using AI (currently) actually brings.

My point is that we're already beyond the "fuck around" threshold; your point (if I understand you correctly) is that we haven't reached the "find out" threshold yet. :)

Thanks, but I am really curious about the jobs AI itself has replaced today.

Note the use of "will", "could" and "plans" in those articles: none of this has materialized today, as was implied in the GP post.

> What's the difference?

The difference is in chasing the market potential vs actually achieving that potential today: it seems to me generative AI is not replacing any jobs today, but AI experts are being hired in lieu of traditional software experts en masse, hoping for generative AI advances to continue to the point where those efficiencies materialize (which is never a given, but I do see the business reasons to bet on it).

One statement is that generative AI is good enough to replace workers today (which I haven't seen proof of yet), and another is that it seems this might happen in the (near) future so let's invest in developing AI more (also implying that where it is today is not sufficient).

"the rest of the year's worth of pay in one lump sum, to keep your corporate laptop, and COBRA coverage for the rest of the year should you need it. You will also get double the value of any unspent paid time off, including the time you would have gained during the rest of the year."

OMG I would love this kind of severance, in February no less. I'm accustomed to hearing about severance that goes from from jack squat to 2 weeks severance + 1 week per year worked, no insurance, no laptop, and maybe you unpaid vacation time that didn't carry over.

Lay me off, baby. Daddy's going on a 10 month paid sabbatical!

The worst that are affected are the people who didn't get laid off and now have to do the work of all the people that did. Double the work with no extra pay, what's not to like?

hahaha yes. This kind of a layoff is actually winning the lottery.

This kind of severance is a thing of the past.

I predict a new type of employement will emerge as a result of the late stage capitalism we are experiencing: the just in time employment. Where you are technically employed all the time but you are not paid [the same] when the corpo has you in the idle bucket. The drones will stay on for the health insurance, minimum pay, the illusion of work right around the corner. Heck, we also may have corpos form big pools of disposables that allow them to elastically scale the number of people that currently work on something up and down. Remember folks! JustInTime Employment!

> just in time employment

Sounds like making everyone a contractor.

You mean the gig economy, right?

Well a guy named SWIM got laid off not long ago with exactly this kind of severance, about 6 months left in the year + compensated for unspent time off + got to keep his laptop and monitor. Getting laid off like this was the best thing that happened in his employment history and not just to him, there was a mass layoff and people were anxious they might end up being kept :)

So I completely stopped reading the story after the severance package since that paragraph completely shattered my suspension of disbelief. Any sane (and competent) person would jump at the opportunity of being laid off like this.

[Spoiler alert - look away now if you haven't read the story]

I'd expect the logical extension to this to wholly be using AI for the managerial aspect of bringing you into the conversation. Employers will have the right to make use of a manger's likeness for reasons they see fit, such as using a bot to layoff their direct reports. Removes the emotional liability from the manager.

These AI doomer predictions get more and more detached from reality.

The naivety of many people still staggers me. Life has a lot to teach you yet, grasshopper.

Thanks for the life lesson Dad.

Yay we have turned into reddit.

Why do you think a class of folks with asymmetric access to a given resource, because of costs to access and use such resources creating barrier to entry, would not use those very asymmetric resources to their advantage when possible?

So long as the prediction is viable from a technological and execution level, I don’t see why it has to be labeled “doomer.” If it’s possible and people can exploit it to their advantage, they will, that’s humans.

People have been saying the same thing about off/near-shoring for decades. "X will be replaced by cheaper Y" but that has not materialized in any way. If anything, the opposite has been proven as demand for high-skilled labor continue to push salaries and competition for positions up. The amount of AI is coming for X or AI will replace Y is so unfounded at this point, I'm chalking it up with FSD-levels of hype. It remains to be seen whether it actually proves useful at any _real_ scale.

> People have been saying the same thing about off/near-shoring for decades. "X will be replaced by cheaper Y" but that has not materialized in any way.

Eh? It absolutely has in many industries. It also has been tried many times in software, it just tends to fail, so the fact the option was there and perceived as an advantage and acted upon is exactly my point. It very well could happen and it absolutely has and has been tried, as soon as it was viable.

When it comes to the above comment about grabbing the likeness of an individual to create an artificial human interface to the layoff process, “deep fake” approaches already exist and are very viable, it’s simply a matter of signing over yet another right in an employment contract. Some groups are already doing this with entertainers and public facing figures because there’s a lot of value in it. So long as it’s cheap to capture a bit of imagery from an employee and cheap enough to overlay and generate video for, how unbelievable is it that a business would simulate a manager figure to lay you off in a conversation pretending to be personable? Technologically we’re not that far away.

At some point you might even be able to crawl internal business conversations to gather personal characteristics and tailor a script or even the appearance of the simulated human to reduce reaction to a layoff message, assuming the risk to cost made sense.

I put nothing off the table of possibilities from groups of sociopaths with power, unless it’s quite literally impossible or too costly to do.

I'm reminded of a recent news story where scammers used multiple AI deepfakes on video calls to convince someone in a financial corporation to transfer them some 25 million dollars.

So I'm thinking it's possible to do this _right now_.

Heh, yea, it's like the people arguing with you have not paid attention for the last 50 years. Wages have been mostly stagnant since the 70s with little growth. Piles of jobs (actually production) have been offshored, then later brought back to the US as part of the jobless recovery, instead when a manufacturing job comes back the company employees an order of magnitude less people and uses machines and capital far more intensely.

Simply put, when we look at the trends of AI improvement we are tasked with the question, what is going to cause the sustainment of human labor for its current value across broad areas of all markets?

I work at a company where the offshore developers are both cheaper and far stronger than the FTE's.

AI is coming for those FTE's. It's nowhere near replacing the good ones but we have such a glut of shitty developers in this industry and AI is absolutely coming for them.

Funny enough, I have a story about this! https://xeiaso.net/blog/protos/

Something that got pruned from the final draft was the manager also being there to monitor the call, but also an AI duplicate. I thought that was too creepy and it would make it too realistic, so it was left on the cutting-room floor.

I enjoyed the story, and want to offer some mild feedback. I found the reuse of "Hooli" from Silicon Valley distracting, spent the next few paragraphs wondering if this was supposed to be SV fanfic. I can think of a number of fake company names which would immediately suggest Google to the reader, without having that effect, as I'm sure you can as well.

Oh, that was left in? It was supposed to be E100. Oops! Fixing.

About a decade ago I was doing a lot of travel for work - 140 plus flights a year over 6 continents level.

I remember watching a film, “Up in the Air”, about a guy who was contest flying from airport to airport to lay people off because the boss was too much of a wimp to do it himself.

I guess even his job isn’t safe from AI.

Sure some will manage to hack with prompt injection attacks, and potentially get compensation, but those attacks will be fixed.

That George Clooney’s traveling show was going to be replaced by Anna Kendrick’s Zoom-before-Zoom technology solution is a major part of the plot.

It’s a fantastic film, albeit in a bit of an obscure niche if you haven’t dipped your toe in the points/status game.

No need for the disclaimer. I know this is fake because Scroogle would never do anything as personal as a 1:1 when laying people off.

Oh, no, the company that runs from human support since inception has an inhumane approach to handling people?!?

I'd love to not have to put a disclaimer there, but legal counsel advised me to.

In case you're being serious: did you actually retain legal counsel for this blog post? Why?

This was a really fun read. I’ve only read a couple short stories ever that so narrowly focus on the technology of today, but I think it’s great. Such an effective and entertaining way of discussing what’s in the news cycle.

I agree the format is interesting. What are some other examples of short stories about technology, recent or less so?

Most short stories about technology are about it's role in society. Take a look at any of the winning or short-listed short stories from any reputable sci-fi award (like the Nebula or Locus) and you'll find them by the dozen.

I like stories by Asimov and Bradbury. If you're looking for something contemporary, take a gander at Ted Chiang.

Yeah, the trick to writing science fiction is that it's almost never about the grandeur of the setting, it's using that setting and its technology as a tool to lay bare the inherent problems with society and humanity. One of the things I've been struggling with is that AI tools are effectively cheap low-quality knowledge labour. How could this go wrong? Many fucking ways it turns out.

well you did ask

https://boilingdown.ghost.io/thoughts-on-neuralink/ https://boilingdown.ghost.io/loyalty-program/ https://boilingdown.ghost.io/streetcred/ https://boilingdown.ghost.io/grow-up/ https://boilingdown.ghost.io/deluge/

The first 1-2 paragraphs in, I thought: OK this is just a fictional account summarizing most people's layoff experiences.

The twist in the middle and end, ha, well done! Didn't see that coming :D Very funny and very well done.

Second this!

> HypeScript

> Flack

nice. we need more of this satire.

although it's hard to out-satire reality right now.

The best science fiction uses technology to shine a light on the inherent problems of the human condition. The hard part is not making it depressing or a stand-up comedy routine. It requires a lot of balance, which requires me to take weeks to let the ideas _fester_ in my head until they become a brainworm that I must excise. I think I hit the right balance here.

Is that really how these layoffs go? The HR person is belittling ("I need you to focus") and the employee passively takes the belittling. Here's a script the employee could have used.

"Excuse me, I need to pause. I have never met you before this call. We are strangers. You demand my attention because you say you need it. To be fair, your needs are no more important than mine. One of my needs is to be treated with respect. Frankly, since I am no longer an employee, I fail to see why you make any demands of me. But because I am polite and want to hear the details about the severance, I will stay on this call for now. However if you continue to treat me disrespectfully, I will drop from the call, and you can email me the details of the severance."

I realize the bravado of the above, but I was in fact laid off one time, and I did assert myself to the owner who at least had the guts to do it himself. A few months later he calls me and asks me to me to return to work to finish the project (not a software project, a building construction project), and I declined and instead told him I would do it on a contract for twice what he was previously paying me. He had no choice, took the offer begrudgingly, and I finished the project, designed another big project the same way, and then moved on with my life.

You might enjoy this TikTok video of an ex-CloudFlare employee getting laid off by people she has never met, and responds as fiercely as your text. Except she's also trying to extract the actual reason she's being laid off, to no avail – yet still impressive how hard she's pressing those random HRs.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/194v9y8/ae_at...

I think I would drop from the call and contact the security department. What’s to distinguish these two randos from a spearphishing attempt?

Telling someone they got fired for performance reasons when that's not actually true is outright evil. (Of course we don't know for certain whether that's what happened here, but it sure does look like it)

On par with the recent news of Air Canada hiring a hallucinating chatbot for customer support. Fun times ahead.

I’d read a book in this style if one was written, Xe! This is both entertaining and very well written

I've been considering compiling my Techaro stories into a book eventually, it'd probably involve a lot of editing and reformatting, but it's a thing I want to work on eventually.

This is really great news, I will definitely be on the lookout for it :D

Maybe 6 months ahead of it's time. Maybe.

I would categorize this as science fiction. But I agree that this is very likely to happen.

Spoilers: This story is about a tech worker. I wonder how the same story would unfold when the company uses this technology to fire HR workers, because they don't need them any more.

It’s implicit. All the consultants ask is the worker to manager ratio and the Hr ratio.

Meta decided to change both in their layoffs for example.

TopTal already had gigs like the one described in this story a few months ago. Also a gig to automate debt collection.

Oh really, yikes. i thought about creating a toptal account for work but never got around to it. Doubt I'd be comfortable working on a proj like that

As a guy who surfed the unemployment wave twice the last year, this was a fun read, albeit sad.

That's rough, twice in a bad year. How was the job hunt experience for you, did you end up finding a second position yet?

To quote GLaDOS from Portal, “That would be funny, if it weren’t so sad.”

GLaDOS was a few years ahead of her time.

"It's not a layoff, it's a re-evaluation of our staffing goals for Q2 2025."

> "I'm from employee success. I'm here to give you an important update about your future at Techaro."

"You have been deemed an employment failure."

"That's what it says. Employment... failure. Funny, we weren't even testing for that."

No no no. You are so successful that we need to promote you to being a customer!!!

The day before the lay offs we are all inclusion, empathy, #goteam.

Then in a split second it's literally go f yourself. And don't make a scene or we will take your health insurance too.

> get the rest of the year's worth of pay

Damn, last time I got laid off I got two weeks severance after five years of employment. I didn’t even get to keep the laptop.

I remember when the first company I worked for did their first round of layoffs, the severance was something like two months. It was good enough that people were asking the CEO "why didn't you ask for volunteers?" The later rounds were not as generous.

Nobody got to keep their laptops or desktops, but few months later the company was liquidating its assets, and some of the former employees got to buy some slightly dated hardware for cheap. If I recall correctly, that was also the only month we were profitable.

At one place I worked I really needed a piece of hardware. I found the best hardware for the price and sent it to my manager. A couple weeks later it was delivered to THEIR desk. So I bought it myself and went to the CEO and asked if he'd cover it, he did. Then when they went under the next year everything went to auction. So I went and bought it again.

I've found laptops always go back, but monitors they tend to not care about. I've been on contracts where they only want the laptop back, after sending you a complete setup with monitor, keyboard, etc.

hug of death, archive link below:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240217123128/https://xeiaso.ne...

Not much worse than a real HR person.

Wow! What a great piece of topical creative writing. Absolutely love it!

Given this is (almost to the letter) how impersonally "layoffs" went at my company in January I think we could switch to AI severance and not lose anything of value.

Plot twist : this story was written by AI.

Only the press release at the end was :)

Interestingly, the story fails to load on Chrome 121, actually removing DOM nodes with the story...

Worked fine in Firefox though.

That is strange. I'll investigate. What browser extensions do you use?

Seems to be somehow connected to loading an image that fails to load - just replicate it in chrome 121 on Android, which obviously has no extensions.

https://usercontent.irccloud-cdn.com/file/zQfJpquv/100000698...

Some more context - Chrome seems to get stuck getting contents of "hero image" of bay bridge, which is invisible (height=0) in Firefox, and somehow everything after said image's <figure> tag gets removed from DOM.

Looking at chrome debugger, it seems both the AVIF file and inter.css fail to load, stuck in "pending" state.

What does the last line of https://cdn.xeiaso.net/cgi-cdn/wtf say?

I am XeDN fra (instance ID 4d89706f61e778) running /nix/store/l4wc41rg57ajwmcci3gvxs605z891zka-xedn-20240210195656/bin/xedn

Connected using ipv6

Roger, I'll go get hacking. Until then, grab the version on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/layoff-xe-iaso-fefqe

Soon I will migrate XeDN storage to Tigris and then we should never have this problem ever again.

The author comments about the story here:

https://lobste.rs/s/uumbc6/layoff

Story is not loading for me for some reason. Is there an archive link?

https://web.archive.org/web/20240217123128/https://xeiaso.ne...

nice! interesting read, thank you!

Was this written by LLM?

> "James, eyes up here please. This is important." James looked back at the E100 Meet tab.

Bit too tryhard for my taste.

Hi, author of the story here. Here's the side notes that I put on Patreon:

This story was hard to write.

Well, okay, the story was a lot easier to write after I ended up working in person in San Francisco for a week and after I had a long conversation with Corey Quinn about why things are the way they are.

Either way, this story was hard to write because of the way you have to balance these things very carefully. If you make a satire story like this, you have to be very careful to balance it between plausibility and comedy. If you falter to one side, it’s too realistic and depressing. If you falter to the other side, it’s just an extended stand-up comedy routine and you don’t get the message you’re going after. I think I got the balance right. An earlier draft of it emphasized the “oh god this is a robot isn’t it” a bit more and I don’t think that made it good to read. Generally when you’re making creative works, you know you’re done when you can’t cut anything else away without affecting the bones of the story. I think I got to that point in editing.

One of my biggest inspirations for this story was that one Cloudflare layoff call of the woman who joined Cloudflare in a sales role (https://www.tiktok.com/@brittanypeachhh/video/73230040850436...) right between two major holidays (thanksgiving and christmas). I wanted to take it a step further. What would it be like if an AI did the layoff call for the company? Layoff calls are super taxing to the human psyche afterall, especially in the US where there’s this subtext of “and we’re taking your health insurance coverage with it”.

I did try to make it turn out well for James, the severance package is ridiculously good for the employee in comparison to what you’d probably get on the market today (I think it’d be something like 1.5 years of pay?). Originally the story was gonna end with a little bit like:

> James later attempted to appeal his termination in arbitration due to the legally binding promise the bot had made. It was unsuccessful. James’ use of “prompt injection” proved that James was aware he was talking to an AI system, and thus the bot was therefore not capable of making legally binding promises on behalf of Techaro. James was ordered to pay legal costs and financial damages to Techaro for reputational harm. James was marked as “not eligible for re-hire” in Techaro’s HR system and his severance offer was revoked. > > James later moved to a farm in the countryside and never used a computer again. He was happy.

Or something, but I think that this could actually be its own story a lot better than it could be as a footnote to an existing story. Maybe the arbitration case could be good surrealism fodder. What if the AI gets called to the stand? Absolute hilarity.

I think the next satire story about AI is going to involve an astute observation that a friend of mine made: for some reason people haven’t figured out that people just want a sandbox where you interact with NPC characters. With one glaring exception: japanese VR erotica games. I’ve wanted to try writing something a bit…more mature, and this may be the concept that I use for it.

The ideas I’m working with are VR erotica, mind uploading (how else would you get AGI on the cheap), something written from the perspective of an AI agent that doesn’t realize they are an AI agent, and this one word in Czech that is the reason we have the term “robot”. We have that word because of the play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) adapting the word “robota”, which means forced labour of the kind that serfs had to perform on their masters’ lands.

So, the main character is actually a fully sapient NPC in a VR erotica game that thinks they’re the protagonist in a game where they’re actually there to make the players happy. This concept is probably going to require a fair bit of development to avoid making it too adult because I do have a number of non-adult readers, to my horror.

Might just make it patron-only. I don’t know. Still need to noodle things out.

Have you considered using an AI bot to help you balance various aspects carefully? :)

I have! A lot of the drafting process for vetting ideas involves having a model generate out a few paragraphs of what the story could entail, but the rest of it is really writing out outlines like this: https://xena.greedo.xeserv.us/files/The%20Layoff.pdf

Then I take that outline, stew on it for a while, and eventually something comes up to inspire me to fully send it into a draft. Then I wait a day and edit that draft down until there's no more to cut out.

So many things end up on the cutting room floor, but it's how you end up with the stuff that's great left behind.

Super biased, strongly held first impression: drop the disclaimer, or move it to the side. I'm just an attention-deprived zoomer, but for me a big preface is not a good way to keep my interested. If I'm gonna be sucked into a whole thing, it's usually because I didn't realize it was a whole thing. Plus 'A dull thud hit James' wrist.' pretty immediately puts this in the realm of fiction imo!

After reading the whole thing (great stuff, sobering for an AI developer) I can somewhat confidently say that the disclaimer at the top isn't some meta-commentary lol

In 2024, you need to have those disclaimers. This is just life now.

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