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Comment by Ensorceled | Hacker News Reader

Why? Seriously. Why do you feel that way?

It's already going to be a bad day for the people being laid off, why make it a nasty surprise for the people who are not being laid off as well?

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I think I feel that way because my job status is incredibly personal information. For the person sitting in the desk across from me to know that I'm not going to have a job at the end of the day before I do strikes me as incredibly invasive. It also gives them an opportunity to tell people outside of work and to use that information against me before I even know about it should I happen to be in a dispute with them for any reason. I should know before someone not in my reporting chain that I'm going to lose my job, not after.

They're going to know one way or the other very soon. The focus of the CEO in this situation is continued operation and minimizing disruption - the people they plan to keep are more important for that and it's often necessary to get them on board before they start seeing their ashen-faced friends and coworkers collecting the stuff on their desks. It's not optimal for anyone but despite what this particular CEO wrote, the reality is the remaining people are the top priority.

This is pedantic, but there are lots of people outside of your reporting chain that will probably need to know about you losing your job before you... HR of course, but also IT and facilities, perhaps, if they need to have anything prepared for when you are let go.

Do you think some of the people who got the call might have talked with some of their friends who work at the company that didn't get the call? We are not talking about isolated silos.

That's a good point. My experiences might be unusual but for me it was quite normal to have some kind of communication channel that is not controlled by the company that includes all/most non-management employees. Or, for a bigger company, one per clique.

Layoffs or rumours of layoffs make that channel blow up with speculation and comparing notes.

Yeah I agree,

I saw a round of layoffs go by at a company I worked at that caught me by surprise. It always felt extremely disrespectful to me that I wasn't alerted beforehand. A simple heads up the night before would have done wonders.

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