• lemmyknow@lemmy.today
    0·
    2 months ago

    I had a meeting with plenty of important people tagged in, yet somehow I didn’t think much, if anything, of it. Like it’s just a meeting. Which it was. A meeting to inform me I was to be let go of the company. The possibility of that only occurred to me, I think, when prompted to think about it, on another meeting I had right before that one. That’s right, two meetings back to back. Yet I was clueless…

  • MNByChoice@midwest.social
    0·
    2 months ago

    It is always tempting to try to justify one’s position and get out of being laid-off/fired.

    The decision has been made by those that “know your position”, or your manager is being let go next.

  • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
    0·
    2 months ago

    Where the fuck do y’all work that your HR “rep” looks like Anne Hathaway? Every company I worked for had a lady that looked like she retired after thirty years of proctoring detentions at a public highschool.

  • burgerchurgarr@lemmus.orgEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Lmao in my case my computer just randomly restarted and asked for a security pin while I was busy working on something. I learned through our WhatsApp group that we got laid off lol.

    Call with HR was when I already knew and nothing like this, I tried to get them to let me keep my $7k MacBook, no chance, literally everything was non negotiable so the call was absolutely pointless.

    • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      You should have kept the Mac, seriously. I often had no response trying to get laptops back from employees and was asking HR if we couldn’t get a form for new hires to sign regarding company equipment returns. Can’t remember the reasoning but HR told me the company is basically powerless to force the issue. In any case, the legal costs of suing you would quickly stack higher than $7K.

      • burgerchurgarr@lemmus.orgEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Yeah but they would hold back the severance pay until they received the laptop, they have done this before lol

      • biggerBear@lemmynsfw.com
        0·
        2 months ago

        Sure, I’ll gladly send the laptop back, you’ll just have to pay my hourly freelance rate for the labor involved. My rate is $240,000/hr, I’ll have it shipped out within 30 business days of payment. Alternatively, feel free to send a courier for pickup, my current address is 189 Beaker St, McMurdo Station, Antarctica.

      • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
        0·
        2 months ago

        Can’t they just file a police report suggesting you stole it? It’s the government’s job then and since the police barely have to investigate anything they are sure to actually do something. That’s a quick way to get a search warrant filed.

        • MirthfulAlembic@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          No, at least not in the US. It does not meet the legal definition of theft because (I believe) the property was initially acquired legally.

          Otherwise, the police would be doing repo for things like delinquent car loans, which is dystopian corporate hellscape stuff.

          • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
            0·
            2 months ago

            Really?

            Over here in Germany refusing to return items which someone contractually entrusted you is a misdemeanor. You would be treated like, say, a car repair shop who refuses to return your car you entrusted them to repair.

            This differs from not paying debt, in that case you are legally in possession (not ownership though!) of whatever indebted item so the only recourse is a civil lawsuit. Besides, repossession can only be done through a court-ordered official:

            Due to the state’s monopoly on the use of force, foreclosure may only be carried out by state foreclosure bodies, such as bailiffs. With the exception of permitted self-help, unauthorized foreclosure by the creditor is prohibited and is generally unlawful as vigilante justice.

            This translation sucks btw, the term “foreclosure” is inaccurate because it refers to a court ordered official either seizing money/stocks/investments and/or physical valuables (valuables = items not required for a modest lifestyle such as jewelry, designer clothes, fancy non-IKEA furniture etc) or foreclosing your property. In case of specific debt like your car they would probably seize that instead unless you demonstrate you rely on it to get to work unless it could be substituted with a cheaper car which would then be provided in exchange.

            • MirthfulAlembic@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              2 months ago

              Technically, yes criminal conversion is certainly a thing. If the laptop was expensive and you lived in a really low crime area where the cops were bored that might get pursued. My experience is that cops are practically more likely to say, absent a court order, to sue the person because it’s he-said she-said. It’s just too much effort for a potentially muddy situation.

              You’d be surprised how often things that are theft/technically theft are not actually pursued by police in the US. The property crime clearance rate (resulting in at least arrest) is <15%.

              Holding onto a rental car, on the other hand, is both expensive and cut-and-dried enough (contract states definitive end date ahead of time) to be a bad idea.

    • Mio@feddit.nu
      0·
      2 months ago

      It would be nice to get some time in advance as notice. Like Trump get 4 years as he can’t be fired for some unknown reason even though he has and is still doing illegal things(tarifs without kongress approval etc.)…

    • modus@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 months ago

      Never bought a Mac before, but what the hell are the specs in a $7k Macbook? I didn’t think they went over $3k.

      • bitjunkie@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 months ago

        I’ve never priced one that high, but I’d suspect 16" screen and multi-TB nvme are the main culprits.

        e: I was curious so I went and priced one. $7.3k for the 16" Pro with absolutely every bell and whistle. M4 Max 16/40 core, 128GB RAM, 8TB. It’s a beast but holy shit that price tag…

        • Jumpingspiderman@lemmy.world
          0·
          2 months ago

          the laptop I’m working on right now cost me $1600 new in March and it is AWESOME. It replaced a Mac I bought in 2016 for $1800. My son uses PCs. He’s bought 4 in the same time period for about $1000-1200 each. Tell me whose computers are most expensive.

  • whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    0·
    2 months ago

    stooge /stoo͞j/

    noun

    1. The partner in a comedy team who feeds lines to the other comedian; a straight man.

    2. One who allows oneself to be used for another’s profit or advantage; a puppet.

    3. A stool pigeon.

  • Mickey7@lemmy.worldOP
    0·
    2 months ago

    In outside sales so everyone is working remote. I get an email around 7PM that we are going to have a meeting tomorrow (on line of course) at 3PM. I had heard that a big layoff was coming. But why a call at 3PM instead of first thing in the morning if I was going to get laid off. Later that evening I get calls from friends about the 10AM meeting. I told them I never got a message about it, but I did about a 3PM meeting.

    What they did was all the people they were laying off were on the 10AM meeting. It was half the total sales force. at the 3PM meeting for the survivors, they explained to us what was going on.

    • Big_Boss_77@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      This just happened a month or so ago at my place of employment… except there were no invites. No meetings. It went more like

      9am: Hey, where did my chat with so and so go? Friggin teams…

      11am: Now the other one is missing? Wtf?

      1pm: Outside TM: Hey… dumb question, but do you have as many people on your team as you did yesterday?

      Email Invite for 1:30PM has entered the chat

  • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Oh. I heard this bluff from Pat Geisinger himself, in person.

    I was employed by VMware many moons ago when Pat took the helm. He decided to start by cutting an entire department from my location, sight unseen.

    We then changed all the furniture because they had two floors of the building and wanted to cut back since they just lost half a floor of people.

    We go home, work from home for a while, then return. Then Pat comes by for a site visit.

    He stood there with the gall to say that the team that was cut was a different business unit, and that was a business decision regarding that business unit (it was the front line team, which was then relocated to “low cost centers”)… Blah blah blah… This is a different department, a different business unit, blah blah, what happened to them is isolated, and doesn’t mean anything regarding your employment… Blah blah …

    I didn’t buy it for a second. But I was too stressed out to do anything at the time.

    The layoffs started less than six months later. I was part of the first round.

    Fuck you Pat.

  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
    0·
    2 months ago

    Finally no longer having to work
    It’s really been the absolute worst thing in life after “being a kid” and “going to school”

    I know the setup is that if you don’t job hard enough
    then something even worse is coming up
    living in the streets, which is illegal
    then living in the man made hell
    called prison, which is just another kind of school

    But this time, by seeing it coming,
    turns out there’s a way to opt out of the bad bits !

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
      0·
      2 months ago

      Had a 3rd shift guy I was trying to fire get 3 extra shifts out of us by just not showing up to the meeting and not answering his phone. HR wouldn’t let me just shut his account off until the 3rd one. That dude was a real POS for other reasons but I can’t knock him for taking advantage of bureaucratic nonsense.

  • lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    That’s why I decline meetings without a proper agenda. No agenda = lack of preparation = waste of time = not a meeting.

  • Jumpingspiderman@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    MegaBux Inc. bought our small ag-biotech firm in 2018. I had developed a high throughput product screening system for natural products against a bunch of animal diseases. The program worked and we identified a bunch of candidates (I also developed the list of things to screen) for botanical/natural solutions to animal diseases. I should have guessed that I was on the chopping block when after finding out some of the things we screened actually worked, I got replaced as PI on the project by someone else much younger. A couple months into 2020 all the folks at the R&D center (including me) got laid off. They did pay severance to us- and mine took me out to October of that year due to my longevity with the firm that was purchased. A couple months after that, a bunch of the junior staff (who were well trained in my methods) got hired back. I was almost 69 at the time, so it was probably time to retire anyway. I was very lucky. This is so familiar! At least I made my stack and can live comfortably on my SS and pensions.

    • SeptugenarianSenate@leminal.space
      0·
      2 months ago

      high-tech solution for measuring and promoting old tech efficacy? investors looking at this “How is this supposed to make us more profitable as a company?” CTO in response “…We could sell the information to other companies… or even trade it with third parties like individuals, or even organs of government…”. Investors: “Interesting! We would need to be careful with how we would go about doing that, no?” CTO: “sigh Time to reorganize the department again. and this time I must be sure to purge the lead designer on the software, so they don’t form any attachments to the use cases of the sale or propriety of the resultant information from the project”