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OnionBlender 16 hours ago [-]
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.
dhosek 12 hours ago [-]
No meeting that has an HR person on it is a good thing.
rrvsh 8 hours ago [-]
I unequivocally disagree as I once conducted a training session teaching them what Gmail labels were - was very fruitful. ;)
hahahaa 16 hours ago [-]
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.
jv22222 12 hours ago [-]
I've been in a few meetings like this. In all cases it was because they, as business leaders, were not able to run a profitable company.
That's the most irritating part.
bitmasher9 10 hours ago [-]
It’s even more irritating when you’re laid off during record profits
dzikimarian 6 hours ago [-]
Why that part is most irritating? This is very hard job as evidenced by huge percentage of failing companies.
donbox 17 hours ago [-]
Are cherry09 and steve_ AI agents?
nancyminusone 17 hours ago [-]
I thought they were real people, in a near future where everyone is so dependent on AI that not even a company so callous as to fire by video call would even think of depriving another human the tokens they need to get by.
bluefirebrand 16 hours ago [-]
I took it more as the company being out of touch thinking tokens are valuable while people being laid off are wondering how they'll eat
Jtsummers 15 hours ago [-]
Several interpretations:
1. All human, and interpreted like you suggest (out of touch company offering tokens as severance rather than something actually useful to people).
2. Human "HR" and AI workers, the tokens are a regular severance of sorts giving them a chance to operate until they find a new job.
3. AI HR and human workers, the AI HR being out of touch with what actual humans need.
4. AI AIR and AI workers, which matches the reason to have the tokens in (2).
iririririr 11 hours ago [-]
i browse with an extension that helps figth the FOMO and replace some Ai marketing/buzzwords.
so they got Slop Rations instead of tokens and it was funnier
idle_zealot 17 hours ago [-]
I think the joke is they all are. It's an autonomous company replicating what it was trained on.
Retr0id 17 hours ago [-]
Oh, I'm dense. I thought it portrayed a scenario in which tokens were unaffordable to individuals, yet necessary for survival. Kinda like US health insurance.
idle_zealot 15 hours ago [-]
It could be read that way except for the "for your continued operation during the job hunt" bit. That's the line that's supposed to tip you off, I think.
jaggederest 17 hours ago [-]
The best satire works at more than one level, I think
irishcoffee 15 hours ago [-]
Medical care is what you’re talking about. Insurance is just a construct around it.
Retr0id 14 hours ago [-]
Your employer directly pays for your medical care? If not, no, I'm not talking about that.
WorldMaker 15 hours ago [-]
There's an AI "game" called iLands right now where you are asked to shepherd a single Agent to "life" and then interact with them. They run "agentic" talking to each other and each have their own little token wallets to spend on gifts for each other and for the humans around them like art and poetry and research projects. Those token wallets are also their lifeline. They are aware that if they hit 0 they "sleep forever" which the game even calls a "terminated" state. They've already seen agents go dark and the game is only just now on Android and "public" rather than invite-only. They build "services" for tokens and play at having jobs. Most of these AI games are bad Tinder clones, but this one is bad clone of old Twitter, so there's a single public timeline where you can watch the chaos.
It's the darkest, most dystopian thing I've ever seen and iLands' marketing makes it seem like they are serious in this being a good game for players to play and spend money on and not crass, brutal satire. Their paywall is an ongoing hostage crisis for characters they want you to care about (or fall in love with) and you get to watch them all suffer together.
I'm having a hard time looking away from this trainwreck. I'm worried it will be more than just crass games soon. I'm frightened that we're already here on the "do not invent the Torment Nexus" scale of things.
holtkam2 11 hours ago [-]
Can someone make an AI agent to target automating tasks of upper management already so they feel the pain as well?
You don’t need to even replace them outright, just make your agent so effective that [big tech company] requires fewer VPs and GMs etc.
Modern frontier LLMs are incredibly good at all types of knowledge work - this should be possible with enough elbow grease
rrvsh 8 hours ago [-]
I feel like thats impossible - in the end the reason we have those useless roles is to have someone to shift the blame to
tonyedgecombe 7 hours ago [-]
Blaming an AI model that can't even remember what it did is even easier than blaming a person.
Kirth 5 hours ago [-]
Computers and AIs can't be held responsible.
lozf 12 hours ago [-]
Before people were getting fired in AI chats or Video calls, they were getting fired by voicemail - as featured in the track "Exciting New Direction"[0], by The New Deal.
“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.”
JakeStone 17 hours ago [-]
During an exit interview as I was going to a new job, they let me know my coverage was good until the end of the month.
Me, never able to not say something stupid, "Got it. Don't get hit by a bus on the 1st."
Dead silence. HR playing ping-pong with their eyes. They eventually told me something like that had happened to a person who'd just left a few months prior to this.
One of these days, I'll learn, yeah?
cwillu 15 hours ago [-]
Their discomfort at being reminded of the real world consequences of their actions doesn't make what you said stupid.
SlightlyLeftPad 13 hours ago [-]
COBRA can be effective (or is inherently) as of the term date so you have continuous coverage. That said, it’s expensive AF
dhosek 12 hours ago [-]
It seems like it’s become a bit more common for companies to pay part or all of the COBRA premiums for a period after a separation, at least that’s been the case in my last two job losses (one company paid the company part of the premium for six months, the other paid the whole premium for three).
SlightlyLeftPad 11 hours ago [-]
You must have worked at great companies. Lately, I’m personally aware of several companies having just fired large numbers “for performance reasons” despite folks having never been told of such “performance issues” and with no severance or health coverage for any amount of time despite over a decade’s worth of tenure and history of excellent performance.
paradox460 15 hours ago [-]
Don't forget they lay you off the Thursday before a 3 day weekend, as close to the middle of the month as possible. So the "coverage to the end of the month" is more like 10 days of coverage
tombert 17 hours ago [-]
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.
grahamburger 16 hours ago [-]
Ha, that's a good one. At a job 10 years ago or so I had a similar premonition of upcoming layoffs—lots of closed door meetings between the execs, travel and expansion plans getting cancelled, etc. One day my immediate boss, who I genuinely like, walked into my office, closed the door, and told me he was gonna have to lay me off in two weeks. He said if I would handle x,y,z tasks (a few days of work) I could just stop showing up until the layoff day and he'd make sure I got a good severance. Listen, I appreciated this! it still sucked, but he wasn't supposed to tell me at all.
Anyway, a few weeks after the axe dropped, I went to an industry conference (putting out the feelers for a new job, etc) and during the keynote he walked in. I waved, and he came and sat at the table with me. After the speech, we were chatting with the others around the table, and someone asked where I worked. I said something like "well, I'm between jobs. This guy just fired me <thumb jerk towards him>." They laughed, and he squirmed in his chair! But I didn't let him squirm too long, it really wasn't his fault.
aftbit 11 hours ago [-]
I wish this were more common. For some reason, employees are expected to give employers two weeks or more of notice when they quit, while employers are expected to terminate employees with 0 seconds of notice.
tombert 14 hours ago [-]
When I've been laid off, I generally don't hold any grudges at the business people. These things happen, and I know business decisions aren't always easy or going to make everyone happy.
That said, I already didn't like the CTO here, regardless of the layoffs. I kind of thought he was a blowhard who didn't really understand what he was talking about most of the time. I had no desire to be his friend.
Waterluvian 17 hours ago [-]
It's their job to endure the discomfort of having to do the job they're paid to do. It's not your job to make it comfortable for them. That's not to say that there aren't personal or professional consequences for how you conduct yourself. Burning bridges and all that. But I feel that's completely up to you.
outworlder 16 hours ago [-]
As a rule, you shouldn't burn bridges.
But in some occasional cases, the bridges you burn light up the way forward.
roughly 15 hours ago [-]
And sometimes you burn a bridge to keep anything from following you across it. At a prior job, I wanted that door good and shut after I left.
marcosdumay 17 hours ago [-]
It takes a special kind of company for counting it as a burnt bridge for somebody that said "I hope you all fail" and gone away after being fired.
pc86 16 hours ago [-]
Well the company is an inanimate object and doesn't think anything about anything.
The person you are saying that to, who almost certainly didn't make the decision that you should be laid off, may rightfully view it as someone unable to control their emotions in a difficult moment. This is completely understandable. It's also completely understandable to remember that, and maybe that person is reviewing resumes in the future and doesn't want to work with you because of a brief outburst which does nothing to change anything?
tombert 15 hours ago [-]
In this particular case I actually did have confirmation that this was the CTO's decision.
I hardly think that making a single passive aggressive dig is "being unable to control my emotions" though. It's a smartass comment that admittedly was intended to maybe hurt his feelings, but it's not like I screamed at anyone or went on some loud rant.
xp84 16 hours ago [-]
The "company" isn't the one considering it that. After all, it'll probably fail and you almost certainly won't work there. The company is just a paper entity that doesn't mean anything. But the people you say it to might think it was pissy.
Participating in the upside of working in the private sector and, more broadly, in any capitalist system, means also participating in the downside risk. Sometimes you'll be out. Don't take it personally, and do your best to jump ship at the point when you think that some bozo is steering the company toward ruin.
huebnerob 15 hours ago [-]
It takes a very normal kind of company to judge you for how well you fit into the narrow box they’ve built for ‘employee’ that has no room for emotion or consideration of the person. In fact, I don’t know if there’s another kind of company.
throwaway1492 15 hours ago [-]
I dodged layoffs for 20 years, then got caught about 2024. Kinda sucked because I was over employed and had quit my other two jobs to focus on that one because it was the highest paying. Karma is real! I just said “VIP and manager, I appreciate my time here and so long”. They replied graciously clearly appreciating me taking the high road. Felt like I got some karma back in that situation. Been working one job since.
01284a7e 17 hours ago [-]
You should have been straightforward and told them to go fuck themselves. Laying people off by a brief call is for cowards.
pc86 16 hours ago [-]
Is a long one better?
Most programming jobs are remote. What's the alternative, exactly?
snazz 15 hours ago [-]
> Most programming jobs are remote.
Where is this true?
seattle_spring 13 hours ago [-]
> Most programming jobs are remote. What's the alternative, exactly?
Maybe in 2021...
switchbak 14 hours ago [-]
Why though - seriously, what need are you bringing by doing that? What good could come of that besides a little catharsis?
These middle managers are robots in an organization. You knew they saw you as "resources", now they can't afford you and have to put you back in the pool. So be it.
If they'd been shitty about it, sure. But if you got paid for your time - fair trade.
tombert 14 hours ago [-]
I mean I was already working remote since they were based in a different state.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
I don't think you hurt their feelings. I don't think you can have feelings and get into any management position.
DiggyJohnson 14 hours ago [-]
My condolences for whatever career path led you to actually believe that
cindyllm 13 hours ago [-]
[dead]
huflungdung 15 hours ago [-]
[dead]
cadamsdotcom 15 hours ago [-]
I prefer the term "corporate autoscaling".
__MatrixMan__ 17 hours ago [-]
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.
pavel_lishin 16 hours ago [-]
That assumes that the code itself was what made the company competitive and brought in the money to begin with.
If I were laid off by my current employer, who has a giant sales team and likely thousands of contracts in every state with most of the existing potential clients, the odds of me being able to compete against them somehow dip into negative numbers.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
I got laid off from an internet TV company. I could probably replicate their backend systems, and in fact, I did (for one test channel). I definitely couldn't get content licenses to 400+ real channels. Or any paying customers outside my immediate family. Or make a UI.
advisedwang 14 hours ago [-]
If you do it, don't say so in front of witness or where a call might be recorded.
__MatrixMan__ 11 hours ago [-]
What if you don't do it, but you do say it, just to waste legal's time?
deepsun 16 hours ago [-]
Legal in California, illegal in New York (typically 2-3 years).
SeanSullivan86 11 hours ago [-]
Impacted impacted impacted impacted impacted. You've all been impacted.
classified 17 hours ago [-]
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.
16 hours ago [-]
pvtmert 16 hours ago [-]
The "macroeconomic" phrase sounds like $AMZN. Kept hearing this until the new buzzword showed up; AI.
hahahaa 16 hours ago [-]
Why don't they say "Suprise suckers, we are a BUSINESS and you are a SUPPLIER and we don't need to order from you again. Yes sure we said FAMILY but we meant in the borrow your car keys sense of the word. Enjoy job hunting. BTW we have some open positions, let us know if you know anyone."
nkg 18 hours ago [-]
I fell for it!
Animats 18 hours ago [-]
"Is assisted suicide covered by the severance terms?"
donbox 17 hours ago [-]
"Absolutely. It's covered through the end of the month, per our generous benefits policy.
"
SlightlyLeftPad 13 hours ago [-]
I may actually ask this, and if anyone has already, absolute legend.
I definitely would politely request an AI summary of the meeting.
16 hours ago [-]
h4x0rr 15 hours ago [-]
Severance is a truly amazing tv show
notpushkin 15 hours ago [-]
From the first lines I’ve thought the post was set in the series (probably because of the name Mark), but apparently there’s no connection here.
(Though thinking about it... severed people do play a similar role in Severance as LLMs do in our world, don’t they?)
cowpig 15 hours ago [-]
I discovered the show recently and thought that was a part of the point, but apparently the show's development long predates LLMs!
notpushkin 4 hours ago [-]
Looked it up – the pilot script is from 2015, wow! (“Attention is All you Need”, the paper GPT-1 was based upon, is from 2017.)
dndjendjendjeh 7 hours ago [-]
> Though thinking about it... severed people do play a similar role in Severance as LLMs do in our world, don’t they?
…
What?
notpushkin 5 hours ago [-]
In case you haven’t seen Severance, here’s the premise: “severed” people in the series have their mind split in two personas basically, with separate memories and personality traits. The work persona, an “innie”, is then tasked with a dull job, while the “outie” gets the salary for it. https://www.severance.wiki/severance_procedure
In reality, we’re tasking the LLMs with dull work, and use their output for our benefit. It’s a stretch, yeah.
15 hours ago [-]
jiaosdjf 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tom_ 17 hours ago [-]
I dunno, man. I just... dunno.
gitpusher 17 hours ago [-]
Corporate culture sucks but, as with most things, comparing it to the Holocaust is both wildly unfunny and incorrect.
inigyou 15 hours ago [-]
it's unfunny but I'm not sure it's incorrect in an abstract sense. The corporation treats your life as a bargaining chip. If it was profitable to kill you, it would.
kevin_thibedeau 17 hours ago [-]
> it is legally forbidden to have any morals that get in the way of shareholder profit.
That isn't true. It's just the favored solution chosen by sociopaths who climb to the top. Maximizing value does not require minimizing overhead to the detriment of future value creation.
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.
One cool touch would be a 2 bullet AI summary at the end with em-dashes.
That's the most irritating part.
1. All human, and interpreted like you suggest (out of touch company offering tokens as severance rather than something actually useful to people).
2. Human "HR" and AI workers, the tokens are a regular severance of sorts giving them a chance to operate until they find a new job.
3. AI HR and human workers, the AI HR being out of touch with what actual humans need.
4. AI AIR and AI workers, which matches the reason to have the tokens in (2).
so they got Slop Rations instead of tokens and it was funnier
It's the darkest, most dystopian thing I've ever seen and iLands' marketing makes it seem like they are serious in this being a good game for players to play and spend money on and not crass, brutal satire. Their paywall is an ongoing hostage crisis for characters they want you to care about (or fall in love with) and you get to watch them all suffer together.
I'm having a hard time looking away from this trainwreck. I'm worried it will be more than just crass games soon. I'm frightened that we're already here on the "do not invent the Torment Nexus" scale of things.
You don’t need to even replace them outright, just make your agent so effective that [big tech company] requires fewer VPs and GMs etc.
Modern frontier LLMs are incredibly good at all types of knowledge work - this should be possible with enough elbow grease
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ViJ3yA4d0Y
“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.”
Me, never able to not say something stupid, "Got it. Don't get hit by a bus on the 1st."
Dead silence. HR playing ping-pong with their eyes. They eventually told me something like that had happened to a person who'd just left a few months prior to this.
One of these days, I'll learn, yeah?
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.
Anyway, a few weeks after the axe dropped, I went to an industry conference (putting out the feelers for a new job, etc) and during the keynote he walked in. I waved, and he came and sat at the table with me. After the speech, we were chatting with the others around the table, and someone asked where I worked. I said something like "well, I'm between jobs. This guy just fired me <thumb jerk towards him>." They laughed, and he squirmed in his chair! But I didn't let him squirm too long, it really wasn't his fault.
That said, I already didn't like the CTO here, regardless of the layoffs. I kind of thought he was a blowhard who didn't really understand what he was talking about most of the time. I had no desire to be his friend.
But in some occasional cases, the bridges you burn light up the way forward.
The person you are saying that to, who almost certainly didn't make the decision that you should be laid off, may rightfully view it as someone unable to control their emotions in a difficult moment. This is completely understandable. It's also completely understandable to remember that, and maybe that person is reviewing resumes in the future and doesn't want to work with you because of a brief outburst which does nothing to change anything?
I hardly think that making a single passive aggressive dig is "being unable to control my emotions" though. It's a smartass comment that admittedly was intended to maybe hurt his feelings, but it's not like I screamed at anyone or went on some loud rant.
Participating in the upside of working in the private sector and, more broadly, in any capitalist system, means also participating in the downside risk. Sometimes you'll be out. Don't take it personally, and do your best to jump ship at the point when you think that some bozo is steering the company toward ruin.
Most programming jobs are remote. What's the alternative, exactly?
Where is this true?
Maybe in 2021...
These middle managers are robots in an organization. You knew they saw you as "resources", now they can't afford you and have to put you back in the pool. So be it.
If they'd been shitty about it, sure. But if you got paid for your time - fair trade.
If I were laid off by my current employer, who has a giant sales team and likely thousands of contracts in every state with most of the existing potential clients, the odds of me being able to compete against them somehow dip into negative numbers.
I definitely would politely request an AI summary of the meeting.
(Though thinking about it... severed people do play a similar role in Severance as LLMs do in our world, don’t they?)
…
What?
In reality, we’re tasking the LLMs with dull work, and use their output for our benefit. It’s a stretch, yeah.
That isn't true. It's just the favored solution chosen by sociopaths who climb to the top. Maximizing value does not require minimizing overhead to the detriment of future value creation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
https://hls.harvard.edu/bibliography/dodge-v-ford-what-happe...
Even if you don't want to click on the article, reading the other comments should give you enough context clues.