Back during the last gasp of the dot com era, the company I worked for hired a very pricey "Program Manager", even though the company was bleeding money, she appeared to know nothing about the Web or how software worked or how humans worked. She was in the office for about 2 months before rumors started circulating about layoffs. The official management position was that we were as lean as we could be without compromising customer support.
One Friday morning, I come into work and see that I've been invited to a meeting at 11:00AM. I go into the meeting along with the rest of the office and this Program Manager comes into the room. She's all smiles and energy and I'm thinking "hey, maybe we get to find out what this woman actually does."
She says "Hi, my name is E.C., and if you have not met me yet (which none of us had), I'm the Program Manager for the US office. The reason why I've called this meeting is to tell you that if you are here in this room, you still have a job."
We all start looking around to see who's not in the room. I didn't hear anything else she was saying for the rest of the meeting, I was so stunned. Apparently, while we were all in that meeting, those people who did not have jobs anymore were being given a gray folder explaining the conditions of their "separation" and escorted from the building.
That was the first in what would be many rounds of layoffs until the company merged with a company it had acquired prior to my joining. But
apparently, Ms. EC's delivery went over so well that SHE was gone the next month - something about the commute being too long for her -
whatever. But, after she left, the company announced that they would be laying off the entire US group over the course of 3 months. I have
to say that by the time that I was let go, I was called into the V.P.'s. office privately and told that I should finish out the week and to please wrap up whatever I was working on and transfer it to the designated group. Definitely a much more civilized way of handling things.
(Posted by Anonymous)
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