Laid Off in Your Living Room: The Chaos of Remote Job Cuts

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Laid Off in Your Living Room: The Chaos of Remote Job Cuts

Angst rippled across laptop screens this month, with dozens of companies announcing layoffs and finding ways to breed extra chaos in the process.

By Emma Goldberg
Jan. 25, 2023
Updated 8:47 a.m. ET

Kerensa Cadenas opened Slack on Friday morning to an expletive-laden message from a colleague that said essentially: “I got let go.” Ms. Cadenas, steeling herself, checked her email. Then she typed out her own expletive. She’d been laid off, too. Alone in her Brooklyn apartment. ... Ms. Cadenas, with more than a hundred of her Vox Media colleagues as well as thousands of other workers this week and last, was submerged in a lonely, surreal wave of remote layoffs. People got the news through emails, Slack messages or video calls, then sent their goodbye notes and powered down their computers, with no teammates around to commiserate over beer. ... “Normally you’re like, ‘OK, I can go get drunk,’” said Ms. Cadenas, 37, noting that atop the isolation comes frustration with the instability that so many media workers have now come to accept as a fact of their working lives. “It’s scary because I’m like: ‘Will I ever have a savings account? Am I ever going to own something? Probably not.’”

This month, angst has rippled across laptop screens, with dozens of companies announcing mass layoffs and even the most large and well-established workplaces finding distinct ways to breed extra chaos in the process. More than 1,000 tech companies laid off nearly 160,000 workers last year, according to Layoffs.fyi, which is tracking job cuts across the industry, and another 185 companies have cut some 57,000 tech workers since the start of this year.

Layoffs are among the most challenging life experiences, causing more psychological stress than even divorce, according to one study. Losing a job can upend workers’ finances and their sense of self, and layoffs in the world of remote work have in many cases been especially destabilizing, with employer missteps fueling uncertainty and unnecessary unknowns.

At Twitter, employees were notified in the middle of the night that they had been laid off, and at least one worker found out during a team call when that person lost access to company accounts. At the mortgage lending company Better.com, Rena Starr, 33, missed a short and unexpected Zoom meeting in 2021, then texted her boss to learn she and more than 900 of her colleagues had been fired during it. In a later round of job cuts at Better.com, last year, some employees there learned they had been laid off when severance pay hit their payroll accounts; this was months after the chief executive had apologized for summarily firing nearly 10 percent of the company’s employees in a roughly three-minute call just before the holidays.

“They’re immediately cutting you off from your technological connection,” said Sandra Sucher, a professor of management at Harvard who has studied layoffs for more than a decade. “I’ve been hearing of a number of companies where people were in the middle of things and couldn’t continue and didn’t know who to address.”

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[Warpy]

1. IT companies need to rethink this, along with companies

using people who can work remotely. Remote work might just be the wave of the future, saving companies a fortune on office space and allowing their workers to live in affordable areas far away from the bosses and without being exhausted by lengthy commutes. It would reduce global warming as well as increase employee satisfaction and productivity.

Sadly, the bosses want people around so they can be bossed.

Most of my neighbors worked remotely during the worst of Covid and they all loved it.

[FM123]

2. I agree.

I think companies really need to rethink this, there are just so many benefits to all (and for our planet).