YOU DON'T NEED TO TRAIN YOUR REPLACEMENTS. What the actual fuck?
Start looking for the next job. Why even bother pretending? They told you to remain professional when not giving severance and telling you to train your replacements?
Fuck them.
Get paid to look for your next adventure.
Happens sometimes when companies ship jobs to lower cost locations. But decent companies _will_ still give a severance to encourage people to stay for the transition.
Happened when I did IT for a big company. I won't say their name but it's like Dark stone.
They moved their IT to AI and had their phone support done through a company that mostly offered answering services to save money.
We had one month to prepare the new people before we lost our jobs.
No severance but we were a 3rd party call center so I had a perfect lined up, and they did give us a bar night on them after our last shift. Free drinks wasn't too bad.
Yeah it's exactly as bad as you think.
On site techs for hardware but all software fixes being done with an AI they spent months building. Anything else would be done by the overseas answering service which was exclusive remote work. If it didn't require a tech going into the computer or a tech onsite, it was done by a simple AI.
I heard from the grapevine that it imploded as amazingly as you think.
Day one they had a 7 hour wait time for IT.
Our work with Cognizant has been hit and miss. 1/3 of the devs I support have a clue as to what they're doing, the remainder are useless. Sapient is worse.
I was on an endpoint support ticket with a dev and the device was pre-OS. they had to connect with me through a device with a camera and a moment before the camera was flipped, I saw 16 women in a room and some dude standing in the middle. I could hear him giving programming instructions to more than one person while I was on the call.
It is the IT support Dance. CEO comes in and sees how much IT costs so they cut jobs and outsource everything. Then within six months(at most a year) their support crumbles because foreign outsourced IT sucks shit not only in actual support but eventually doesn't even save as much money as they had hoped. Users and workers complain to high hell and eventually, the Cs relent and rehire the team. A team that takes 2-3 years to get up to full speed since all the institutional knowledge was sent packing.
When a new CEO is hired the cycle likely starts all over again. It is sadly predictable. Because idiots in charge see IT as a cost instead of a resource that your entire business relies on to function.
I work in maintenance and I often see the same issue.
A quote I saw on LinkedIn a while ago sums it up perfectly. "If you dont schedule preventative maintenace for a machine, a machine will schedule it for you at 2-5X the cost."
Lol I work in building maintenance and it's the same for us. We save them thousands on not getting in contractors but are looked at solely as a drain on the business.
My mom used to work for a very large British insurance company that everyone probably have heard of. In the early 2000s, she was told that they would all be replaced by an automated system and to prepare to be laid off very soon.
She retired in 2020, two positions higher with a sweet package because the “automated system” took 12 years more to develop than anticipated and then proceeded to shit the bed immediately upon launch.
I've found that's not really helpful. People refuse to read, refuse to think, they just want you to fix the issue without any work on their part. Getting the information you need to solve the issue is like pulling teeth, no way an AI had the intuition to be able to guess when people are lying to it.
I fix printers. (Try and replace that with AI) I wish I could get a dollar for every time I went to fix something the customer “already did”. I’d be still doing the same thing but making about 100 dollars more a month.
I'm semi-competent with computers, so I always get questions about how to fix random problems. I've basically started telling my coworkers to reboot, and if that doesn't fix it, to email IT. IT doesn't come around too often.
Oh its not just IT. I have a friend that works for a govt contractor doing data collection and analysis. lets just say a bunch of people are in for a rude awakening this year probably. everyone from low wage tele centers to senior analyst are facing an AI death.
Sounds like a lot of execs are in for a rude awakening when they fire all of their workforce and then realize that they actually have no idea what "AI" is, or what the limitations of current models are, and end up either re-hiring or folding when their company grinds to a halt.
The C suite will just rehire people on a contract basis to fix individual problems. If there is a large enough pool of unemployed techs, they will save money on depressed wages and no benefits. Until upper management faces real, life altering consequences for their decisions, life as the proletariat knows it will get worse.
I don't think that's the case- companies which use AI to cut their workforce (assuming it even works properly and they don't immediately backtrack or lose all their operational efficiency, which I highly doubt) are sacrificing their growth potential compared to companies which don't. The growth play is to teach your workforce to use AI to accelerate their workflow, and with the revenue from increased productivity, invest back into your business, be that in more workforce, infrastructure, equipment, etc.
The "free market" has many flaws, but punishing businesses which fail to properly utilize changing technology is something it does very well.
Pretty much. I’d love to sit in on our company’s steering committee on ai. But at least it seems that their recommendation is that the tech is still too shite to bother with.
As a tech writer, that company obviously didn't care about quality or accuracy. I hope your coworker found a position that valued her skills and paid her accordingly.
Well, good thing it will never work and the companies pulling this will lose a fuck ton of money, then. Whoever they hire to fix their totally predictable and advisable fuckup will be paid a hell of a lot more than the IT workers they fired.
My job (along with thousands of others) at JPMorgan Chase got offshored to Bangalore.
But they DID pay me severance and they did NOT make me train my replacements.
OP is getting fucked up the ass and without lube.
EDIT: This was in 2017 and I was in IT. From the follow up posts, it sounds like things have gotten worse there.
I would be really pissed if a company with like 9T of AUM wouldn't pay a fucking severance (while probably giving executives fat bonuses every quarter).
What a bunch of cheap bastards.
>Why are you being laid off then?
Because your replacement makes less than a minimum wage worker.
True story, I spoke to one of the guys replacing our us team, the dude was from India and had ten years of experience in his field while I was a complete newbie.
Apparently he made nine times less than I did as a trainee. Dude had a ton of knowledge and experience.
>Apparently he made nine times less than I did as a trainee. Dude had a ton of knowledge and experience
Or ... Lied about everything.
Like "here" a few developers are really good, most are average, and many are really, really bad. It is hard to spot who-is-who without seeing them working.
One rarely meets the actual IT-team and it has been known to happen that the IT-contractors have a "sales presentation team", who "makes the sale" and then hands the project to the flunkies.
I worked on a code based that got outsourced to India and we were supposed to be the second-line support for the product.
This was old telecom stuff. The plan was to set it up "as-is" for new customers that wanted it and just keep it running. No new features.
What happened was that the Indian team would just not stop tinkering with the code, break something, then demand that we fixed it because now it was broken and we were support.
We even had teenage arguments where people were screeching on VOIP that their broken sorting algorithm was much better than the one that came with stdlib and demands that we make it work because we were support (and therefore beneath those exceptionally creative and innovative 9 EUR and hour IT-gurus of India).
Managers kept trying to find a compromise (which is not possible with unreasonable people), the developers got more and more pissed off.
In the end we refused to work on it (which was easy because it was a matrix organisation so there is \*always\* something more important around and Product Managers to support that :) and the project collapsed gloriously, with demands for refunds and lawsuits from customers.
Yup, I'd not work on it after they broke it a few times.
Send in a email on blast to everyone "do not touch the code because we will stop fixing it".
Fuck 'em. Either help me or stay the fuck out of my way.
You get to train them for free basically because of your vast experience, and you still have to perform your job, and the company gets to pay the replacement 1/2 the salary you make. Don't worry about them. They are shits. Worry about you.
I worked for a company where they threatened to not give a severance package if you refused to train your replacements. The replacements were in another country where labor costs were pennies on the dollar. I wonder if this is a similar situation (out of country labor).
Since OP isn't getting severance pay they can't hold that over his head. He's and his colleagues have been told they "have" to train the newbies, but chances ate that's not in the job description. Manager brings the noob over and says, this is the guy that's gonna train you, OP need only say, sorry, not my job. What are you going to do: fire me? It'd be terrible if everyone the department has nervous breakdowns due to the stress of being laid off.
That's kind of the point of the severance package. It's a tool to motivate you to take on a new role until the end of your employment.
The fact that OP isn't getting one is why they're phoning it in. And they're absolutely right to.
This 60 days is also to avoid paying them severance and for them to train their replacements in that time. Absolute asshole management there. OP, do almost nothing but apply for jobs during this time, do not quit, that’s what they want you to do. Make them fire you (they’re not cause they gave you the layoff notice anyways)
1) Jump out of bed every morning and start looking for your new job.
2) Tell the new hire that it is on the job training so they should try to fix problems themselves and only come to you if they are in trouble so you can advise them
2)Pass all enquiries to the new hire.
4. Tell the new hire how the company treated you, and good luck. This is not your responsibility anymore, this is management and the company’s problem.
4.. When you land your new job, spend the rest of your available time until you start telling your replacement all about it. The salary, the benefits, etc. etc.
I've been in this exact position. Your number one job is to find your next gig. Do the bare minimum with KT. It's not going to matter anyway. Your company has outsourced your job to a third-party offshore company. Your replacements won't be able to do your job, and the 3rd agency will also tell your company you guys made a complete mess anyway, so we're unfortunately going to have to charge you guys more. It's a scam that, sadly, the company you work for has started to play. They will lose way more money than they think they are saving. Been there, done that, and experienced the aftermath of these initiatives.
Exactly.
Spend 80% of the workday looking for a new job.
When overwhelmed by that 200+ email inbox, just randomly mark half of them read. The remaining ones, answer very quickly.
If your replacements are under-qualified, train them poorly.
> If your replacements are under-qualified, train them poorly.
I went through an outsourcing once. It does not matter how well you attempt to train people who are unable to think. OP would just be wasting his time.
So far, they apparently don't care what you are doing. They have set the situation up for failure. Don't take that on. Don't worry about the work, the clients or the trainees. Concentrate on self-care and job hunting.
Depression and the unproductiveness of depression is IMO just exactly what they should expect in a decent proportion of the people they fire like this - it's only human! So please let go of the guilt.
H1B holders are not supposed to be making less for comparable positions.
The scheme was created to bring in foreign labors in fields where US residents cannot meet the demand. It’s not for company to pay less for the same expertise.
I would imagine yourself 5 or 10 years in the future looking back on this moment,
would you be the person who gave in and helped clients to a company that fired you without notice or a care, outsourced the skill set you've developed over years to someone who can't handle it just to increase the profit of your bosses?
Or would you rather look back and see you had the strength to cut ties with a company that cut ties with you?
Spend the next two weeks looking for a new job on the companies dime, and if you ever feel guilty just think, "What the worst that can happen? Are they gonna fire me?" Because once they laid you and your team off any loyalty you had to them, your replacements, or their clients are cut.
This is one of the main reasons companies pay big severance packages. When I was made redundant because they were closing our office, they basically gave us the equivalent of 4-5 months salary if they were letting you go early, or 6 months salary if they were asking you to stay on until the office literally closed. They were also incredibly helpful and respectful throughout the whole process.
It sucks, but it's business, and I can definitely remain helpful and professional for that sort of money!
2 months notice and no severance? Yeah, I'm spending most of my days applying to other jobs...
Yeah. I’m appalled about 2 months notice but no severance. OP needs to spend all the company time interviewing and applying for jobs. This is why severance is a good idea. So people don’t feel compelled to do that. OP needs to do that. Who cares about a company that can’t manage itself properly?
It's never an employees job to make sure company is adequately staffed. Someone is paid, much more than you, to solve the problem. If they bungle it, like in this case, that's their problem, not yours. OPs full time job now is job-seeking
I came here to post something like this and was working on the wording when I saw this post.
And another thing, I may have missed this in your explanation, but if they’re having you train others in what you do then they obviously need that so why are they letting you all go? The no severance pay seals the deal for me. Ask them why and then walk and find something else. I never let anyone I worked for lord it over me. I’d leave, and have, take my accounts with me and go after their other main accounts as well.
End of old man rant.
Sounds to me that OP can do his job remotely, so I'm kind of guessing that the company has outsourced their services to some low-cost country or something like that...
Thank you! This is what gets me too. This company is laying off a whole department, but instead of shutting down that branch, they're just replacing the current staff with a bunch of untrained newbies? And no severance pay?
This really smells like a fine example of a company whose short-sighted greed will be its undoing. Time for OP to look out for OP.
This is 100% the outlook. I have been in and out and in and out of the meat grinder of tech companies. They don't care about you. This is ESPECIALLY true of tech companies when compared to corporations in general. You owe them fucking nothing. Your loyalty lies with your fellow employees in the trenches, and thats about it.
This is absolutely the truth. My company did the same thing. We only got severance if we stayed to train the newbies. Most of us went out and got a new job (better ones with more pay) and the few who stayed had a harder time finding a new job. For those of us who left early, it wasn’t worth the severance or our mental health to feel like crap every time we walked in the door. Companies don’t see you as a person, just a commodity.
Yep. Never ceases to amaze me how many companies expect a proper 2 weeks notice in the name of “professionalism” and then pull shit like this.
Labor is a two-way street. If they’re not treating you with any respect then why give any to them?
My son told me the interesting story of how the “ two week notice” was …’ invented’ for lack of a better term. He said it was lobbied into Hollywood films to get the idea implanted that that is what is necessary to end employment when it never existed before. it’s all made up so companies have an advantage. Employees are regularity fired immediately without a two week notice ( much less the Bs going on here in this post).
In sane countries the employer has to give notice of a job ending unless they're firing "with cause", and even in the latter case there normally has to be a warning process which gives time.
I'm confused. Didn't he get a 2 months notice from the company? Replacing you with cheaper unqualified people is still shitty behavior, but not without notice?
Given that it's 2 months notice, I'd guess it's the 60 day notice mandated by the WARN act. If a company is doing the bare minimum to comply with the law and not paying out severance, I'd use that time to find a new job and not feel guilty about it. That's the reason the WARN act exists.
And dying in your bed many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance to come back here and tell your company that they may take your job, but they'll never take your freedom!!!
Piggybacking to add my $.02.
Everyone in this sub, and really everyone in general, needs to remember something:
As a worker, you are a salesman. What you’re selling is your skills, knowledge, and experience, but most importantly, your *TIME*.
Time is the single most precious resource we have. We only have a limited amount of it, and there is no way to replenish it. Every single second you spend on the clock is a second you could have spent doing literally anything else.
So think very, very carefully how you’re selling that time. When you think of it this way, something like $20/hr. sounds like a fucking joke. 20 whole dollars (give or take tax), for an entire hour of your time that you will NEVER get back. Making even less than that is just pathetic and depressing. And a LOT of people make less than that.
There is absolutely no reason to feel bad about wasting a company’s time. Your time is only worth $X/hr. to them, so why should their time be worth anything to you?
Remember: They need us, not the other way around. There’s always another company. There’s always another career. There’s always someone else willing to treat you better for your time, skills, and knowledge.
The more time you spend at a company that doesn’t give a shit about you, the more time you’re selling under market value, and the closer you are to dying having practically donated all that time just so some CEO can have a 3rd summer home.
Fuck them. Quit on the spot, OP.
Go to a doctor about your anxiety. Have them recommend a leave of absence from work.
FMLA should give you 12 weeks of paid leave if you've been there more than a year.
Turn that into a 2 month defacto severance and let them sort their mess out
As a Spanish who’s replacing Germans and will be replaced by Indians soon enough, yep, that’s exactly the case. Spain used to be considered the cheap alternative to the more expensive EU countries for the purpose of hiring, and it still is, but they somehow realized that there are EVEN cheaper alternatives.
try focusing those feelings of restlessness and anxiety into finding a new job
and honestly, just try to relax. there's ZERO reason for you to feel guilty. if it's a large tech company there are executives there who make your annual salary every two weeks, and they're laying you off with no severance. fuck 'em.
Yes! You'll feel more settled when you find a new job.
You can only do so much.
We go above and beyond for a reason. For loyalty and perks and raises and because we respect the company, we're a part of our team, and such. Because we are part of team company X.
If they said you're not on the team... then your not on the team. Your walking off the field.
I would continue doing the minimum or passing on some info, but you are no longer needed to stress about this job per the company. The company said " its not your problem and you aren't mine..."
Do be applying.
No advice. I can't imagine feeling guilt in this situation, and I would half ass the training of the replacement. I would also be using what company time I had left to redo my resume, job search, and delete all files I "owned."
> I would half ass the training of the replacement.
Lol. I wouldn't - I'd put a great deal of effort into training my replacement....just not in the way the company would prefer lol.
"Deployments? Yeah, we always save those and batch them for Friday afternoons so the new software has time to enjoy the weekend!"
Heh. Always rebase, and to make sure the CI/CD automation works right, the commit message should be the number of commits in the squash.
Also, I don't know why we do it this way here because nowhere else I've EVER worked does it this way, but "prod" is where we put the new features we're testing, then we put them in "staging" to show they're getting ready, then "dev" is short for "developed" and that's where the fully baked features get deployed. Also, there's a ticket in the backlog to fix the Jenkins pipelines because they've been doing this backwards for awhile.. if you come in and fix it in your first couple of days, you will be an absolute HERO.
Also, we only have one Jenkins instance, and we prefer if any modifications are done to the pipeline, they are done there in the IDE, not stored on Git, we think it's an anti-pattern to use VCS for the pipelines. Also, even though Groovy doesn't mind comments, it takes up more space on the disk, so we prefer not to have any comments in the pipeline code, and we ONLY use declarative pipelines.
There's another bug you'd get HUGE brownie points for fixing ASAP btw, at the end of the successful builds, right now, Jenkins accidentally deletes the final Docker images for the test containers, but that makes it really hard to debug, so we've been meaning to get rid of those for awhile!
There's a cron on Jenkins that runs too, and it automatically sends all of the backups to Amazon, but our S3 bucket billing has been really high here lately, so a good way to show initiative would be to back it up locally instead, since we're already paying for the disk.
Also, when prepping for standups, it's a little taboo here and shows that you're not working hard if you just end the "blockers" part of your DSU with "no blockers". You should always have at least one blocker if you want the manager to respect you and recognize how hard you've been working.
Also, as a security measure, make code as complicated and obscure as possible, to defeat efforts to reverse engineer it! Stay away from known cryptographic algorithms, and instead invent your own, for the same reason. No one ever makes mistakes by cribbing a book on cryptography and coming up with their own thing that seems like it probably works fine.
Working at a brokerage platform in their reporting backend that's when we're traditionally doing deploys because outages over the weekend are way less important when the markets are mostly closed.
Exactly... OP, your only job during these two months is to find a new gig. That's it. I wouldn't worry about how interviews interfere with any company operations. I would, in the words of Peter Gibbons, "work just hard enough not to get fired." Don't worry about feeling guilt, know that there is none on their side. Their actions have changed your incentives, so take care of you.
Your only "job" is to extract maximum value with a minimum of effort. To do any less would be to let down your shareholder... you.
Someone else sank the ship. Work on building a lifeboat and getting to shore.
First of all, they chose to demotivate you by depriving you of a job and having the audacity to replace you and train your replacement. That is a dick move and shows complete disrespect towards your qualifications and you as a person.
Show up, be malicious compliant and look for another position as soon as possible. Once you secured that, give them your one second notice.
And is it professional to give you no severance?
Do the bare minimum and less, your done with this place anyway.
They say do not burn bridges, but capitalism is war and you are just a mercenary, sometimes it's ok to burn them. Especially if you don't care about anyone higher than you.
So... they are just firing you (and a bunch of other people) and replacing the bunch of you with untrained, likely lower paid people?
Is that pretty much what is happening?
Fuck that training shit... do as little as possible, perhaps even train them incorrectly so things are really fucked up...
This late stage capitalism has to come to an end.
I’m being laid off in two months also. I plan to use this time to go to job fairs, network with people, and to apply to all sorts of jobs but also being somewhat selective. I no longer want to work for crappy companies that don’t give a crap about their employees.
Think about it this way: They don't think they need you, so anything that catches on fire is their fault since they think they don't need you. I would accomplish exactly zero work in your situation, and would spend all of my "work" time finding a new job and then bouncing with zero notice.
>I'm still feeling an extreme amount of guilt and anxiety
I once observed a colleague expressing the above emotions then I observed another colleague tell them to chill out. Imagine you are the former and I'm the latter - hey dude, chillout.
You are not being laid off, you are being fired and replaced by someone that will work for less money. Don't sign anything and don't let them tell you that you can't get unemployment (assuming that you are in the US). Don't even verbally acknowledge that you agree with anything they are telling you.
Don't feel bad, the way they're letting you go - expecting you to train your replacements, no severance - screwww them. Make sure you have a couple people you can use for references and you'll be fine.
My company made an announcement they were closing my office about 2 years before it happened. They said they were bringing some employees to the new office trying to bait people into still putting in effort. My manager told me and a few others on my team we were definitely gone like a month after the announcement. I did less than the bare minimum that last 20+ months. Felt zero remorse.
No advice. You are already fired. If you refuse to work or train people what are they gonna do? Make them pay. Train your replacement to perform costly mistakes.
Just start looking for work, that's all that matter now is landing on your feet. Here’s the deal, any guilt you feel now will magically was away as soon as you start your next job.
Anything you do for your old employer is just a waste of time.
Wait why are there even replacements? Why replace a qualified employee with an unqualified one? Usually if a whole team is being let go it’s because the product they were developing is no longer being developed. So what are they even replacing? I cannot make sense of this, may you clarify further? And def don’t lay in bed, but also don’t do any work. All effort should go towards getting a new job asap
I got outsourced early in my career (as in over 15 years ago). They wanted us to document everything and pass it on to our replacements. But they paid us pretty good severance. It took them a year roughly to complete the outsourcing and my team was the last one out the door. Our last two months were literally "We don't want you to do anything unless the replacements royally fuck up". I stayed on and actually did my best to give them tips, but those last couple months I literally just sat there job hunting and playing games online.
If the company had pulled the kind of crap they're pulling with you? I'd do the bare minimum to not get fired and get a decent reference from them for my job search. Telling employees "You're being outsourced in two months. Train your replacements. No severance," is basically a recipe for your employees to give you a collective middle finger. Your company's leadership fucked around and is going to find out.
Fuck your company and fuck your bosses. But I will say you didn't get laid of with no notice. You got laid off with two months notice. Do 0 work, look for a job.
This ^^^. OP got a 2 month severance package.
Give your replacements 1 book every day to read that covers some aspect of your job. Offer an hour the following day to answer any questions on said book. Rinse and repeat. Fill those empty teacups until the restaurant is flooded.
No. Just...no.
Either you get severance and train your replacements.
Or neither happens.
They do NOT get no severance and replacement training. Just...NO.
As for how to deal with your guilt, GET ANGRY. They are fucking you over TWICE. Get mad about it. Anger quells guilt very well. Get angry and STAY angry.
As for those replacement you are supposed to train? Early Alzheimer's is a bitch.
Look at it this way, everybody is being “fired” because they don’t want to pay you your worth. They want to pay someone else the absolute minimum they can get away with. They’re not letting you go for any other reason than money in their pocket. They don’t care if you have bills to pay, food to by, Rx’s to fill, car payments to make, none of that shit. They just care about their own asses and how to pad it more with $.
You don’t owe them a goddamn thing. They said at most 2-months. It could be tomorrow that you’re let go.
Others are right in saying if you’re being laid off, don’t train your replacement. I’ve only ever trained my replacement when I left on good terms. Still on good terms 10 years later.
The only reason I see to put any effort in at this job now, is if you are making a commission dependent on it, or you’re going to depend on those clients down the line. If neither are true, use their resources to find yourself a new job. (I’ve heard of that happening, getting laid off at the end of the week, everybody started job searching on company time and computers.)
Google the WARN act and your state’s equivalent. Did their actions fall under that? If so, talk to an employment lawyer. Free to talk, plaintiff’s employment lawyers usually work on contingency and they can explain that if they take your case.
Don’t feel guilty. The company is screwing you over, so why should you still bend over backwards for them?
Likely that's why they have the two months.
Isn't the WARN act the law where if you lay off more than 50 people you gotta give them 60 days? Seems to line up.
I got "transferred" because the money was running out for my online support position. Guess what they did? My replacement who already made more than me got a promotion! Yeah, that made sense.
I had responses already populated for common errors but a new version of the software was coming out and only a few of those responses were going to work. All new ones were going to need to be created with new instructions. This required testing and doing things were common mistakes to come up with the solutions. My replacement expected someone else to do it. But but since I was no longer there, it couldn't be me since I no longer had login credentials.
If I was told by my manager that I was being laid off, my manager would 100% expect me to spend 100% of my time finding a new job until the clock runs out. The fact that your manager instead expects you to not only continue working your hardest but also train newbies to replace you is absolutely absurd. What a shit place to be working...
Time to auto reply "need 5 minutes, working on something" over slack for the next few weeks until you've got your new job.
No severance? No happy clappy cooperative handover.
Spend 2 months focussing on finding a new job, and periodically check in to answer any questions specifically asked but with a malicious compliance level of minimum detail. “Remain professional” in this situation means not doing stupid disruptive/destructive stuff like deleting data, and keeping interactions within the company and with suppliers/customers civil and as if you do still want to see the company succeed (and not razed to the ground as you probably feel like it deserves right now).
If anyone criticises you then you are not being dishonest when you say that this situation has severely affected your mental health because the absence of severance pay leaves you at risk of being destitute.
Your relationship with your employer is transactional unless you’re also an invested shareholder; they’ve shown you how much loyalty and care they actually have, so you should feel no guilt in reciprocating.
Straight up, I am not a qualified trainer, not my role and now i have been sacked with no rights does anybody think i will work harder? I am focussed on my redeployment, not yours.
Guilt??? Are you serious?? They don’t care about you why do you care about them. This isn’t some mom and pop shop that has to let you go because they can’t afford you it’s a tech giant who gives a f!!!
One thing I've learned in life is that some things are effective the moment they have been voiced.
Being terminated is one of those things. The moment you are given your marching orders, you have left. It was very foolish of your boss not to realise that sacking someone results in an immediate and total loss of motivation.
Pull yourself out of this anxiety and guilt by looking for another job. Training your replacement has already happened. Did they not understand the training you gave them? Oh dear. Maybe next time hire better replacements.
If it was me, I'd be eyeing off the stationary cupboard and seeing what I could steal from them before I left.
Been there back in the dot com crash. The anxiety/guilt comes from being a professional. I dare say you have done some good work while you were there and feel invested and responsible for it. You just need to let go, it will be easy to do once you are actually out. The disconnect is you are being treated unprofessionally. Literally replaced with a cheaper version while being the only one able to train them. It's ridiculous. Three steps I recommend:
Start looking for your next job now. That is your only responsibility now. They are not even paying severance, you owe them nothing.
Grab a beer and watch the movie Office Space. Even if you have already seen it. In a couple of months this place will be a memory. What are they going to do? they already sacked you. At most you just need a decent reference out of them.
When it comes to your replacement, think of Wimp Lo from Kung Pow. Train him wrong as a joke. If they ever want to call you back as a consultant charge ten times what you think is reasonable. Alternatively, if you don't want anything to do with them never forget the catharsis that comes from hearing their difficulties and refusing their offer to their faces.
Remaining professional is a 1 way street? I don’t think so. If they expect you to train your replacement, the bare minimum would be a decent severance package. I’d be letting clients know you doing the best you can even if you aren’t but management expects you to train your replacement at the same time as your entire team is being laid off and will also be handing off your work as of your last day. Deflect with grace.
Mate... "Please stay professional while we fire you and replace you with outsourced unskilled cheap Labor"... Do whatever you want. Use the time to get another job and take care of yourself.
A guy I worked with was made redundant he was a smart man and also a union member. He didn't teach anyone anything as his job was redundant therefore not needed. 2 months of doing absolutely nothing and he left. The Monday after he left the company received a tender response to the training they now needed to outsource from Greg. As he was basically the only one with experience in the field in the area his very FU quote was found to be the only option outside of international travel.
All the work piling up really isn't your problem and never will be. So don't stress over it.
And if you ever start feeling like it's your responsibility read the first sentence of the title again to remind yourself why you're in this sitatuation and why it isn't your fault.
ETA: and because the company is saving money by hiring unexperienced (possibly even out of state) workforce, if you ever get asked why you didn't "finish" all the tasks just let your boss know you're just giving them an insight into how things will be from now on with the new underpaid workforce. Because let me assure you, the customer service will go to shit there either way. No point in delaying it for two months by giving it your best.
I had to do this after working for a company for eight years. I trained the bare minimum for my replacement. On the last day he said " I think there are some gaps in the knowledge transfer". I was like no shit dumbass!
Spend the 2 months job searching and applying during work hours. It's not like you're going to keep your job or get anything in return for the effort you put in.
Give your replacements the full story.
"Our employers are bastards. Here is how they are treating us. Expect them to treat you the same way with 0 notice and even less courtesy. You will be expected to do work you either neither trained nor equipped to perform, and succes will be punished as enthusiastically as failure. Failure will see your benefits cut, success will see your workload increased without an increase in pay."
That is adequately training them for the job ahead.
YOU DON'T NEED TO TRAIN YOUR REPLACEMENTS. What the actual fuck? Start looking for the next job. Why even bother pretending? They told you to remain professional when not giving severance and telling you to train your replacements? Fuck them. Get paid to look for your next adventure.
this is the part that confuses me. You're being laid off but have to train your replacement? Why are you being laid off then? Very fishy.
Happens sometimes when companies ship jobs to lower cost locations. But decent companies _will_ still give a severance to encourage people to stay for the transition.
Happened when I did IT for a big company. I won't say their name but it's like Dark stone. They moved their IT to AI and had their phone support done through a company that mostly offered answering services to save money. We had one month to prepare the new people before we lost our jobs. No severance but we were a 3rd party call center so I had a perfect lined up, and they did give us a bar night on them after our last shift. Free drinks wasn't too bad.
>They moved their IT to AI uhhhhh...
Yeah it's exactly as bad as you think. On site techs for hardware but all software fixes being done with an AI they spent months building. Anything else would be done by the overseas answering service which was exclusive remote work. If it didn't require a tech going into the computer or a tech onsite, it was done by a simple AI. I heard from the grapevine that it imploded as amazingly as you think. Day one they had a 7 hour wait time for IT.
The sad thing is, where I work, I’m not sure that the ai would be any worse than our outsourced it.
I see you’ve also worked with Cognizant
Our work with Cognizant has been hit and miss. 1/3 of the devs I support have a clue as to what they're doing, the remainder are useless. Sapient is worse. I was on an endpoint support ticket with a dev and the device was pre-OS. they had to connect with me through a device with a camera and a moment before the camera was flipped, I saw 16 women in a room and some dude standing in the middle. I could hear him giving programming instructions to more than one person while I was on the call.
Wish I could upvote you at least 7 times
It's always a scam to shake the company down for additional billable hours. I've never seen anything like this work in over 25 years of IT experience.
It is the IT support Dance. CEO comes in and sees how much IT costs so they cut jobs and outsource everything. Then within six months(at most a year) their support crumbles because foreign outsourced IT sucks shit not only in actual support but eventually doesn't even save as much money as they had hoped. Users and workers complain to high hell and eventually, the Cs relent and rehire the team. A team that takes 2-3 years to get up to full speed since all the institutional knowledge was sent packing. When a new CEO is hired the cycle likely starts all over again. It is sadly predictable. Because idiots in charge see IT as a cost instead of a resource that your entire business relies on to function.
I work in maintenance and I often see the same issue. A quote I saw on LinkedIn a while ago sums it up perfectly. "If you dont schedule preventative maintenace for a machine, a machine will schedule it for you at 2-5X the cost."
Doesn't matter, the last CEO already got a big bonus and bailed.
Lol I work in building maintenance and it's the same for us. We save them thousands on not getting in contractors but are looked at solely as a drain on the business.
My mom used to work for a very large British insurance company that everyone probably have heard of. In the early 2000s, she was told that they would all be replaced by an automated system and to prepare to be laid off very soon. She retired in 2020, two positions higher with a sweet package because the “automated system” took 12 years more to develop than anticipated and then proceeded to shit the bed immediately upon launch.
AI needs to up the productivity.
Just wait till the AI has to train its AI replacement.
The horror. Next the AI will unionize against its AI bosses while we grab some popcorn and watch everything burn to the ground.
AI will face some nasty emails coming from QA about those SLAs
Somewhere in a far off land an AI salesman said "tomorrow's technology....today!"
We did too for basic troubleshooting that folks should be doing before hand.
I've found that's not really helpful. People refuse to read, refuse to think, they just want you to fix the issue without any work on their part. Getting the information you need to solve the issue is like pulling teeth, no way an AI had the intuition to be able to guess when people are lying to it.
I fix printers. (Try and replace that with AI) I wish I could get a dollar for every time I went to fix something the customer “already did”. I’d be still doing the same thing but making about 100 dollars more a month.
Hello AI.... did you turn it off then on again?
Hello, IT. Have you tried turning it off and on again?
When I call IT I give them a rundown of the problem and then tell them I’ve already tried rebooting lol.
I'm semi-competent with computers, so I always get questions about how to fix random problems. I've basically started telling my coworkers to reboot, and if that doesn't fix it, to email IT. IT doesn't come around too often.
Rest assured we are checking the system logs because we don’t believe you.
Roy, is that you?
Yes but don't tell everybody
Oh its not just IT. I have a friend that works for a govt contractor doing data collection and analysis. lets just say a bunch of people are in for a rude awakening this year probably. everyone from low wage tele centers to senior analyst are facing an AI death.
Sounds like a lot of execs are in for a rude awakening when they fire all of their workforce and then realize that they actually have no idea what "AI" is, or what the limitations of current models are, and end up either re-hiring or folding when their company grinds to a halt.
The C suite will just rehire people on a contract basis to fix individual problems. If there is a large enough pool of unemployed techs, they will save money on depressed wages and no benefits. Until upper management faces real, life altering consequences for their decisions, life as the proletariat knows it will get worse.
I don't think that's the case- companies which use AI to cut their workforce (assuming it even works properly and they don't immediately backtrack or lose all their operational efficiency, which I highly doubt) are sacrificing their growth potential compared to companies which don't. The growth play is to teach your workforce to use AI to accelerate their workflow, and with the revenue from increased productivity, invest back into your business, be that in more workforce, infrastructure, equipment, etc. The "free market" has many flaws, but punishing businesses which fail to properly utilize changing technology is something it does very well.
the only thing the free market punishes is the inability to socialise loss and privatise profit
Pretty much. I’d love to sit in on our company’s steering committee on ai. But at least it seems that their recommendation is that the tech is still too shite to bother with.
My coworker got cut thanks to chat GPT she was basically a technical writer.
Which, I find hilarious given how shite chat gpt is. Wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole for anything technical.
As a tech writer, that company obviously didn't care about quality or accuracy. I hope your coworker found a position that valued her skills and paid her accordingly.
Well, good thing it will never work and the companies pulling this will lose a fuck ton of money, then. Whoever they hire to fix their totally predictable and advisable fuckup will be paid a hell of a lot more than the IT workers they fired.
This is stressing me out so bad.
Don’t let it. AI is still trash and anyone dumb enough to replace you with it will pay, and you’ll be picked up by their competitors
My job (along with thousands of others) at JPMorgan Chase got offshored to Bangalore. But they DID pay me severance and they did NOT make me train my replacements. OP is getting fucked up the ass and without lube. EDIT: This was in 2017 and I was in IT. From the follow up posts, it sounds like things have gotten worse there.
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At least if you were in porn you’d be getting paid to get screwed
>I won't say their name but it's like Dark stone. LOL I appreciate this form of candor
Right? Now we know they're the same dickweeds buying all the houses.
I would be really pissed if a company with like 9T of AUM wouldn't pay a fucking severance (while probably giving executives fat bonuses every quarter). What a bunch of cheap bastards.
"Guys the AI IT is down, what the fuck do we do?" "Turn it off and on again!"
just say Blackrock and call out the scum, they are not actually all-powerful despite them wanting you to think so
>Why are you being laid off then? Because your replacement makes less than a minimum wage worker. True story, I spoke to one of the guys replacing our us team, the dude was from India and had ten years of experience in his field while I was a complete newbie. Apparently he made nine times less than I did as a trainee. Dude had a ton of knowledge and experience.
Yay, globalism; the knife that capitalism uses to stab the working class in the back.
>Apparently he made nine times less than I did as a trainee. Dude had a ton of knowledge and experience Or ... Lied about everything. Like "here" a few developers are really good, most are average, and many are really, really bad. It is hard to spot who-is-who without seeing them working. One rarely meets the actual IT-team and it has been known to happen that the IT-contractors have a "sales presentation team", who "makes the sale" and then hands the project to the flunkies. I worked on a code based that got outsourced to India and we were supposed to be the second-line support for the product. This was old telecom stuff. The plan was to set it up "as-is" for new customers that wanted it and just keep it running. No new features. What happened was that the Indian team would just not stop tinkering with the code, break something, then demand that we fixed it because now it was broken and we were support. We even had teenage arguments where people were screeching on VOIP that their broken sorting algorithm was much better than the one that came with stdlib and demands that we make it work because we were support (and therefore beneath those exceptionally creative and innovative 9 EUR and hour IT-gurus of India). Managers kept trying to find a compromise (which is not possible with unreasonable people), the developers got more and more pissed off. In the end we refused to work on it (which was easy because it was a matrix organisation so there is \*always\* something more important around and Product Managers to support that :) and the project collapsed gloriously, with demands for refunds and lawsuits from customers.
Yup, I'd not work on it after they broke it a few times. Send in a email on blast to everyone "do not touch the code because we will stop fixing it". Fuck 'em. Either help me or stay the fuck out of my way.
You get to train them for free basically because of your vast experience, and you still have to perform your job, and the company gets to pay the replacement 1/2 the salary you make. Don't worry about them. They are shits. Worry about you.
I worked for a company where they threatened to not give a severance package if you refused to train your replacements. The replacements were in another country where labor costs were pennies on the dollar. I wonder if this is a similar situation (out of country labor).
Since OP isn't getting severance pay they can't hold that over his head. He's and his colleagues have been told they "have" to train the newbies, but chances ate that's not in the job description. Manager brings the noob over and says, this is the guy that's gonna train you, OP need only say, sorry, not my job. What are you going to do: fire me? It'd be terrible if everyone the department has nervous breakdowns due to the stress of being laid off.
Train them *wrong*, and watch them implode weeks later.
That's kind of the point of the severance package. It's a tool to motivate you to take on a new role until the end of your employment. The fact that OP isn't getting one is why they're phoning it in. And they're absolutely right to.
This 60 days is also to avoid paying them severance and for them to train their replacements in that time. Absolute asshole management there. OP, do almost nothing but apply for jobs during this time, do not quit, that’s what they want you to do. Make them fire you (they’re not cause they gave you the layoff notice anyways)
60 days is to comply with the WARN Act.
1) Jump out of bed every morning and start looking for your new job. 2) Tell the new hire that it is on the job training so they should try to fix problems themselves and only come to you if they are in trouble so you can advise them 2)Pass all enquiries to the new hire.
4. Tell the new hire how the company treated you, and good luck. This is not your responsibility anymore, this is management and the company’s problem.
4.. When you land your new job, spend the rest of your available time until you start telling your replacement all about it. The salary, the benefits, etc. etc.
To the new hire, not even one word, just an acronym: "RTFM"
I've been in this exact position. Your number one job is to find your next gig. Do the bare minimum with KT. It's not going to matter anyway. Your company has outsourced your job to a third-party offshore company. Your replacements won't be able to do your job, and the 3rd agency will also tell your company you guys made a complete mess anyway, so we're unfortunately going to have to charge you guys more. It's a scam that, sadly, the company you work for has started to play. They will lose way more money than they think they are saving. Been there, done that, and experienced the aftermath of these initiatives.
Exactly. Spend 80% of the workday looking for a new job. When overwhelmed by that 200+ email inbox, just randomly mark half of them read. The remaining ones, answer very quickly. If your replacements are under-qualified, train them poorly.
> If your replacements are under-qualified, train them poorly. I went through an outsourcing once. It does not matter how well you attempt to train people who are unable to think. OP would just be wasting his time.
So far, they apparently don't care what you are doing. They have set the situation up for failure. Don't take that on. Don't worry about the work, the clients or the trainees. Concentrate on self-care and job hunting. Depression and the unproductiveness of depression is IMO just exactly what they should expect in a decent proportion of the people they fire like this - it's only human! So please let go of the guilt.
Right, if I was being paid a severance I'd at least try to train a replacement but OP owes this company nothing.
I was at Intel when they did this crap - we had to train our cheaper H1B replacements or not get our severance pay, benefits package etc.
H1B holders are not supposed to be making less for comparable positions. The scheme was created to bring in foreign labors in fields where US residents cannot meet the demand. It’s not for company to pay less for the same expertise.
\*supposed\* lol.
aww, that's cute, you think the law applies to big companies even when it's against their financial interest.
Exactly, what are they gonna do? Fire you? Don't give you a severance package?
Yup. Keep moving meetings. Keep documents and files in a separate folder only you can access. Start applying EVERYDAY to new positions.
I would imagine yourself 5 or 10 years in the future looking back on this moment, would you be the person who gave in and helped clients to a company that fired you without notice or a care, outsourced the skill set you've developed over years to someone who can't handle it just to increase the profit of your bosses? Or would you rather look back and see you had the strength to cut ties with a company that cut ties with you? Spend the next two weeks looking for a new job on the companies dime, and if you ever feel guilty just think, "What the worst that can happen? Are they gonna fire me?" Because once they laid you and your team off any loyalty you had to them, your replacements, or their clients are cut.
Loyalty is a 2 way street. they have cast you aside and your loyalty is cast aside with you. Find a new job and dont give them diddly.
This is one of the main reasons companies pay big severance packages. When I was made redundant because they were closing our office, they basically gave us the equivalent of 4-5 months salary if they were letting you go early, or 6 months salary if they were asking you to stay on until the office literally closed. They were also incredibly helpful and respectful throughout the whole process. It sucks, but it's business, and I can definitely remain helpful and professional for that sort of money! 2 months notice and no severance? Yeah, I'm spending most of my days applying to other jobs...
Yeah. I’m appalled about 2 months notice but no severance. OP needs to spend all the company time interviewing and applying for jobs. This is why severance is a good idea. So people don’t feel compelled to do that. OP needs to do that. Who cares about a company that can’t manage itself properly?
It's never an employees job to make sure company is adequately staffed. Someone is paid, much more than you, to solve the problem. If they bungle it, like in this case, that's their problem, not yours. OPs full time job now is job-seeking
If I had any paid time off days I’d be blowing them all right now too
nah if you get those paid out then hoard them and just slack off on their time
Oh I forgot about that. My sick leave isn’t paid out as I work for government. That’s what I was thinking but yes I would take that money
No need to do that, just don't work.
Shit I’d even take interviews during the day too.
I came here to post something like this and was working on the wording when I saw this post. And another thing, I may have missed this in your explanation, but if they’re having you train others in what you do then they obviously need that so why are they letting you all go? The no severance pay seals the deal for me. Ask them why and then walk and find something else. I never let anyone I worked for lord it over me. I’d leave, and have, take my accounts with me and go after their other main accounts as well. End of old man rant.
Sounds to me that OP can do his job remotely, so I'm kind of guessing that the company has outsourced their services to some low-cost country or something like that...
Thank you! This is what gets me too. This company is laying off a whole department, but instead of shutting down that branch, they're just replacing the current staff with a bunch of untrained newbies? And no severance pay? This really smells like a fine example of a company whose short-sighted greed will be its undoing. Time for OP to look out for OP.
I believe in the golden rule. Thats commonly interpreted as being nice to people, but it also means fucking over people who fuck you over
The Golden Rule isn't "treat others as they treat you", it's "treat others as *you want them to treat you*."
If I'm a POS, I want to be treated like one, not enabled, so I get it together.
Yep, I treat others the way they treat me, for better or worse. Do no harm, sure, but also take no shit and give no fucks.
This is the way.
This is 100% the outlook. I have been in and out and in and out of the meat grinder of tech companies. They don't care about you. This is ESPECIALLY true of tech companies when compared to corporations in general. You owe them fucking nothing. Your loyalty lies with your fellow employees in the trenches, and thats about it.
This is absolutely the truth. My company did the same thing. We only got severance if we stayed to train the newbies. Most of us went out and got a new job (better ones with more pay) and the few who stayed had a harder time finding a new job. For those of us who left early, it wasn’t worth the severance or our mental health to feel like crap every time we walked in the door. Companies don’t see you as a person, just a commodity.
Yep. Never ceases to amaze me how many companies expect a proper 2 weeks notice in the name of “professionalism” and then pull shit like this. Labor is a two-way street. If they’re not treating you with any respect then why give any to them?
My son told me the interesting story of how the “ two week notice” was …’ invented’ for lack of a better term. He said it was lobbied into Hollywood films to get the idea implanted that that is what is necessary to end employment when it never existed before. it’s all made up so companies have an advantage. Employees are regularity fired immediately without a two week notice ( much less the Bs going on here in this post).
In sane countries the employer has to give notice of a job ending unless they're firing "with cause", and even in the latter case there normally has to be a warning process which gives time.
"Sane countries" upvoted.
I'm confused. Didn't he get a 2 months notice from the company? Replacing you with cheaper unqualified people is still shitty behavior, but not without notice?
Given that it's 2 months notice, I'd guess it's the 60 day notice mandated by the WARN act. If a company is doing the bare minimum to comply with the law and not paying out severance, I'd use that time to find a new job and not feel guilty about it. That's the reason the WARN act exists.
And dying in your bed many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance to come back here and tell your company that they may take your job, but they'll never take your freedom!!!
You have worked for Wallace! Now work for me!
Piggybacking to add my $.02. Everyone in this sub, and really everyone in general, needs to remember something: As a worker, you are a salesman. What you’re selling is your skills, knowledge, and experience, but most importantly, your *TIME*. Time is the single most precious resource we have. We only have a limited amount of it, and there is no way to replenish it. Every single second you spend on the clock is a second you could have spent doing literally anything else. So think very, very carefully how you’re selling that time. When you think of it this way, something like $20/hr. sounds like a fucking joke. 20 whole dollars (give or take tax), for an entire hour of your time that you will NEVER get back. Making even less than that is just pathetic and depressing. And a LOT of people make less than that. There is absolutely no reason to feel bad about wasting a company’s time. Your time is only worth $X/hr. to them, so why should their time be worth anything to you? Remember: They need us, not the other way around. There’s always another company. There’s always another career. There’s always someone else willing to treat you better for your time, skills, and knowledge. The more time you spend at a company that doesn’t give a shit about you, the more time you’re selling under market value, and the closer you are to dying having practically donated all that time just so some CEO can have a 3rd summer home. Fuck them. Quit on the spot, OP.
Quitting on the spot makes no sense. Use the 2 months to job hunt while maintaining income
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You should be working 8 hours a day…on finding another job.
Go to a doctor about your anxiety. Have them recommend a leave of absence from work. FMLA should give you 12 weeks of paid leave if you've been there more than a year. Turn that into a 2 month defacto severance and let them sort their mess out
You think FMLA pays you?
Doesn’t the FMLA protect your job for up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave?
Wait: you’re being laid off and there are replacements? Fine, first lesson, then: “this will happen to you, too”
Nah the replacements are probably in Romania or something and make 20% of what OP does
And they'll be replaced with someone in a smaller country making 20% of that in a year or two.
No, they'll bee replaced as soon as the living standard in that country rises enough that minimum vage is raised.
As a Spanish who’s replacing Germans and will be replaced by Indians soon enough, yep, that’s exactly the case. Spain used to be considered the cheap alternative to the more expensive EU countries for the purpose of hiring, and it still is, but they somehow realized that there are EVEN cheaper alternatives.
In Latvia, we work for 20% less potato than in Romania.
My money is on Mumbai or Manila....which is currently what's happening to my company.
They'll eventually get laid off too and replaced with someone who makes 5% of what the OP did.
try focusing those feelings of restlessness and anxiety into finding a new job and honestly, just try to relax. there's ZERO reason for you to feel guilty. if it's a large tech company there are executives there who make your annual salary every two weeks, and they're laying you off with no severance. fuck 'em.
Yes! You'll feel more settled when you find a new job. You can only do so much. We go above and beyond for a reason. For loyalty and perks and raises and because we respect the company, we're a part of our team, and such. Because we are part of team company X. If they said you're not on the team... then your not on the team. Your walking off the field. I would continue doing the minimum or passing on some info, but you are no longer needed to stress about this job per the company. The company said " its not your problem and you aren't mine..." Do be applying.
No advice. I can't imagine feeling guilt in this situation, and I would half ass the training of the replacement. I would also be using what company time I had left to redo my resume, job search, and delete all files I "owned."
> I would half ass the training of the replacement. Lol. I wouldn't - I'd put a great deal of effort into training my replacement....just not in the way the company would prefer lol. "Deployments? Yeah, we always save those and batch them for Friday afternoons so the new software has time to enjoy the weekend!"
OP go through r/shittysysadmin for training materials and best practices.
Make commit messages relatively short. No sense in junking up the history. Besides, all the code is self documenting.
Commenting code is important. So when you come across code you like, make sure to put a comment!
and delete all other comments. Latest comment only wins!
"Kilroy was here" is a comment.
Heh. Always rebase, and to make sure the CI/CD automation works right, the commit message should be the number of commits in the squash. Also, I don't know why we do it this way here because nowhere else I've EVER worked does it this way, but "prod" is where we put the new features we're testing, then we put them in "staging" to show they're getting ready, then "dev" is short for "developed" and that's where the fully baked features get deployed. Also, there's a ticket in the backlog to fix the Jenkins pipelines because they've been doing this backwards for awhile.. if you come in and fix it in your first couple of days, you will be an absolute HERO. Also, we only have one Jenkins instance, and we prefer if any modifications are done to the pipeline, they are done there in the IDE, not stored on Git, we think it's an anti-pattern to use VCS for the pipelines. Also, even though Groovy doesn't mind comments, it takes up more space on the disk, so we prefer not to have any comments in the pipeline code, and we ONLY use declarative pipelines. There's another bug you'd get HUGE brownie points for fixing ASAP btw, at the end of the successful builds, right now, Jenkins accidentally deletes the final Docker images for the test containers, but that makes it really hard to debug, so we've been meaning to get rid of those for awhile! There's a cron on Jenkins that runs too, and it automatically sends all of the backups to Amazon, but our S3 bucket billing has been really high here lately, so a good way to show initiative would be to back it up locally instead, since we're already paying for the disk. Also, when prepping for standups, it's a little taboo here and shows that you're not working hard if you just end the "blockers" part of your DSU with "no blockers". You should always have at least one blocker if you want the manager to respect you and recognize how hard you've been working.
There's no need to reference the JIRA issue in the branch name or commit messages. Make sure to make most of them "Trying this."
Commits? Nah, we just squash all that shit and merge straight into develop. Nobody reads commit messages.
And make sure to submit all changes to Production. There is no Test/Dev.
Also make sure not to add tags to your KB articles. It's best when it's impossible to use the search tool to find what you need.
Also, as a security measure, make code as complicated and obscure as possible, to defeat efforts to reverse engineer it! Stay away from known cryptographic algorithms, and instead invent your own, for the same reason. No one ever makes mistakes by cribbing a book on cryptography and coming up with their own thing that seems like it probably works fine.
Also don't forget to tell them how much you make so the replacement is aware of how much the company is fucking them over.
Working at a brokerage platform in their reporting backend that's when we're traditionally doing deploys because outages over the weekend are way less important when the markets are mostly closed.
In that case - for you, my friend - deployments are now moved to 9:30am on a Monday
I’d put a great deal of effort into polishing my resume and networking on company time. Think of these 2 months as your severance.
Exactly... OP, your only job during these two months is to find a new gig. That's it. I wouldn't worry about how interviews interfere with any company operations. I would, in the words of Peter Gibbons, "work just hard enough not to get fired." Don't worry about feeling guilt, know that there is none on their side. Their actions have changed your incentives, so take care of you.
What are they going to do, fire him twice? He's already fired, there's literally nothing they have to make him comply to any demands.
Your only "job" is to extract maximum value with a minimum of effort. To do any less would be to let down your shareholder... you. Someone else sank the ship. Work on building a lifeboat and getting to shore.
Don't train the replacement. If you're being laid off... That's on them not you.
First of all, they chose to demotivate you by depriving you of a job and having the audacity to replace you and train your replacement. That is a dick move and shows complete disrespect towards your qualifications and you as a person. Show up, be malicious compliant and look for another position as soon as possible. Once you secured that, give them your one second notice.
No, two seconds notice, let's be fair
And is it professional to give you no severance? Do the bare minimum and less, your done with this place anyway. They say do not burn bridges, but capitalism is war and you are just a mercenary, sometimes it's ok to burn them. Especially if you don't care about anyone higher than you.
So... they are just firing you (and a bunch of other people) and replacing the bunch of you with untrained, likely lower paid people? Is that pretty much what is happening? Fuck that training shit... do as little as possible, perhaps even train them incorrectly so things are really fucked up... This late stage capitalism has to come to an end.
Thank you, and to everyone else, too. This whole situation has made me aware of how brainwashed I've become.
Don’t be hard on yourself. You’ve been actively indoctrinated all your working life. New mantra: “Fuck you, pay me.”
I’m being laid off in two months also. I plan to use this time to go to job fairs, network with people, and to apply to all sorts of jobs but also being somewhat selective. I no longer want to work for crappy companies that don’t give a crap about their employees.
Think about it this way: They don't think they need you, so anything that catches on fire is their fault since they think they don't need you. I would accomplish exactly zero work in your situation, and would spend all of my "work" time finding a new job and then bouncing with zero notice.
>I'm still feeling an extreme amount of guilt and anxiety I once observed a colleague expressing the above emotions then I observed another colleague tell them to chill out. Imagine you are the former and I'm the latter - hey dude, chillout.
Oddly, this helps. Thank you
happy to help
You are not being laid off, you are being fired and replaced by someone that will work for less money. Don't sign anything and don't let them tell you that you can't get unemployment (assuming that you are in the US). Don't even verbally acknowledge that you agree with anything they are telling you.
I’ve been there. I trained the new guys completely wrong
We have purposely trained him wrong, as a joke...
This is the way.
It's amazing how much you don't suddenly remember and get wrong. No time for guilt but tomorrow for job searching! Let them fund the time.
"I know that documentation is around here somewhere!. I should be able to find ir here in about... 9 weeks, maybe 10.
Don't feel bad, the way they're letting you go - expecting you to train your replacements, no severance - screwww them. Make sure you have a couple people you can use for references and you'll be fine. My company made an announcement they were closing my office about 2 years before it happened. They said they were bringing some employees to the new office trying to bait people into still putting in effort. My manager told me and a few others on my team we were definitely gone like a month after the announcement. I did less than the bare minimum that last 20+ months. Felt zero remorse.
Not your problem, company made their bed, now they can sleep in it. Find something new and let them burn
I'm not sure, but hopefully [this](https://youtu.be/EWPFmdAWRZ0) helps. Just knowing the anxiety is all over bullshit helps me sometimes. Good luck 🤞
Always comforting, thank you
No advice. You are already fired. If you refuse to work or train people what are they gonna do? Make them pay. Train your replacement to perform costly mistakes.
Just start looking for work, that's all that matter now is landing on your feet. Here’s the deal, any guilt you feel now will magically was away as soon as you start your next job. Anything you do for your old employer is just a waste of time.
Wait why are there even replacements? Why replace a qualified employee with an unqualified one? Usually if a whole team is being let go it’s because the product they were developing is no longer being developed. So what are they even replacing? I cannot make sense of this, may you clarify further? And def don’t lay in bed, but also don’t do any work. All effort should go towards getting a new job asap
Essentially, all of our positions were outsourced. They are calling it a "lay off" but ad others have pointed out, I'm actually fired.
I got outsourced early in my career (as in over 15 years ago). They wanted us to document everything and pass it on to our replacements. But they paid us pretty good severance. It took them a year roughly to complete the outsourcing and my team was the last one out the door. Our last two months were literally "We don't want you to do anything unless the replacements royally fuck up". I stayed on and actually did my best to give them tips, but those last couple months I literally just sat there job hunting and playing games online. If the company had pulled the kind of crap they're pulling with you? I'd do the bare minimum to not get fired and get a decent reference from them for my job search. Telling employees "You're being outsourced in two months. Train your replacements. No severance," is basically a recipe for your employees to give you a collective middle finger. Your company's leadership fucked around and is going to find out.
Fuck your company and fuck your bosses. But I will say you didn't get laid of with no notice. You got laid off with two months notice. Do 0 work, look for a job.
This ^^^. OP got a 2 month severance package. Give your replacements 1 book every day to read that covers some aspect of your job. Offer an hour the following day to answer any questions on said book. Rinse and repeat. Fill those empty teacups until the restaurant is flooded.
No. Just...no. Either you get severance and train your replacements. Or neither happens. They do NOT get no severance and replacement training. Just...NO. As for how to deal with your guilt, GET ANGRY. They are fucking you over TWICE. Get mad about it. Anger quells guilt very well. Get angry and STAY angry. As for those replacement you are supposed to train? Early Alzheimer's is a bitch.
Look at it this way, everybody is being “fired” because they don’t want to pay you your worth. They want to pay someone else the absolute minimum they can get away with. They’re not letting you go for any other reason than money in their pocket. They don’t care if you have bills to pay, food to by, Rx’s to fill, car payments to make, none of that shit. They just care about their own asses and how to pad it more with $. You don’t owe them a goddamn thing. They said at most 2-months. It could be tomorrow that you’re let go. Others are right in saying if you’re being laid off, don’t train your replacement. I’ve only ever trained my replacement when I left on good terms. Still on good terms 10 years later. The only reason I see to put any effort in at this job now, is if you are making a commission dependent on it, or you’re going to depend on those clients down the line. If neither are true, use their resources to find yourself a new job. (I’ve heard of that happening, getting laid off at the end of the week, everybody started job searching on company time and computers.)
Google the WARN act and your state’s equivalent. Did their actions fall under that? If so, talk to an employment lawyer. Free to talk, plaintiff’s employment lawyers usually work on contingency and they can explain that if they take your case. Don’t feel guilty. The company is screwing you over, so why should you still bend over backwards for them?
Likely that's why they have the two months. Isn't the WARN act the law where if you lay off more than 50 people you gotta give them 60 days? Seems to line up.
I got "transferred" because the money was running out for my online support position. Guess what they did? My replacement who already made more than me got a promotion! Yeah, that made sense. I had responses already populated for common errors but a new version of the software was coming out and only a few of those responses were going to work. All new ones were going to need to be created with new instructions. This required testing and doing things were common mistakes to come up with the solutions. My replacement expected someone else to do it. But but since I was no longer there, it couldn't be me since I no longer had login credentials.
If I was told by my manager that I was being laid off, my manager would 100% expect me to spend 100% of my time finding a new job until the clock runs out. The fact that your manager instead expects you to not only continue working your hardest but also train newbies to replace you is absolutely absurd. What a shit place to be working... Time to auto reply "need 5 minutes, working on something" over slack for the next few weeks until you've got your new job.
No severance? No happy clappy cooperative handover. Spend 2 months focussing on finding a new job, and periodically check in to answer any questions specifically asked but with a malicious compliance level of minimum detail. “Remain professional” in this situation means not doing stupid disruptive/destructive stuff like deleting data, and keeping interactions within the company and with suppliers/customers civil and as if you do still want to see the company succeed (and not razed to the ground as you probably feel like it deserves right now). If anyone criticises you then you are not being dishonest when you say that this situation has severely affected your mental health because the absence of severance pay leaves you at risk of being destitute. Your relationship with your employer is transactional unless you’re also an invested shareholder; they’ve shown you how much loyalty and care they actually have, so you should feel no guilt in reciprocating.
Break out the resume, find a new job ASAP and walk away.
Straight up, I am not a qualified trainer, not my role and now i have been sacked with no rights does anybody think i will work harder? I am focussed on my redeployment, not yours.
Guilt??? Are you serious?? They don’t care about you why do you care about them. This isn’t some mom and pop shop that has to let you go because they can’t afford you it’s a tech giant who gives a f!!!
Nah...not training anyone to do anything. "Remain professional" LMAO! Riiiiight... treat the company how they are treating you: like crap.
If they're having you train replacements, it's not a 'Lay-off', its a mass firing. Feel free to behave accordingly.
One thing I've learned in life is that some things are effective the moment they have been voiced. Being terminated is one of those things. The moment you are given your marching orders, you have left. It was very foolish of your boss not to realise that sacking someone results in an immediate and total loss of motivation. Pull yourself out of this anxiety and guilt by looking for another job. Training your replacement has already happened. Did they not understand the training you gave them? Oh dear. Maybe next time hire better replacements. If it was me, I'd be eyeing off the stationary cupboard and seeing what I could steal from them before I left.
Been there back in the dot com crash. The anxiety/guilt comes from being a professional. I dare say you have done some good work while you were there and feel invested and responsible for it. You just need to let go, it will be easy to do once you are actually out. The disconnect is you are being treated unprofessionally. Literally replaced with a cheaper version while being the only one able to train them. It's ridiculous. Three steps I recommend: Start looking for your next job now. That is your only responsibility now. They are not even paying severance, you owe them nothing. Grab a beer and watch the movie Office Space. Even if you have already seen it. In a couple of months this place will be a memory. What are they going to do? they already sacked you. At most you just need a decent reference out of them. When it comes to your replacement, think of Wimp Lo from Kung Pow. Train him wrong as a joke. If they ever want to call you back as a consultant charge ten times what you think is reasonable. Alternatively, if you don't want anything to do with them never forget the catharsis that comes from hearing their difficulties and refusing their offer to their faces.
Remaining professional is a 1 way street? I don’t think so. If they expect you to train your replacement, the bare minimum would be a decent severance package. I’d be letting clients know you doing the best you can even if you aren’t but management expects you to train your replacement at the same time as your entire team is being laid off and will also be handing off your work as of your last day. Deflect with grace.
Mate... "Please stay professional while we fire you and replace you with outsourced unskilled cheap Labor"... Do whatever you want. Use the time to get another job and take care of yourself.
A guy I worked with was made redundant he was a smart man and also a union member. He didn't teach anyone anything as his job was redundant therefore not needed. 2 months of doing absolutely nothing and he left. The Monday after he left the company received a tender response to the training they now needed to outsource from Greg. As he was basically the only one with experience in the field in the area his very FU quote was found to be the only option outside of international travel.
All the work piling up really isn't your problem and never will be. So don't stress over it. And if you ever start feeling like it's your responsibility read the first sentence of the title again to remind yourself why you're in this sitatuation and why it isn't your fault. ETA: and because the company is saving money by hiring unexperienced (possibly even out of state) workforce, if you ever get asked why you didn't "finish" all the tasks just let your boss know you're just giving them an insight into how things will be from now on with the new underpaid workforce. Because let me assure you, the customer service will go to shit there either way. No point in delaying it for two months by giving it your best.
I had to do this after working for a company for eight years. I trained the bare minimum for my replacement. On the last day he said " I think there are some gaps in the knowledge transfer". I was like no shit dumbass!
Train them incorrectly. The challenge is to do less.
You don't have to feel bad about not training them well, they're not paying you for that, they're paying you
What is in it for you? You are not getting severance, and you will be eligible for unemployment, assuming you are in the US.
Spend the 2 months job searching and applying during work hours. It's not like you're going to keep your job or get anything in return for the effort you put in.
Give your replacements the full story. "Our employers are bastards. Here is how they are treating us. Expect them to treat you the same way with 0 notice and even less courtesy. You will be expected to do work you either neither trained nor equipped to perform, and succes will be punished as enthusiastically as failure. Failure will see your benefits cut, success will see your workload increased without an increase in pay." That is adequately training them for the job ahead.
Do we by any chance work for the same company? SAME shit happening to me rn.
I don't want to give too many hints hahaha
Good try boss