My Final Tech All Hands
I’d been laid off, my job handed over to TCS, and all that was left was one final, cheery Zoom call to pretend it never happened.
I don’t know what I expected from the last meeting where everyone would get together on Zoom. It was my last meeting, but I certainly didn’t expect this.
The Meeting
“Happy festive period.
It’s been a busy year.
Lots of you are looking forward to a bit of downtime.
It’s the last time we’ll speak to you all before we get back in January.
We’ll make more of an effort to get guest speakers in.
For the remainder of 2024, I’ll end where I started: thank you.
Thank you for all the change and transformation work we’ve been through.
It will be different next year. We will be rebuilding.
There will be more to come.
Active things to improve the organisation.
There’ll be much more to come.”
That was it.
I Guess Goodbye?
No mention of layoffs. No acknowledgment of the people who wouldn’t be coming back in January.
Nothing about the teams that would be broken up, the projects that would be dropped, the years of experience walking out the door. Nothing about the people who had already been told they had no future here.
Just a generic, cheerful sign-off. A “thank you” to the room, but not to the ones who were already being quietly erased. It felt like I wasn’t recognized in the slightest, and it was now time to slip away into the shadows.
The Strategic Silence
It’s a script I’ve seen before.
Instead of mentioning issues that are at hand, a corporate sleight of hand comes into play that is happy if people simply disappear without disrupting the festive mood for those who were not leaving.
“We’ll be rebuilding next year.
We’ll make more of an effort.
There’ll be much more to come.”
For some of us, there won’t.
Because this was our final all-hands, too.
And they just didn’t mention it. Why would they? They were happy to simply let us slip away into the night.
Conclusion
I know, I know. When you leave a position, it isn’t likely to be flowers and a celebration of the hard work that you have done.
Yet I just hoped for more. I know I should know better, but I guess I don’t.