I was laid off from my job recently.
Apparently I have lots of company there. The big tech giants all decided to spontaneously lay off thousands of people at once, so that there is now a surplus of roughly 250,000 IT professionals who “became available” all at once. Frankly if the IT industry as a whole was trying to make sure to fuck over these people as hard as possible, well, they could hardly have done better.
In previous layoffs I’ve been fairly stoic. In most cases it was easy to see things coming — in one case I was working for a company that everyone knew was slowly but surely going out of business. In another a company I worked for was bought by a venture capitalist firm that didn’t seem to have much idea what we did or what to do with us. But this time is different. I’m not so stoic. There really was no reason to have layoffs, and the company I was working for, Microsoft, is not dying or even losing money.
In short, there was no reason for these layoffs. Microsoft just went ahead with it because other companies were doing it too.
To be honest, I feel betrayed. Only a few days before the axe came down the team I worked for was told that these layoffs were something we “didn’t have to worry about”. Well, that was clearly bullshit. It seriously leaves me with the feeling that in this last job I ended up trusting people I shouldn’t have trusted. People whom I thought had my back. Guess I was too naive to realize that they were holding knives behind theirs.
Anyway, I guess the lesson to be learned here is that IT is an industry that’s now well within the hands of parasite capitalists, amoral beasts who justify every action in terms of share prices. Employees? who cares? they’re just “human resources”. Cannon fodder. Nothing more.