Everything was going great. Best salary I have ever had, all my benefits were paid for by the company. Unlimited PTO and you could expense anything work related including internet if you were remote (which I was).
8 months of bliss working for a company in a relatively stress free environment from the comfort of my own house. If I need to step away for a little bit, go right on ahead. Need to take an afternoon off or a mental health day? See you tomorrow. Want another monitor for your setup to better perform your duties? Get it ordered and ship the receipt.
I was part of the “new hires” having been there less than a year. The department when I got there was basically 4 people with a couple of tier 3 support staff above. Not a large crew, but in my time we grew to a team of about 15 people including the higher tiers.
Then Friday comes. An email goes out at 6am EST (3am PST, which is pretty relevant considering most of the staff for this company is west coast) stating that we have over stepped our finances and the company will be looking to downsize by about 17%. This is a decently sized company, about 1000 employees worldwide, so 17% is no small amount, but we are a small team and are vital to the companies success. There's no way they will lose many if any from my department right?
Holy hell was I wrong, while we are chilling in slack the first victim pipes up. “they just fired me” we all read in utter disbelief. It took an exchange of about 10 messages and a zoom call before we realized that this was in fact not a joke. The person who got fired started around the same time as me, was involved in many special projects, and had just left that day for vacation and his wedding, about a month after he broke ground on a new house he is having built.
Now comes the next few AGONIZING hours while everyone on our team is sitting in quiet anxiety for that slack message to pop up asking them to join a call. Guess who was next?
My turn had come. In hindsight I should have just told them, nah I'm not going to join, for shits, but I digress. My higher up and an HR person are in the call. My boss says about 10 words total “You saw CEO's email? Your position is being terminated” and then shuts off his webcam and mutes himself. At least say more than that man, come on.
In the end they blew up half my department, there are only 6 people left on the team, and 1 of the casualties of this happened to be someone who had been with the company since it started.
Naturally this happened less than a month before my own wedding too.
On a side note, if anyones company is looking for a NOC specialist with 4 years experience with JIRA / Zendesk / AWS and more, let me know haha.