I woke up to a call at 9 am yesterday saying that I was being let go out of the blue. I was working fully remote as a design intern for a global print and marketing solutions company, and I really enjoyed working there. My team was great and I had multiple conversations with my boss about continuing work for them after I graduate this Spring, so I was pretty confident I had a job lined up after I was done with school.
I also had been working a second job back at school up until recently, when my internship asked if I could work more hours for them and essentially quit my other job. I had a hard time deciding on this but I decided to quit the other job and my internship have me a huge raise to compensate for it. So while I wasn’t sure if leaving the other workplace was the right decision, I was feeling pretty good and excited for the future at this company.
Fast forward to yesterday morning, I wake up to a call before my daily stand-up to an exec person and an HR lady. I had mentioned that I had another meeting after this call, but the guy said there’ll be no need to go to that. He then explained that due to company financial struggles, they had to make a tough decision that morning and they were disbanding my team and I was being let go effective immediately. He said it was nothing personal and that I should log off immediately after the call. Then he left the call abruptly and said “have a nice day!” So I was just on the phone with the HR lady 2 min after learning of this, and she says “okay so about mailing your laptop and monitor back..” and I’m just in total shock right now that I can’t hear everything she’s saying.
I get off the call and message my boss one last time before I lost access to everything, and I asked if he could get on a call real quick because I had no idea what was going on. He wasn’t able to, but he messaged me through DMs on LinkedIn and apologized for everything and said he was just let go as well. He said he felt really shitty for making me quit the other job, but that he had no idea this was going to happen. I have no hard feelings towards him at all, and it was nice to be able to connect with him one last time on LinkedIn at the least. I have one of my other coworkers numbers, but I don’t have contacts for the rest of my team so I didn’t get to say anything to them.
I’m sad my team got split up and I’m really going to miss them. But I do not have respect for this company anymore. Looking back now, I’m really confused why they asked me to work more and gave me a huge raise about a month ago to incentivize me when they can’t afford it apparently. They knew I had just quit my other job to work more for them and that I was committed. But now I know firsthand that big companies do not give a shit about their employees, even the extra loyal ones.
I’m having a really hard time adjusting to this all. I had been working there over a year now so it was my constant. And I’m not sure if my last job will take me back now. I didn’t get severance pay or anything since I was still an intern, but I’m still shocked at how they handled this situation. I knew the company was having a lot of layoffs recently, but they cut me off so fast and removed my access to everything so unexpectedly that I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to my team, let alone process this. It feels like a rug was just pulled from under my feet and I feel helpless and discarded.
I know people get laid off all the time and it’s hard to deal with this economy. But I think it’s horrible that companies ghost their employees like this. It’s a really toxic business culture here in America and everything points back to money in the end.
All I really have to say right now is…fuck corporate America.