I quit working for this company in September 2020. The job included investment and market data analysis in the language of your expertise – we had people who spoke Russian, Finnish, Mandarin, French, Polish, Turkish, Japanese etc. The company is located in a very small country in Europe and 90% of the workers were living there on a work visa. Many people were leaving behind countries with higher salaries, better economies and political conditions in exchange for the chance to live in a Schengen country with this visa.
10 months into the WFH policy due to COVID (around Feb 2021), they fired the entire team in one day as they “had workers in the Indian office that could do our jobs by using Google translate”. Every one was shocked. These were employees who now would have 3 months maximum to find another form of employment that would be willing to sponsor a visa or they had to leave the country. Even worse (and illegal?) was that HR told each employee during their meeting that they had to sign the termination contract before the end of the day or they would lose their severance pay.
Anyways – the company quickly realised the mistake of this decision as Google translate is hardly reliable especially in an analytical setting. Everyone was “kindly” offered their job back within 3 weeks. Most of my ex-colleagues accepted the offer and were back to work within a month.
Three months ago – same thing happened. Everybody was terminated in a day once again, this time because the company planned to use ChatGPT and other AI to replace them. Nobody has been hired back and a majority has had to leave the country due to their visa expiring.
If this is not a double slap to the face as a reality check that corporations don’t care about you – I don’t know what is. I’m just thankful I didn’t have to deal with it personally.