I’ve been there for 11 months, love the job, love the people, we all have genuinely gotten tight as friends and love working together.
About five months ago, we hire a new VPM to run our team, and she is essentially an absentee parent, canceling zoom meetings while we are all in the waiting room, rescheduling last minute, triple booking herself. Super distracted on calls, eating, doing chores around the house, not leading meetings. Not once did she actually say “how are you, company veterans, tell me the state of the department how things are going“, never actually talked to us to read the room. No one could get meetings with her. This is a very tightknit company and this is super out of the norm.
We’ve been shouting into the void for months that the way we are doing commercial production is really inefficient in marketing and need to have a new plan to relocate our production budgets better. This is the workers saying that we are trying to cut costs and make our production more lightweight. It’s a funded tech startup for creatives and we want this thing to succeed because then we all benefit from it (stock options, job security, etc)
The reason for firing us was “our current model is unsustainable and we need to change how we do things.“
Yeah. No shit. We’ve been saying that for months. And had you listened to us, we wouldn’t be here.
Really crazy to think a highly motivated and successful team were all fired by the new person who’s never talked to us. ALL you could possibly know about the company then comes from dashboards, spreadsheets, and upper management’s impression of things, which is highly skewed.
Decisions by spreadsheet. My favorite.
Healthy salary especially for Nashville, great benefits, stock options, work from home, $10,000 production computer given to me… All gone. No notice. Four weeks severance.
Taking the rest of the week to decompress and get drinks with my coworkers and play lots of Horizon Forbidden West.
For nine years before this, I owned my own turnkey production company, and I’ll be back on it Monday.