“I myself am embarrassed to have to explain to friends and family members why I was fired,” said a former Meta employee who was fired on the board of the company. company, said. layoffs at the end of 2022 and requested anonymity to avoid jeopardizing her future job prospects.
But it’s not just abrupt. It’s also the dehumanizing way that announcements are made, making employees who have been fired feel uncomfortable. When it finally arrived, the email notifying Bowling that he was fired by Google was “legitimate,” he said, and was signed by the company’s vice president without any greetings.
“No ‘regards’, no ‘sorry’, nothing,” he said. “It was written by a lawyer, so there was no hint of guilt or anything in it. It was very cold. Everything about it is so cold.”
According to Bowling, the company has a history of treating employees fairly well, even when they quit. “This layoff is very different from the culture of how people leave the company,” he said.
Google did not respond to a request for comment.
But for Susan Schurman, a professor of labor and employment relations studies at Rutgers University, the gap between how tech companies present themselves and how they act has always existed.
“It would be fair to say I was shocked but not surprised,” Schurman said. “I was old enough to be raised in the so-called 20th century organization, where you could say that workers are treated as consumables.”
According to Cary Cooper, professor of organizational psychology at the University of Manchester Business School, attitudes towards employees have also worsened during the pandemic. Remote working creates greater separation between managers and their employees. “There is less direct contact and the majority of their communications are virtual,” he said. “That can create a situation where you don’t develop a close relationship with your employees, if you’re a direct manager.”
Some tech workers say they’ve realized that tech companies won’t necessarily return their loyalty.
Alejandra Hernandez, hiring program manager at Meta, who was fired in November after working for the company for a year, said: “Honestly, a couple of years ago, I started changing. Change my mind about the companies I work for. “I’m looking at it as, ‘This is a business, you hired me to do certain jobs.’” Hernandez points out that being employed in California means she is employed under will and could be terminated at any time—this helped her reframe her Thoughts.
Hernandez wasn’t too upset about how she and her colleagues were fired over email. “I would rather get an email than have someone try to convince me over a Zoom call to let me go,” she said.
Even for those who survived the layoffs, the past few months have served as a stark reminder that their happiness will never come before the fiduciary duties of executives and executives. that, in times of trouble, their position is vulnerable.
“We’ve all been fooled into thinking that these tech companies are treating people like human beings,” Schurman said. “But I think we’ve discovered that can only happen at that point, and just as times get tough—boom: The boss is back.”
