If you're considering laying off 2/3rds of your staff and relocating the remainder to another country, maybe you shouldn't be actively hiring. They didn't come up with this idea last week.

They can decide to move, sure. And it might be the right decision.

However, hiring people and relocating them 1 week before said move was decided would just be incompetent.

The company should be open and honest with it's employees. It shouldn't be telling them everything is fine, hiring new people, relocating them from other countries and then a day later firing most of the staff.

A decision like this isn't sudden. It's the difference between trying to work things out with your wife, talking through your differences and eventually deciding it won't work, vs leaving her without warning and taking the dog and bank account.

From the other comments in the linked article, it looks like they hired more than one person that relocated from another city and were let go in < 1 week of starting employment.

I agree with you that it's a business and they are always doing what's in their best interest which they have every right to do. I think even with that in mind, this could have been handled a bit differently to avoid really sticking it to some people.

Given the stories of how they continued hiring people until the end, laying off people who had moved there and had only worked for a month or less when it happened, I absolutely can refer to them as a douchebag company.