One of my past employers tried to give laid off employees a dignified send offs including not immediately revoking their access.

The number of people who snap and make rash decisions to try to exfiltrate data, plant backdoor logins for themselves, or sabotage company work in those hours was a much larger number than I would have guessed prior to seeing it.

They understand, but they are more concerned about you exfiltrating data and suing them.

But you're right, the survivors don't even get a list. They have to find out when something they're waiting for never shows up because that person doesn't work there anymore.

When i was first laid off during the dot com bust I was working on a sales floor. All open no cubes. We didn't know layoffs were coming. Manager walks in and taps this one guy on the shoulder, says grab your personal things and come with me. Manager came back in did the same to a few others. Then it was me. Talk about embarrassing! Also, was 2 weeks before quarter ended. If you were not working for the company at the end of the Q, no bonus. 2 weeks! I'll never forget that. That was my first taste of how nasty a company can be. Not the layoffs, hey things happen. But the timing. Feels diabolical.

This is largely the world we've created with litigation practices.

Corpo is very careful to show empathy that can be perceived in some way as accepting blame in a way that would open them to litigation.

I've noticed people are shockingly good at filtering out their empathy through bureaucracies. Instead of feeling bad about their personal decision that they made to lay someone off, they instead can tell themselves it was the only way to do business and then happily absolve themselves of guilt.

One of the most surreal meetings I've ever been to was a company All Hands after a 20% layoff round. The upper management people who decided who was laid off took turns talking about how upset it made them to have to do it. They showed a diagram of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief and went back and forth talking about what stage of grief they were in having to lay all these people off. Was like something out of the UK version of The Office. It was so tone deaf that it was bleakly comedic at a certain point.

The extra kicker was that there were a bunch of UK people in this meeting who knew they'd be laid off, but it takes longer to do the redundancy process over there, so they had to listen to these people complaining about how sad firing them feels.

Contrary to what people may think, the most humane way is a fast clean cut. Drawing it out in anyway doesnt help anyone. This does assume communication is clear about employee next steps for HR related tasks.

This is also why in the other direction a fast clean cut works too. I mean if they want two weeks of “work”, i always consider that severance.

The fast clean cut is true in all industries. Drawing it out only makes it more painful. It is similar to breaking up in a relationship.

Yes in my (somewhat tinfoil) opinion the point is to have an emotional impact on the workforce overall (or at least, one of the points is). Tech workers had a really good 20 years in the US, and kind of forgot that they were ultimately still wage workers. I think the culture circa 2018 took for granted a basic level of respect and cooperation from upper executives, and were beginning to exercise their power to achieve political goals, which was annoying to the tech ownership class. I think one of the major strategic turns of last 4ish years is the usage of precarity and high turnover to corrode worker solidarity in fields which used to be ironclad and respectable white-collar work. By simultaneously narrowing the hiring window ('junior devs are replaceable with AI') and also expanding the opportunities to be culled ('we are axing this division to cover our moonshot outlays') capital cultivates a desperate and compliant workforce. Bottom-up culture is woke, in the 2020's the folks in power want top-down directives that are followed unquestioningly; similar approach to how the executive branch was brought to heel by DOGE.

Some employees in the company might understand the emotional impact, but companies themselves would only look for certainty in protecting what belongs to them, which will hardly align with fairness or emotions towards employees in a situation like this.

Do not say “companies”. They are managers who do this. It is them who are to blame.

Company still has no sense that them shaving 1% of their bottom line means shaving 100% of the bottom line of some of their dedicated staff.

This is American way. There are no people, only resources.

Honest question, why would they care?

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