Happening right now. Seems like many are from India?
71 replies (most recent on top)
@17m imagine thinking you're so great and they enjoy talking to you. Clowns like you are what get in the way of the ones who actually want to produce quality products. The developers from India and Mexico I worked with helped me to become a better peer. It's unfortunate if you didn't get the boot.
Anyone got full vesting?
@17p what "product quality" 🤣
I heard they cut all the scrum masters and alot of key Developers and QAs. The products quality about to take a nose dive
Well most of the QA engineers I've interacted with are id--ts who can barely speak English, so I won't be sorry to see them gone.
@13c I’ve always received great PRs and I was cut. I know some QAs gone but some who survived
@qt you can check workday there’s a severance calculator that would let you know how much you’d get
I've seen managers give out "2s" to employees solely for the fact that their AI use was low. Even if their AI use wasn't below the metric they asked for. Simply lower than anyone else and they had to pick 1 person to give a 2. They will keep retroactively moving the goal post as well. Everyone is hitting targets? Well this whole time they should have also been doing xyz. Guess no one meets metrics now!
@124 yrs I can confirm Director level and below had zero knowledge of this happening
@124 was told if you have ever received a bad review so pretty much below meets expectations you were on the chopping block. Also looks like they are trying to remove all QA positions we lost like all our QA
What makes this even more interesting is that middle and higher middle management apparently didn't know about it lol
What does this tell us? Your performance has no bearing whatsoever. So why even try? I suspect that's how most TR "survivors" feel right now
@x6 yes, my heart goes out to those Indians in the silicon valley that make half a mil annually
https://www.siliconrepublic.com/business/thousands-of-google-workers-sign-petition-calling-for-layoff-protections
@qy I would like to know that as well! Can they not let go those who wish too ?
That’s a really stupid move from their side. Letting go of people with years of experience, who’ve been building the product for years, know its strengths and weaknesses in favor of new people who will be starting from scratch is just plain stupid. Yes, they’re moving more toward AI, but AI won’t just magically solve problems in a system that’s been built over the years.
I work with AI every day in a highly complex system with dozens of integrations. Yes, AI speeds up work, but only for people who know what they’re doing, know the product, and can ask the right questions. AI is suitable for simple tasks, not for creating and maintaining massive commercial projects. The amount of text it generates is enormous and overwhelming for a human, and often, after reading just a portion of it, I see a huge number of things that show the AI completely fails to understand the context, and in many cases, when faced with complex problems, it simply can’t handle them and recommends unrealistic solutions (which people without experience in the project might consider good, which could have disastrous consequences). It takes years for many people to reach this level, and replacing experienced engineers with AI will certainly ruin a lot of projects. It’s like replacing an experienced employee with someone who forgets who they are every day and needs to have everything explained to them all over again.
As far as I know, many of the laid-off engineers with years of experience have long since become what they call “AI natives,” so that’s a poor excuse on their part, but apparently the short-sighted desire to cut costs outweighs the desire to have a stable product and satisfied customers.
On the layoff call, executives sitting in their fancy offices, collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars, announced they were laying off 500 people.
Then came the corporate gymnastics. They claimed it wasn't because AI is taking over jobs... while also saying AI was the "accelerant." Which is it?
They also said they want engineering focused on "higher-impact products." Funny, because many of us were raising those exact concerns months and even years ago. Back then, those concerns went nowhere.
Apparently the solution was to consolidate teams and locations into fewer, broader roles, eliminating positions people had held for six or more years. That's not "streamlining"—that's erasing years of institutional knowledge overnight.
I had a feeling this was coming, especially after they shut down the Irvine office last year. I heard half the TaxCaddy team got eliminated, and many other people from SurePrep.
I'm also curious whether remote employees were disproportionately affected. It would be interesting to see the numbers.
@s5 No severance if you are PIPd, only RIFd
@ra how would they know about “comparable” job. Stop posting your new job on LinkedIn
@ra get a lawyer to fight for more especially if you’ve been in TR long and will face ageism in the job market. Don’t sign off on the package
@kt system admins as well.
Any idea what severance package was offered for Canada? Are layoffs better than getting PIP-ed?
@qt typically 2 weeks of severance per year worked at job. 5 years = 10 weeks of severance. But they pay bi-weekly. So essentially, 5 normal paychecks. Cobra starts first of month after you're let go. Coverage till severance ends. They set you up with a portal to help writing resumes. But as soon as you find a "comparable" job (i.e same title or pay), they stop paying severance.
is there a way one can nominate to get laid off?
What type of package does TR offer when they lay someone off? US location
I hear few were in Canada too!
Yes, there where layoffs in Canada
There were no layoffs in Canada. Only in India, UK and US. Exchange rate being so bad, I feel they will replace US workers with Canadian. They fired more men than women. JH wants to get 50-50 and 60 in leadership.
@ht scrum masters, dev ops, SW engineers
Were there any layoffs in Canada this time?
So looks like a lot of QA/Automation engineers were part of the people let go. Our product was left with 1 out of about 10
@h6 inept management
They are looking for specialized teams of 4-6 engineers per major project. I've seen teams of 10-15 go to 7 or after this first round of layoffs. Won't be surprised if more. There is a reason they force managers to give out 2s. Yearly 3% RIF until work stops getting done. Then they've found their limit. Massive hiring for AI engineers going on as well (250+). Trying to automate everything and create agents to replicate end to end workloads. They still naively believe engineers are replaceable with AI.
@h1 layoffs can anywhere
Can layoffs in Canada?
@g8 there were a number of US employees affected as well.
I need to get out of here. Team of 7, thisroud of layoffs 3 were let go
@fk they're probably saving the US layoff for Thanksgiving. It's a Thomson Reuters thing
Oh but ge-z, the way Joel chose to announce that people in my meeting weren't affected. "We've made the difficult decision to lay off 490 people. If you're on this call, that means that your role.... (pregnant pause) was not part of that action."
Like seriously? He phrased it and then paused so everyone would hear your role "is being terminated" or "not continuing" or something like that. Even though my boss had messaged me earlier this morning saying I was not affected I was still convinced for a heartbeat I was being layed off anyway. These executives are pure sadists.
Well I got to attend one of the meetings today and found out I am safe for now so that's great. That was a sleepless night for nothing. They are trying to spend this as cutting bureaucracy and allowing for leaner, faster teams. I'll believe that when I see it. They did mention India was disproportionately affected. I wonder if this has something to do with emails I saw earlier this month about engineers taking on more of qa's job. Maybe a lot of the cuts were in qa?
@d4 they keep resending the same meeting invites over and over. As if they expect OOO people to drop their time off and attend a mandatory meeting, where they'd be graced with a merciful extension of their employment (until the next round of not-layoffs)