At the beginning of the week, I was a member of a team of seven employees. Like the Magnificent Seven. Now we're a team of three. We lost some really great employees and good friends in a sweeping series of layoffs. My manager, a good man who doesn't take this sort of thing lightly, is heartbroken, and now has to give his three remaining employees their performance reviews--up until Wednesday he would have said that writing performance reviews was the thing he hated most about his job. We are swimming in work, drowning in unfamiliar and urgent issues that need to be solved. A friend and colleague whose job was saved had to take over a project where virtually all the key players (all friends) were laid off on Wednesday. They told him this Wednesday at noon. The project went live today (yeah, two days later, because he's a rock star). We don't know whether to be glad or resentful that he pulled it off. We keep going because we have our own bills to pay, and because we don't want to let down the people who are left, but it seems like a betrayal to provide these services and deliver products when the fact is that the services and products are only this good because of people who were unceremoniously given a box and sent packing. It's an odd position to find yourself in. You hope you manage to do this new mountain of work, because hey, the people who need help did not ask for this any more than you did, and their needs haven't changed. But there's a part of you that hopes you fail, just to show the assholes who make these decisions how stupid they are.
It's shitty, is what I'm saying. It's not an original sentiment, but it sure is true.
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