I was working for a US startup at the beginning of this year that was opening an R&D center in Ukraine.
Reporting directly to CEO / Founder. We laid off 2/3rds of the company in the middle of January. I asked him why we were doing this during their holidays, while there was a massive military buildup on the border? He didn’t care. Didn’t consider saving money in any other capacity — especially not his penthouse apartment or imported $100,000 Mercedes.
He forced his assistant to jump through hoops for 6 months to import this ridiculous car so he could have his chauffeur drive him 5 minutes from work to the hotel and back, then fired her a week before Christmas.
Disgusting.
It used to be folks would pool their resources when times got tough, view their colleagues as equals and their employees as their responsibility. Now it’s just a mad scramble to accrue as much human capital as possible in order to grift ignorant and indifferent investors out of more blood money. Once you get the bag? Cut the “fat.”
This is in Ukraine, so more than half the people we fired were literally making $1,000 / month or less. The whole thing was just a ploy to improve the metrics after a poor end-of-year board meeting. There was no real reason to do it.
Pure evil.
I fired 90% of my team, waited a week, and quit without notice.
Then the war started and I lost my home. Had to evacuate from Kyiv and lived as a refugee with my wife (Ukrainian) for three months.
A US startup reached out to me, interviewed, and made an offer. “Mission-driven” company where everyone frothed at the mouth to tell you how altruistic, kind, good, etc. they were.
They all wanted to suck my cock for the first month, until they all forgot about the ongoing genocide and were onto the next social capital goldrush.
We had a meet up where a colleague asked me why I was in a bad mood. I mentioned most of my family was still in the war zone, and that a good friend might have lost his life. Hadn’t heard from him for a week.
He responded by telling me that he was also going through a “tough time.” His boyfriend cheated on him, and the one year anniversary of their breakup was coming up.
This kind of abhorrent narcissism is par for the course with upper middle class agree-machines. They don’t care about anyone or anything. Just getting through every interaction in the most frictionless fashion possible. Use the jargon, agree the shit out of your compatriot’s politics, and never disagree without anyone about anything unless popular consensus backs you up.
I turned down multiple offers, relocated my family to the states, set up a life here after having been abroad for 6 years, and then got laid off after being explicitly guaranteed by both founders and my manager that this would never, ever happen.
I was assured if it did, they’d give me tons of notice and do it as humanely as possible.
Got surprise fired at 8:30am on a Thursday, and had my laptop locked and all accounts nuked instantly after the call.
They didn’t even want to give me severance since I had “only” been there for 6 months.
(Explained this situation to my landlord, who promptly let me know they would never let me break my lease without a replacement and would sue me if I tried — ain’t people great?)
Nobody cares. People in tech, especially, are some of the most demented, narcissistic, evil monsters I have ever encountered. Sam Fried’s latest thing about basically saying whatever you have to in order to get money and exploit more people is literally the exact mentality of 99% of the people I’ve met in this industry.
You fuck up? You get fired. Your manager fucks up? You get fired. The company’s leadership fucks up? You get fired. Economy gets fucked up by the same class of elites? You get fired.
It’s all a fucking scam.
Become self-reliant if you ever want stability.
I would literally rather larp as Ron Swanson in a wet cave than sit through one more dogshit zoom meeting with a bunch of socially maladapted, sycophantic, conniving weasels.