“Your enrollment will end on the last day of this month, and we will be providing every affected employee with information about extending their coverage through COBRA.”
“The last day of the month, so, today?”
“Yes, that is correct. On the other hand, our OpenAI and Anthropic accounts are paid quarterly, so you will retain access to your chats and may continue using these tools until the end of September.”
Whenever I voluntarily leave a company, I always give my 2-week notice 13 days before the end of the month, and ask to set my last day for the 1st of the following month. My former managers have never cared what date I pick, and always agree.
"we will provide up to two weeks’ worth of tokens to facilitate your continued operation during the job search. We also partnered with ThriveFlow to furnish, as an option, a collection of expertly-crafted grief counseling prompts" seems like it.
One time when I was in one of these calls. It was pretty obvious it was coming, the company wasn't doing great and there were plenty of whispers.
Still, I was pretty upset I was laid off, because it's just not a fun feeling. After the HR person explained the severance and COBRA stuff, I said something to the CTO like "I wish you all the best in trying to save this company, and for the sake of this conversation, let's just pretend I'm not lying". Then I hung up.
I wish I could feel guilty over that, but ultimately they were cutting off my livelihood, they can deal with momentary hurt feelings.
You can always get together, cleanse the code of any IP entanglements, and compete with the company that just laid you off. Calls like this one are a good time to suggest it--even if only to make them squirm.
I know this is a joke, but this is why my coworkers and I were muted during the meeting we were laid off.
I received a meeting invite the night before for 9am with two HR people and some middle manager above me that I never met. It was obvious what the meeting was going to be.
Before people were getting fired in AI chats or Video calls, they were getting fired by voicemail - as featured in the track "Exciting New Direction"[0], by The New Deal.
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[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 26.8 ms ] thread“Your enrollment will end on the last day of this month, and we will be providing every affected employee with information about extending their coverage through COBRA.”
“The last day of the month, so, today?”
“Yes, that is correct. On the other hand, our OpenAI and Anthropic accounts are paid quarterly, so you will retain access to your chats and may continue using these tools until the end of September.”
Still, I was pretty upset I was laid off, because it's just not a fun feeling. After the HR person explained the severance and COBRA stuff, I said something to the CTO like "I wish you all the best in trying to save this company, and for the sake of this conversation, let's just pretend I'm not lying". Then I hung up.
I wish I could feel guilty over that, but ultimately they were cutting off my livelihood, they can deal with momentary hurt feelings.
But who knows, some companies do wacky things these days.
I received a meeting invite the night before for 9am with two HR people and some middle manager above me that I never met. It was obvious what the meeting was going to be.
One cool touch would be a 2 bullet AI summary at the end with em-dashes.
That's the most irritating part.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ViJ3yA4d0Y
I should start acting surprised, and ask why they're telling me about someone being constipated.
You don’t need to even replace them outright, just make your agent so effective that [big tech company] requires fewer VPs and GMs etc.
Modern frontier LLMs are incredibly good at all types of knowledge work - this should be possible with enough elbow grease