CEO quotes Martin Luther King Jr. in email announcing mass layoffs

midian182

midian182

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WTF?! Anyone who's been laid off from a job will know what an awful experience it is. Something that can make it even worse, however, is the CEO sending out a 1,500-word email informing staff of the layoffs, referred to as "refinements" in the message, and including a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.

PagerDuty, a cloud computing company specializing in a SaaS incident response platform for IT departments, is joining the depressingly long list of tech firms laying off staff in these times of economic turmoil. Around 7% of its global workforce are losing their jobs, most of them based in the US.

There's no easy way to inform staff that they no longer have a job, but the layoff announcement email from PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada is generating a lot of heat for its tone—and other elements.

The email begins with the upbeat and quirky "Hi, Dutonians," which is probably not the best way to start telling someone they'll soon be unemployed. Other points unlikely to make the blow of losing a job more bearable include the layoffs (or "refinements") not being addressed until around a quarter of the way into the message, boasts about the company's achievements, reminding employees how important they are (or were), and talking about how exciting it is that the firm has a new SVP of field operations.

But the icing on this cake is using a Martin Luther King Jr. quote at the end, which Tejada edited with brackets. "I am reminded in moments like this, of something Martin Luther King said, that 'the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy.'"

It's unlikely that King would have expected his quote from a pair of 1958 sermons on racial and economic equity would one day be used in a letter announcing layoffs, yet here we are.

Tejada expanded on the quote with, "PagerDuty is a leader that stands behind its customers, its values, and our vision — for an equitable world where we transform critical work so all teams can delight their customers and build trust." Teams that haven't been laid off, presumably.

Writer Gergely Orosz tweeted that the announcement looks like it was created by a generative AI in the style of other layoff announcement letters.

As bad as the email is, it's still better than the method used by Vishal Garg, CEO of mortgage firm Better.com, who fired 300 employees during a three-minute Zoom call—and just before the holidays, too.

Thanks, Insider

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/97410-ceo-quotes-martin-luther-king-jr-email-announcing.html

 
This is typical of tech companies. I've personally worked with at least 3 coworkers who left this world because of layoffs and tell stories of buyouts upon buyouts before they're ruthlessly laid off. This is nothing new and has been happening for over twenty years.
 
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Plutoisaplanet said:
This is typical of tech companies. I've personally worked with at least 3 coworkers who left this world because of layoffs and tell stories of buyouts upon buyouts before they're ruthlessly laid off. This is nothing new and has been happening for over twenty years.
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Mergers and acquisitions will always yield casualties... nothing new. This article was more about how out of touch and poor taste was this email.
 
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poohbear said:
We're in a recession. Companies have to cut back, and people have to learn how to manage debt. When we're out of the recession, people will start to be hired again. Hang in there peeps.
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Right, until the next recession, where once again, people will be left homeless and starving just like in this one. What a fantastic system. You know who doesn't have to cut back?

The rich people who run those companies and caused this recession in the first place.
 
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mctommy said:
Mergers and acquisitions will always yield casualties... nothing new. This article was more about how out of touch and poor taste was this email.
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I doubt that you'll be so cavalier about it if and when it happens to you. It hasn't happened to me but having empathy means realising that this is a serious problem. Too many people have this idea that nothing is bad as long as it doesn't happen to them.
 
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But...But, I thought I saw on here in comments that Microsoft was the only cold hearted IT company for laying off unnecessary personnel.

Little did they know EVERYONE ELSE is doing the same and worse with their "less than appropriate" emails from their CEOs as you can see clearly on here.
 
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Avro Arrow said:
Right, until the next recession, where once again, people will be left homeless and starving just like in this one. What a fantastic system. You know who doesn't have to cut back?

The rich people who run those companies and caused this recession in the first place.
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Do you know of a system that has not had economic hard times or starving/homeless citizens?

"rich people" are only a piece of this puzzle and they have always existed...nothing new there. Government spending and covid is what kicked this into high gear. Started with Trump and has only continued with the rocket scientist we have in office now. Biden was throwing money around like crazy. I got $2500 his first year in office and didn't need or want it. Anyone with a brain over 15 years old should understand there are consequences to throwing money around like that. You can't spend your way out of a recession...but don't worry we have the inflation reduction act here to save us.
 
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wiyosaya said:
Sorry, but I think that if you don't get it, no amount of elaboration would suffice.
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I think you know that "I get it". I was just curious if you would elaborate or justify the statement. When I chime in with my views it always fits the current article or quote. However the person I quoted would find a way to turn a GPU review comment section into an anticapitalistic view. It just comes out of left field a lot of times. Clearly a topic they feel strongly about but a lot of times it just doesn't fit.
 
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NintPlayBox said:
But...But, I thought I saw on here in comments that Microsoft was the only cold hearted IT company for laying off unnecessary personnel.

Little did they know EVERYONE ELSE is doing the same and worse with their "less than appropriate" emails from their CEOs as you can see clearly on here.
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It's not the corporations, it's the economic ecosystem in which they exist, NeoLiberal Capitalism. Back when Keynesian Capitalism was more commonplace, things like this didn't need to be implemented because corporations were able to focus more on long-term sustainability than on short-term profits like they're forced to now. This impossible dream of infinite growth in a finite market is what's causing all of these problems. These corporations are forced to show a neverending increase in profits year-over-year by any means necessary, even as they break profit record after profit record. At some point, they hit a wall and the only way to keep increasing profits is to eliminate expenses.

What you call "laying off of unnecessary personnel" is the reason that you wait on hold for over an hour if you want to contact your cable, phone or internet provider. It's the reason why you can never get help from anyone in retail stores anymore.

What you call "laying off of unnecessary personnel" is what I call "A race to the bottom".
 
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Avro Arrow said:
Back when Keynesian Capitalism was more commonplace, things like this didn't need to be implemented because corporations were able to focus on long-term sustainability than on short-term profits like they're forced to now. This impossible dream of infinite growth [is] what's causing all of these problems
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It's fairly clear you don't understand the terms you're using. Corporate behavior isn't driven by CEO's debating economic theory, but rather their response to business and regulatory conditions. Specifically, high corporate tax rates are what caused so many corporations to abandon the old dividends-to-shareholders model in favor of continual growth. When a company pays a dividend, they must first report the sum as profit, and pay taxes on it-- then their shareholders immediately must pay a second tax on the same funds. However, if that company instead reinvests that money in growth, it pays a much lower tax ... and their shareholders pay nothing on the resultant share price increase (until they sell, of course, allowing them to defer taxation).

Furthermore, business cycles and their resultant unemployment were worse under Keynesian- thinking than they are today. 45 of the 50 years following Keyne's primary treatise had higher unemployment than we have today (I stopped in the early '80s, as that's when much of the world began to realize how *****ic Keynesianism is). In fact, the worst economic crisis in the US of the last half-century -- 1970s-era stagflation -- came about because of Keynesian thinking: Nixon's price controls, followed by Carter's expansionary monetary policies).

What you call "laying off of unnecessary personnel" is the reason [why] you can never get help from anyone in retail stores anymore.
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No, that's because those who *are* working there are on their smart phones chatting with friends, rather than helping customers.
 
Avro Arrow said:
I doubt that you'll be so cavalier about it if and when it happens to you. It hasn't happened to me but having empathy means realising that this is a serious problem. Too many people have this idea that nothing is bad as long as it doesn't happen to them.
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You don't know me and just so you know, I've been through it before (being let go after a merger). When mergers happen, you don't sit there and kick back, you go and polish your resume because you never know when that random Friday 15mins calendar meeting invite by HR shows up in your email.
 
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Endymio said:
It's fairly clear you don't understand the terms you're using. Corporate behavior isn't driven by CEO's debating economic theory, but rather their response to business and regulatory conditions. Specifically, high corporate tax rates are what caused so many corporations to abandon the old dividends-to-shareholders model in favor of continual growth. When a company pays a dividend, they must first report the sum as profit, and pay taxes on it-- then their shareholders immediately must pay a second tax on the same funds. However, if that company instead reinvests that money in growth, it pays a much lower tax ... and their shareholders pay nothing on the resultant share price increase (until they sell, of course, allowing them to defer taxation).

Furthermore, business cycles and their resultant unemployment were worse under Keynesian- thinking than they are today. 45 of the 50 years following Keyne's primary treatise had higher unemployment than we have today (I stopped in the early '80s, as that's when much of the world began to realize how *****ic Keynesianism is). In fact, the worst economic crisis in the US of the last half-century -- 1970s-era stagflation -- came about because of Keynesian thinking: Nixon's price controls, followed by Carter's expansionary monetary policies).

No, that's because those who *are* working there are on their smart phones chatting with friends, rather than helping customers.
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Adding that share buybacks also give the corporation flexibility in deciding when and how much they want to buy the stocks back and increase the value of the company.
 
Avro Arrow said:
The rich people who run those companies and caused this recession in the first place.
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Agreed ^^ ... the rich people in the US who own those tech companies poured millions towards a certain political party while censoring anyone and everyone who's agenda they didn't agree with. To make it even better the majority of those techies getting laid off were donating to the same political party as their rich owner overlords while cheering on the layoffs of thousands of workers in the oil & gas industry (including myself) while jokingly telling said laid off workers to 'learn to code'. I have to admit I get a warm feeling everytime I read about these mass layoffs in the tech industry. Some of us call it 'karma'.
 
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