Oh yeah, and another:
So, the place I went after that was an accounting-software place, let’s call it “FiveGone”. They’d gone on a hiring spree in December and had brought in something like fifty people, mostly to be consultants to clients to whom they were going to sell tons of software.
Now, the company president was a self-important moron who had every single person in the company stop work and come downstairs to the main meeting area every single damn Monday morning at 10am to listen to him blather, er, inspire us, for an hour. Anyone who wasn’t in the building was expected to teleconference in.
He tells us, “The rumors are not true! There will be no layoffs. I am furious at whoever started this, corporate traitor blah blah scum blah vermin blah blah dogturd” etc.
Well, I knew the excrement was about to hit the rotating blades, and I’d just done a jobsearch to start there, so I went back into it just in case.
A week later, everyone who was still within their ninety-day new-employee evaluation period was terminated. Then the company began firing people “for cause”. They put “evaluation plans” together for everyone they didn’t want hanging around, and told us we had to meet the plans or else.
In my case, I was told to install a new, untested version of the product on some servers for a demo that weekend. No problem, I had a whole week. Except that the people who were telling me what software versions to install kept lying – “Use Oracle build number 8488!” Ok, did it, didn’t work. “Why did you use that one? It’s known to have some fatal flaws for our software. Use build 8503, you pinhead!” Uh . . . ok, I see how this is going.
About an hour before I’m scheduled to meet my “managers” to go over my progress in achieving their wonderful plan, and be fired, I get a contract faxed over from Boeing. I type up a quick resignation letter, walk into the meeting with them, they start telling me how poorly I’d done, and I tell them that none of this matters to me because I’m gone.
Zoop. 180-degree turnaround. They want me to go to a client the next day to straighten out a major problem (their software doesn’t work and has destroyed the client’s business). I ask them why they would want me to go, since five minutes earlier they were going to fire me. They look at each other and can’t figure out a line. Meeting’s over.
So then, one asks me if I’d like a letter of reference from him, and were there any more jobs available at Boeing?
I later heard that overall, a full third of the company got “fired” or “terminated” in that meltdown.