Ups, We Are Fired!

Posted on November 14, 2012 by ThePMJournal

9:00 AM. The most “pleasant” way of starting a new day of work is by receiving the following shocking email:  “The shareholders of this company decided 109 employees will be disposed (meaning almost all employees will be fired). The board of directors will try to find solutions and provide alternatives for his employees“. And that’s all folks, the story of our parent company ends here.

-Don’t worry! we are told.

-Please sign, you took note about the collective disposals… encourage us one of the executive director.

-We won’t be colleagues anymore, isn’t? asks ironically one man of the third party team.

-We never were! sadly replies one of our employees who was employed few months ago.

The R&D Project Manager seems worried.  I try to calm him down by telling him something that I am not longer believe:

-Don’t you know this is the standard procedure for outsourcing companies? We will be subcontracted by F-Startup. We are moving to another cost center…

It’s more than evident we are in deep shit. I felt responsible to reassurance people everything will be fine:

-From now on, the destiny of our company, depends on us. If we go well, we can save it!

-Do you realize not everything depend on us? Even if we make our job very well, our success depends also on marketing and sales! reminds me one of senior software architects.

I approved thinking about the “incredible” team of Experts we have at Marketing and Sales.

The news of collective dismissal was disastrous: we all felt like our big “ship” is about to explode. The conflicts suddenly have spread out. One of the most experienced third party architects, hearing about the “great” news, he didn’t appear anymore at the office. Initially let a note to his manager saying that he wants to work from home because he was sick… Inevitable I ask his manager: “-Is he sick or he works?”

The next days, the situation was clarified… the man didn’t want to work anymore with us, because had a childish conflict with one of our Team Leads, so called “The King”. The third party architect is the first “pirate” from our group that left us. His fight with “King” was totally immature; imagine two senior people, 35-40 years, debate about the source code: “I didn’t write this!”, “How could you say it wasn’t you, if you committed that code one month ago?!”. Before situation became extremely tense, I broke them by force. One of them, the architect, got sick nervously, and left the company. Everyone blamed on “The King” because he was found responsible for losing a good comrade, but the true was there entire conflict was because the general situation was very tense.

In the end of this story, the parent company was declared bankrupted and F-Startup, without financial support from parent company, remained on its own.

Read next: Launch preparation.

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