| Well, consider a different scenario. I was on a two-person team that was, due to recent client poaching, pretty severely overstaffed. Our manager had just been promoted and we got a new one hired in. He viewed our lack of work to do as temporary and started recruiting. He eventually hired a third member and we started training her. After the first day of training, I was fired with no notice and no severance. The manager remarked, in the surprise exit interview, that he had taken a look at staffing recently and we had too much. There are a couple interesting things to consider here: 1. We had been severely overstaffed (as advertised!) for several months before he even started hiring. He was well aware of it. 2. My team's original manager had offered to me that I was free to live anywhere in the world, as long as it had an internet connection. He left the team so soon after I joined that this didn't happen. But the new manager gave many indications of being acutely uncomfortable with the idea that I had made a request that he wasn't willing to grant immediately. My question to you is, was I fired because we were overstaffed, or was that mentioned in the exit interview for no particular reason? And my followup question is, did the companies discussed here do layoffs because they were overstaffed, or because they felt they had the right amount of staff, but they wanted to pay them less? |
And of course, companies also have practical right to make mistakes, from overstaffing to understaffing, or to place bets that do well or do not.
The point is that these things would happen even if things were being run perfectly, so they are not indicative of nefarious practices or abuses.