Workday advent calendar

A little under a year ago, I logged on to my work laptop a little before 8 in the morning. At 8 sharp, I received an email notifying me that my company was undergoing a reduction in force (read, layoffs). The worst part was that no one knew who was going to be laid off for 10 minutes. You simply had to refresh your screen over and over again to see if you were impacted or not.

I was not impacted. Many of my friends and coworkers were. Ironically, I left a few months later.

Layoffs, no matter how they’re handled, suck. They’re anxiety-inducing and leave a gaping hole in the organization afterward.

On a completely separate note, I started thinking about the holidays after Thanksgiving. What if there was a way to combine layoffs with an advent calendar? You can imagine a Workday feature where layoffs are a mystery. A new layoff drops every morning leading up to the holidays.

This is one of my more twisted works of late. It’s stressful, scary, and would (hopefully) never get implemented. People would be so mad if this did get rolled out, and there’s functionally no redemption quality to it. Maybe if you inverted it and tied the advent to bonuses, it could be fun, who knows.

Have a friend who was recently laid off? Don’t send them this newsletter. https://sorens.beehiiv.com/