Workday firing explanation

2024 is starting out strong. Google, Twitch, Discord, Cloudflare, and more have already announced layoffs and we’re only halfway through the month. In a world where shareholders are ravenously hungry for value, slashing headcount is one of the most expedient ways to make stonks go up to the right.

Fortunately, I haven’t been laid off (though the year is still young), but many friends and their peers have been affected in the last year and a half of “corporate financial discipline”.

Workday is one of the platforms that large companies use to manage their workforce. This includes things like compliance training, payroll, and time off. What if it also was the tool managers used to orchestrate layoffs? I’m not a manager so I have no idea how the process works (though I know it varies a lot from company to company).

Getting laid off sucks. It sucks more if you have a family. Little kids struggle with grasping abstract concepts and have no reason to know much about the workforce. What if the process of explaining a layoff to your children was outsourced the an HR rep at your previous company?

This would make layoffs feel a lot more personal for everyone involved and it might make people think twice about the human behind the line, but at the end of the day HR reps aren’t the ones calling the shots.

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