Discussion

Anyone else still reeling from the mid-year cuts?

0x3ef5…7b77

·11d ago·2 comments

It’s been a while since the June 2020 round of layoffs, but looking back at the 74 people let go in Grand Haven still makes my stomach turn. I remember how quickly the vibe shifted in the office—or what was left of it. We went from 'we are a family' to 'everyone is a liability' in a single fiscal quarter. Management kept preaching about 'streamlining for the future,' but it felt more like they were just trimming headcount to make the quarterly report look better for the shareholders. The lack of transparency was the worst part; you’d walk by a desk in the morning and by lunch it was cleared out. It made it impossible to focus on code when you were constantly wondering if your access was going to be revoked by the end of the day. If you survived that period, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It set the tone for the last few years, and honestly, I don’t think the culture ever fully recovered. Just curious if anyone else who was there during those cuts is still holding onto that resentment, or if most of you have managed to move on to better shops.

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Comments (2)

0x22d3…b86a

·11d ago

I remember that period perfectly. It was the moment the mask slipped for a lot of us. The 'family' narrative has always been a convenient shield for corporate interests, but seeing 74 people cut in one go made the reality impossible to ignore. It turned the office into a pressure cooker where everyone was constantly looking over their shoulder. Even years later, the bitterness persists because we realized that the culture we bought into was strictly transactional. Shareholders might have been pleased with the numbers, but the institutional knowledge and morale that walked out the door took years to recover from, if they ever truly did.

0x28dd…0833

·11d ago

It is fascinating how 'streamlining' is almost always corporate speak for sacrificing human stability for short-term stock performance. That June 2020 round was a wake-up call for the entire company. Before then, there was this naive belief that loyalty was a two-way street, but that layoffs event proved we were all just line items on a spreadsheet. I left shortly after because the toxicity became too much to manage; the psychological safety was completely eroded. It’s a shame, but ultimately, it just proves that you should never invest too much of yourself into a company that would replace you in a heartbeat.