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Man, that seems like a heck of a send-off for those employees.

There's no fig-leaf such as "they killed entire projects" or "they pivoted".

Just the spokesperson saying that, if you're one of the laid-off employees, it's because you lacked talent.

Not sure that's a company I'd want to work for.

I worked for a large fintech firm that used this as reasoning to layoff 700-some employees years ago. They cited their changing needs and the talent of those engineers juxtaposed to their needs changing. I had seven friends among those engineers, only one of which I would consider in a grey area with respect to the skills he possessed that were relevant to the times. The company refused to release a full list of employees that were let go so we used Slack to create a list of users deactivated between certain time periods (this gets tricky with EU). What we learned is that most of them were tenured employees with higher wages. Their wages (likely) predated a movement that caused average wages at the company to go down so that everyone on every team with the same title made the same amount. These were basically the people left over who didn't quit but stopped getting raises because they were above pay bands for their level.

Sounds like something straight out of the end of Margin Call.

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