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Comment by snvzz | Hacker News Reader

That's just how it is for a lay off, in megacorp and elsewhere.

Not sure how this is HN-worthy.

Adam was a very prominent Chrome DevRel and top voices of the web platform. I personally owe to his content (blog, snippets, podcast, talks, youtube, social media etc.) to stay up-to-date on things.

It’s a bit of a shock to me that he of all people is getting laid off and that too in such an ugly way.

What was specifically ugly about it? It seems ugly like any other layoff except maybe he liked his job more than most.

the obligations listed on the page that he got rug pulled off of seem kinda ugly to me.

Ugly, but not uncommon.

A company will often try and avoid letting a candidate know that they are being considered for firing, or that the decision has already been made, until the trigger is pulled.

That's normal. What's uniquely ugly/American is conveying those firing decisions by locking the fired employees out of their email at 6 PM on Friday. In most countries this is illegal.

I suppose organizing departure in an adult manner (Offer some time to finish task, pass on knowledge, etc... AND let the people leave earlier if they prefer - you know, the whole "think about the team" thing) would also violate someone's meritocratic free speech ?

Do you really need to make it a freedom of speech issue? can't it be recognized as a human as a pile of shit to rug pull someone like that and not let them at least cancel their own talk?

Sorry, sarcasm intended (I was riffing on the idea that anything ugly and unacceptable gets defended as "saving free speech", those days.)

Poe's law strikes again!

Replace/Cancel the talk he had scheduled or forgo the $500k+ in savings and keep him. Not a hard decision.

Is it? $500k is a lot of money to you or me, but I'm not Google and don't make $3000/second, or about $500k in 30 minutes.

DevRel is unfortunately something that’s going the way of the dodo though now that interest rates are up. A position that doesn’t directly contribute to the bottom line of a company, so it’s easy to justify getting rid of.

> blog, snippets, podcast, talks, youtube, social media etc.

In ZIRP every cent is positive ROI

(Not intended to be a comment about OPs individual performance or skill)

And Chrome has an insanely dominant position now. Devs need Chrome, not the other way around

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