It was to talk about "team restructuring"
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Randomly got a message from one of my reports asking what this "Mandatory Team Meeting" was on his calendar. I hadn't been invited, but it was our whole company shutting down ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hey, that happened to me, too!
I got scheduled for a mandatory meeting with 1 hour notice. During lunch.
I asked my boss what it was. He didn't know either. I joked that it was us being shut down.
Sure enough, 1 hour later we were both writing LinkedIn recommendations and helping each other find jobs after it was announced that our whole studio was being shut down by corporate and myself plus all my coworkers were all now jobless.
A former coworker of mine once learned that his company was shutting down because the office was raided by FBI agents who seized all the computers, servers and company documents. Everybody sat around in the empty office for a little while and then went home, and nobody ever got paid or heard from the company ever again. Even the tax documents at the end of the year didn't get sent out.
What did he have to do without the tax documents?
I don't know exactly. There's some process you go through with the IRS to find out what you were paid and how much was withheld in situations like this where the company just goes out of existence suddenly. The IRS has all that info anyway because companies withhold and submit the taxes (at least while they still exist).
Well, they're supposed to, anyway.
I at least had the cathartic experience of being told "hey we need to shut down EVERYTHING before 7pm because that's when the email will turn off, so log into every service you know we use and delete it all." And then I spent the next couple hours clicking every delete button I could.
K8s clusters? Delete. Prod DB? Delete. Prod DB backups? Delete. S3 buckets? Delete. Cloudflare account? Delete.
It was actually kinda fun.
This sounds therapeautic
Oof, how did it end up going?
The company shut down.
To shreds you say? How are the investors holding up?
To shreds, you say?
But the company's not supposed to shut down.
Is that not typical?
Of course it's not typical! Ordinarily, companies don't just shut down. I want to make very clear that this is not the normal state of affairs!
So what's the minimal employee requirements for a company?
Oh, I suppose ... one?
One employee?
Well, one, I suppose.
That's not very typical, I'd like to make that point.
Chance in a million
The front fell off.
The front fell off?
Yeah that's not very typical, I'd like to make that point.
(The idea's that the company tanked, just like this tanker did.)
Still one of the greatest pieces of cinematics ever produced, and I'll die on this hill.
Random team meeting on the first Friday after I got hired. "Telltale has lost it's funding and everyone is being let go". Fun week.
Bitwise industries did that to us but it was an optional meeting. Like a kick to the gut.
Worst part is they stole our 401ks.
¯\(ツ)/¯\ you dropped this