'Layoff'

Alejandra stared across the table, waffle uneaten. A prim scoop of butter wept down one edge, indifferent.

Across from her, Paul just sighed. Letting her have the moment.

“So you just woke up with your devices dead?”

“Just like that,” Paul nodded. “Email in my personal account. So long.”

Their one-on-one tradition, a long, indulgent breakfast twice a month, was the one thing Alejandra looked forward to at work. She’d get advice, hear gossip, and otherwise commiserate with the only boss she’d ever had who tried to keep her safe.

Now that was gone.

“So now who’s running the team?”

Paul shrugged, casting a vacant stare into his pile of corned beef hash. Also uneaten. “I’m a little surprised it’s this messy. Usually you get a sense of what’s happening before it drops, you get someone really curious about details they never cared about before. Nothing this time.”

Somehow they got some of their meal down. They parted with a hug, promises to keep getting the occasional breakfast, and each began a glum walk in opposing directions. Paul was going home, Alejandra had a workday ahead of her.

It was this way across the company, Alejandra found, her phone lighting up with backchannel gossip as she walked. Big round of layoffs that also vaporized whole layers of middle management, and plenty of executives as well.

The org chart was shredded.

She kept texting people the same question: “How are we supposed to function?”

As she arrived to the office, mostly empty, she got her answer.

A calendar invitation for a noon video call.

With the CEO.

They’d met a couple times. At 2,000 people, the company had been just small enough you’d get a few seconds with the CEO in the odd meeting or holiday party. But Alejandra certainly didn’t have regular meetings with the guy.

“So tell me a bit of what you’re working on!” Johnny’s cheer seemed sincere, but that made it strange. She’d had a terrible morning. She wasn’t in a cheery mood.

But the rent was not going to pay itself.

After she gathered herself, Alejandra explained the effort to improve efficiency in the company’s resource usage. Their software design had evolved in recent years, but they were provisioned for an architecture that had been much more gluttonous. There was margin to be found in the difference, and Wall Street was eager to taste it.

“We’ve tested this in staging for the last month and gotten things to a very stable place. We’ll roll it out over the next month or so, and we’ll be able to cut back on costs before the quarter is over.” Alejandra and her team had worked hard to get this locked in, and she was proud it wasn’t going to slip.

Nice to be able to give the CEO good news.

Johnny listened, and just as she got to discussing specific timelines, he cut in. “You know what, I’m thinking we can course-correct on this. For now let’s leave the existing computing capacity in place.”

Alejandra fought the reflex to object. This was the CEO after all. But she and her team had spent six months on this. They’d been told over and over that not only was this urgent, it would impact everyone’s pay over the long term, as it would make the company more appealing to investors. She felt her pulse quicken, wanting an explanation.

But instead, she nodded slowly. “Where should we put our focus now?”

Johnny asked her to put a plan together now for increasing capacity. “I’m sure you already know your way around thanks to the last project. Give me some idea for the costs and complexity involved with an extra 50% of computing headroom. We need plenty of juice to grow into what’s next.”

She nodded again, masking her confusion. “I’ll give you ten minutes back!” he said, as though this was quite generous, cutting the call.

The backchannel chatter continued into the evening, and Alejandra had to charge her phone hours earlier than usual. A new encrypted group chat formed with two dozen managers and team leads.

By the end of the week, things were weird.

ale: okay, so did ANYONE this week NOT meet with Johnny?

A flurry of eye reacjis glommed onto her message.

bree: literally three times for me

thomas: how does the CEO of a public company have time to take THIS MANY MEETINGS?

lil: and why are we completely changing course on everything?

The picture was consistent. Across engineering, everyone had been re-tasked. Other functions had been told to pause.

No one had clarity on a new management structure.

But after a few weeks, the picture became clear. It was just lots of meetings with Johnny.

One morning, yet another one-on-one meeting with her CEO appeared on Alejandra’s calendar, just an hour away. She had to reschedule a few things to accommodate.

When Johnny joined, all of his previous cheer was gone.

“So walk me through how things have gone since the last time we talked,” he prompted, his face grim.

Alejandra began rattling off the work needed to create the spare capacity Johnny had asked for, along with its progress.

He cut in. “That’s great, but I need you to pause that for the time being. Instead, I want the infrastructure team to focus on a system we can use to rapidly scale back our computing capacity, while still prioritizing high-value customer workloads.”

Alejandra’s frustration finally got the better of her. “Why? What would we need that for? You just told me to add more.”

Johnny paused, tilting his head as though regarding something both pitiable and frustrating. “Please just action this.”

He cut the call.

In the backchannel, once again, Alejandra found herself not alone with the strange interaction.

cam: anyone feeling whipped around by our new boss? Feel like I'm getting conflicting directives every few days now

bree: It's honestly like talking to a different person sometimes

thomas: again, where is he finding the time

ale: and why is he so moody?

The next day, just as Alejandra was about to close her computer, leave the office, and meet some friends for a badly needed dinner on the town, she got a direct message from Johnny.

j_hnny: hey do you have a few minutes?

What could she say?

As she joined the video call, Johnny seemed poorly rested.

“Do you ever worry things aren’t going to work out for us? As a business, I mean?” Johnny looked at her, almost pleading. He wanted a contradictory point of view.

He wanted encouragement?

“Uh, I mean,” Alejandra started. This wasn’t her wheelhouse at all. She kept services running. Business analysis was someone else’s job.

To say nothing of counseling executives who made multiples of what she did.

“You know, I guess I just try to do the best job I can and trust that you and your team can figure out the path forward.”

Johnny’s face fell.

“What if we can’t?”

Alejandra’s skin crawled. What the fuck.

They were both silent for a beat.

Finally, Alejandra ventured, “Why are you worried right now?”

Johnny frowned, looked away. Then he told her, “I can’t talk about it. I better go.”

He cut the call.

As she crossed the threshold of the lobby into the street, her phone buzzed.

Johnny again. What the fuck?

“Hey there,” he said briskly, as though he hadn’t just had the most bizarre fucking conversation with her minutes earlier. “How far did you get on the scale-back system we talked about a few weeks ago?”

Finally, Alejandra had enough. “Johnny, we didn’t get anywhere on it because two days later you re-tasked us again!”

“God dammit,” Johnny spat and then the phone beeped, the call ended.

I hate this fucking job, Alejandra seethed to herself.

She began walking to dinner when her phone chimed, overriding her silent switch. She was on-call, and an incident had just tipped over.

”Fuck!” Alejandra cried, at nearly the top of her lungs. An oncoming couple started, snapping their gaze to look at her. “Sorry, sorry,” she said, hands up, a protective gesture. Her rage was not for them.

She texted her friends. She wasn’t going to make it to dinner. She turned back to the office. That would be the simplest place to get things moving.

But when Alejandra arrived at the security gate, her badge didn’t work. The proxcard reader blinked and made a dull grunt of a beep.

Security had gone home. There was no one to get her inside.

She cursed again to the empty lobby. On her phone, she tried to access her workplace chat. But she couldn’t log in.

Surely they didn’t lay her off in the middle of an incident.

In her encrypted group chat, there was bedlam. The ‘incident’ was a complete outage of seemingly everything. Every customer affected, even the public website wouldn’t load.

But without access to any of her tools or internal communications, there was nothing Alejandra could do to coordinate a response.

This was the sort of crisis where she’d call Paul on his personal line, or any of a number of other higher-level managers on other teams. But most of them were gone. The rest were already in her group chat, just as helpless.

She sat against a wall in the lobby and dialed Johnny back.

He didn’t answer.

ale: so basically, what, we're fucked?

thomas: I wish I could tell you but everyone I'd call right now doesn't even work here anymore

bree: same

Reacjis churned. It was agreed: there was nothing to do.

Alejandra went home.

The next morning, the stock dropped so hard and fast that trades were halted. Johnny was giving quotes to the media that boiled down to “we’re working on it and we don’t know when we’ll be back up.”

Alejandra kept waiting for her phone to ring. She and her team were instrumental to recovering from a crisis like this.

But no one called.

She told the rest of her team what she knew: nothing. Advised them to keep an eye on their phones but otherwise enjoy some time for themselves.

What else was there to do?

The group chat seethed. Stock was a big chunk of everyone’s compensation. They’d watched meaningful amounts of their money go up in smoke in the space of hours. And it would only get worse when the halt lifted.

Worst of all, they couldn’t sell off any of their own stock. The abject failure of leadership here was non-public information. The rest of the market assumed they were hard at work on a response. Besides, they weren’t even in an open trading window.

Their hands were tied.

It continued this way for days, stock cratering, no one calling, no one able to log in. Friday morning, still in bed, Alejandra’s phone buzzed.

“Paul? Did they call you back in or something?”

“The NSA just left my house, Ale. Johnny’s the one who killed the company.”

“What the actual fuck?!”

“He made some sort of AI’s out of himself. To replace all the laid off management.”

Alejandra just stared a hole into her ceiling.

Paul continued, “I guess they all went to war.”