Employees Use Humor to Deal with Anticipated Job Cuts at Tech Giant
As the threat of job cuts looms over a major tech company, employees are resorting to humor to cope with the uncertainty. The company is predicted to let go of a few thousand more of its corporate employees in the near future. This comes on the heels of a previous wave of mass layoffs where approximately 14,000 positions were axed.
In the face of no official communication from the company, workers are using a humorous approach to alleviate the stress of the situation. A popular internal communication channel, with over 26,000 participating employees, has become a hub for sharing jokes and memes.
A Twist on the 'Two-Pizza Rule'
The target of the humor is the company’s founder and ex-CEO's renowned "two-pizza rule". This rule suggested that meetings should never be so large that two pizzas couldn’t feed everyone. The rule was intended to ensure meetings remained compact and effective.
However, as the company continues to slim down its workforce, employees are using this rule to highlight just how much smaller their teams are set to become. One meme depicted a thin slice of pizza with a caption, "how we feed two pizza teams", creating a comical twist on the rule.
Another image humorously featured two unbranded pizza boxes with the caption, "did someone say 2 pizza team?" This meme is a clever nod to the company's digital services branch, where many of the job cuts are rumored to be concentrated.
Playful Banter and Uncertain Times
An employee humorously commented, "I don't think I've ever been on a team that could be completely fed with just two reasonably sized pizzas until you were still hungry very frugal. Increasing 'span-of-control' for managers seems to be the new rage." There was even a playful debate about what constitutes a "reasonably sized" pizza.
The pizza-themed humor isn’t the only coping strategy. Employees have also shared various non-pizza related memes. One meme cleverly used a famous scene from a popular horror movie, hinting at the rumored date for the layoffs. The character's face was replaced with the company's cloud services acronym.
Another meme used a popular internet template to mock corporate jargon. It depicted an error message about email not functioning, presumably due to the employee being laid off, with the caption "Mail not working (have I become Nimble?!)", a reference to the CEO's previous comments about job cuts being necessary for agility.
Facing the Unknown with Humor
Other posts reflect the anxiety of not knowing what will happen, with one meme providing a checklist for the rumored layoff day: "able to login", "mail and Slack works", and "no random HR meeting in calendar". Another post simply stated the overall mood, "I don't know what will happen on this date and at this point I'm too afraid to ask."
Using humor to deal with internal upheavals isn't new in the tech industry. In a past instance, employees of another tech giant flooded their internal message boards with memes poking fun at its extravagant developer conference, occurring just months after it had laid off 12,000 employees.