Absolutely, in Roman times 'decimatio' was the punishment for a poor result in battle. The soldiers were obliged to choose one of ten, and kill him.

Huh. Romans invented stacked ranking.

It’s a bit more ironic than that —- at least according to to Wikipedia, they drew lots (I.e randomly) for the individual who was killed.

I get the feeling that this is more-or-less how stack ranking actually tends to pan out.

More like, managers playing favorites

The toxic reason to never miss unpaid happy hours!

Layoffs

I think the reasoning behind decimation was that it was supposed to be an equivalent bloodbath defeat. Historically, a rout typically resulted in about 10% casualties. Decimation reduced the calculus of a Roman soldier to 'stay in the fight, and risk a 10% chance of death' versus 'run, and risk a 10% chance of being killed at random by your tentmates'.

Seems like the low performers would have been taken care of already from the battle.

Not necessarily. Cowardice is a viable individual survival strategy.

Where would a Roman run? To somewhere in Gaul?

"Ave! Auxilium requiro."

"Oxnychz navar werun dosh? [laughs in extinct language]"

"Quid?"

In that kind of setting I imagine the low performers would sometimes be likeliest to survive, if they broke rank to run away. I imagine the lots would come out if everyone gave an honest effort.

That's not how the legions worked. The men assembled three ranks deep. The first rank was comprised of those with middling experience, who had seen combat before. The rear rank was the senior veterans. The cherries with no experience went in the middle, both to be reassured by the E4 mafia laying skunion in the front rank, and to be prodded on by the very experienced guys behind them.

Happened in Mexico too (may have been fictional or based on real events),in a great book I read once: https://www.fantasticfiction.com/b/rick-bass/diezmo.htm

Very well done! Is there a word for when you use a word in the excruciatingly correct way but are guaranteed to misguide 99% of the audience who reads it?

"Literally", which is such a word itself.

99% literally use literally wrong though.

And the converse of "Literally" is, or should be, "Illiterally", I think, I don't know, literally.

M-x mansplain-pedant-mode

It's "figuratively" or, more... literally, "metaphorically."

pretty sure it was a joke

I would consider the converse of "literally" to be "figuratively".

"Literally" literally means "literally", but figuratively now means "figuratively".

"Deprecate" is a great example of this. Everyone gets it wrong, but no one seems to care.

Deprecate means "to continue supporting but to discourage its use." 99% of people believe it means to end support.

Really? I see that word used correctly more often than not, but I guess it depends on what projects you work with.

My wife woke up this morning to an email sent at 3:16AM informing her that she was laid off as part of this restructuring. It's a blessing in disguise, IMHO -- the work-life boundaries expected as part of her org were non-existent (calls with India every night at 8PM or 7AM, our time in California, on top of the normal 9-5 hours).

It's definitely hard to process. Lots of feelings of anger, sadness, relief, etc.

Fortunately for her, the severance is pretty generous (paid through March, then 6 months on top). But there's also anxiety about the job market right now with so many tech workers being let go.

Is this 9 months of full pay? How long was your wife's tenure if I may ask?

Yeah, that's what it sounds like to us. She had been there about 6 years.

I didn't think anyone gave that sort of severance any longer in the US even for someone who has been at a place a middling long time.

Why would anyone wake up to an email at 3AM?

Perhaps I phrased that wrong.

When we woke up at (roughly at 6:30), she saw a work email on her phone announcing the layoffs.

No, it was me, didn’t read carefully enough. Thank you and hope your wife finds a balanced job soon!

It sounds like their job was pretty toxic and pushing through their work-life boundary. (This has happened to me before).

When that happens regularly, and you get used to being woken up in the middle of the night to respond to a technical outage or needy management, the lightest phone buzz can shock you awake.

Given the described situation, I'm not surprised they woke up to an unexpected phone notification :(

Yeah -- definitely toxic! There were really no boundaries. We have two kiddos as well. So it ended up conflicting with bedtime at night or getting ready for school in the morning. Managers were just not sympathetic at all.

To clarify, we woke up at our normal time and saw the email.

She woke up at a normal hour and saw an email from 3 AM. "Woke up to find a notification on her phone", not "woken up by a notification on her phone".

I read it as “woke up at <some arbitrary, unspecified time> to an email which was sent at 3:16AM.”

I sometimes just wake up randomly in the middle of the night and use the restroom and check my email in the process. I know it’s dumb but I feel like punishing myself.

Decimation in a signal processing context would suggest "keep 1/10" instead ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downsampling_(signal_processin...