Re:Atlassian terminates 150 staff with pre-recorded video
by jfengel on Friday August 01, 2025 @05:20PM
(#44762634)
Doing that for 150 people is a pretty long, ugly day, while everybody waited for their turn.
You could gather everybody in the same room, and announce it there, but that's still not really face-to-face.
Delegating it to their direct managers is even worse. They're generally not the ones who made the decision. Even if they were the ones who submitted a list of their people they could live without, it was the higher-ups who approved the layoff en masse.
There's just not a great way to give bad news. A video sucks, but it attracts attention only because it's different from the other sucky ways people do it.
You could gather everybody in the same room, and announce it there, but that's still not really face-to-face.
Delegating it to their direct managers is even worse. They're generally not the ones who made the decision. Even if they were the ones who submitted a list of their people they could live without, it was the higher-ups who approved the layoff en masse.
There's just not a great way to give bad news. A video sucks, but it attracts attention only because it's different from the other sucky ways people do it.