raxthrowaway0

Great, now you're asking questions.

My manager was terminated before he could complete reviews for his staff (he was forbidden from telling any of us about it, because they wanted us to be surprised we were being fired, so my immediate manager just up and vanished one morning). His manager, and that person's manager both turned over from the company weeks ago after they were given a courtesy notice of this event coming. Rackspace then reacted to the turnover and forced the highest manager mentioned so far to stay and personally fire everyone.

I understand that you think your theory regarding this layoff is correct. It is not. Performance reviews had absolutely nothing to do with this event. At all. This event involved cost center.

Proof I'm legit: The meeting invite to fire everyone was called "Business Update," and scheduled by Liana Greenberg on behalf of Scott Crenshaw. They fired 30 at a time, then quickly cleared the room for the next batch.

You are aware that pretty much every hosting organization in existence pays referral fees, yes? Including "cheap VPS that can scale" (also known as: a contradiction in terms).

https://www.linode.com/referrals

https://www.digitalocean.com/referral-program/

https://www.vultr.com/news/Summer-Promo-Now-Earn-%2430-For-E...

You're also clearly unaware that Rackspace built itself and went public on colocation, which dates your perspective. "What type of servers to use" is such a variable question for each outfit, and even with a web-focused startup perspective like this one, there's so much variance in work that colocation often made sense at the time. Time sharing a VPS with Bob's IRC Vhost Service often does not.

You were saying the layoffs are "typical slog," going so far as to authoritatively declare how the layoffs that impacted us were executed. (Completely wrong.) I was merely reminding you that from the outside, you have extremely little context on which to speak authoritatively. You also cannot speak authoritatively on working conditions; Rackspace was a great place to work with little involvement from Apollo, despite your armchair theorizing regarding a place you've never been.

Especially when the people who had been given assurances by ELT and then woke up Thursday to find they'd been broken on account of near insolvency of the business, when those people are hanging out in the comments among you, it's probably best to listen more than speak.

> So annual rank/stack, bell curve, fire x%. Right after performance reviews, and right before any annual raises.

Except we hadn't completed ours yet, this event was planned for several months due to leadership expecting double-digit turnover after the performance review period, about 10% of leadership in a single product got wind of it coming and has already settled in at new companies, multiple principals and architects with spotless records were let go from a single product along with nearly 80% of its other headcount, and layoffs have been quietly happening without attention being drawn (a few a week). We were also told at an Open Book that Apollo had to intervene for Rackspace to afford contracted bonus structure this year, as Rackspace literally did not have cash on hand to meet targets.

Other than all that, though, astute insight and analysis. You're right, just typical fiscal year slog. (PR is literally saying "we're a stable company, promise" in statements.)