It was to talk about "team restructuring"
Randomly got a message from one of my reports asking what this "Mandatory Team Meeting" was on his calendar. I hadn't been invited, but it was our whole company shutting down ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"Team restructuring" is so much fun, you never know what you're going to get.
Your boss's boss now reports to a slightly different VP? Everyone is getting fired? No way to know which it's going to be, until the end of the meeting.
That happened to me. I noticed a vague Monday morning meeting when I logged on. Checked with my team to see if they knew what it was about and no one knew. Supervisor was MIA on slack. Just before it starts we got a group text from him that essentially said, "what the fuck. I'm so sorry guys. I'm not allowed to speak or I'm immediately fired"
I checked the invite list and, sure enough... VP of department, VP of HR, my supervisor, and my small team. I instantly knew we were all fired.
Joined the meeting a few minutes early and it was just my teammates all wondering out loud what's going on. They're all pretty young. Couldn't help but blurt out, "nice knowing yall..."
Supervisor texts me with "please don't, we'll grab a drink right after this"
The cool executives log and blah blah blah your team is getting shuttered thanks bye.
We did get drinks at 9:30 in the morning.
Oh and my supervisor quit a month later, right after he got the end of year bonus. I don't blame him. Good dude. He helped a lot of the team secure other jobs in the industry within 3 months
How about a meeting an hour after our daily standup and it's the CTO and CIO saying "ok is everyone on the call?"
I was telling myself "oh crap, the company is gonna shut down"
5 minutes later "So as of this very moment, everyone stop working. The company is officially closed as of this meeting."
We were a start up essentially. Made it almost 9 years with ups and downs. This all happened at the end of July. At least got 3 month severance and insurance covered. I do start a new job Tuesday.
The HR rep is the real red flag. The other two could be there for exciting announcements too.
We got reorganized last month. Scrapped almost all the projects we were working on and fired 1/4 of the workforce (mostly sales and support staff). On the plus side, I'm still employed and I've been able to use the last month to catch up on personal shit while the higher ups figure out what they want to spend money on next. On the down side, the new project I'm assigned to sucks and is never going to be successful. At least I don't think it will.
But, as long as the paychecks keep rolling in...
As someone who has been there before, time to get that CV up to date, get any linkedin stuff sorted, and use that free time to start browsing the jobs market so that you're ready.
I once didn't take that advice and promptly got dumped on my backside without the last month's pay because the whole thing had folded (I got paid a few months later through the liquidators, but that didn't help get my rent paid when I needed it!)
Companies are often insane. I'm working in one who has this one guy build a super complicated architecture, because he don't know aws. So instead of just using a message queue on aws, he is building Java programs and tons of software and containers to try and send messages in a reliable way. Costs the company huge money, but they don't care, since he is some old timer who has been there for like 10 years and everyone let's him do what he wants.
