The business unit at the company where I formerly worked, which had been described to me as “like a really well-funded start-up” at my interview, has closed down, and most of the people I worked with have been laid off.
The corporation has essentially decided to get out of the healthcare systems business. They’re in the process of offloading the remainder of their enterprise clinical systems into a joint venture with an established healthcare systems firm (one that has figured out how to make money in this arena); the consumer side had been left to atrophy about 18 months ago.
I don’t have any figures, but it’s my sense that the BU didn’t make any money in the five or so years of its existence. And after a while someone in corporate finance is going to notice that.
The thing that got me about the consumer unit (where I was a very bad fit) was that they’d commit to building applications based not on market research but on vague “strategic” partnerships committed to by the BU senior management (now “retired”) or because someone glib had a flea in his/her ear and convinced someone else it would be cool. The prevailing approach was, “let’s build it and; figure out how to make money later.”
Their foundational consumer product, a personal healthcare record (PHR) platform, has never made money. And when even Google backs out of that market, you know there’s probably not a way to make money out of it.
Anyway, that’s not what I want to consider today. It’s how the BU handled the internal announcement. And by “handled” I mean “bungled”. A colleague and erstwhile office mate told me what happened.
On Wednesday the entire group was called to a meeting. People knew something was up because there’d been a lot of new people in for repeated meetings with closed conference room blinds. So they figured there would be some announcement.
However, at the last minute, a subset of the group got meeting updates directing them to a conference room in a different building. These were the “saved”. My colleague, BW, was in the latter group, but he didn’t get the update, so he showed up at the “damned” meeting, with his coffee and laptop.
An HR rep called him out of the gathering for a word—and would he collect his gear? Outside the room, she asked if he’d not got an update? Because this meeting was being “repurposed”. She sent him back to his office, where he waited, wondering what was going on.
Fifteen minutes later, the “damned” having been informed that Friday would be their last day, she was back to walk him over to the “saved” meeting. But by that time that one, too, was over.
It’s not at all on the same scale, but while BW was describing the events of Wednesday, I was reminded of the selection process at Auschwitz: whether you were directed “rechts” or “links” determined whether you lived (for a while) or died.
I know that it was the BU HR that set this up, because corporate HR runs things like Prussian Uhlans. I also know that both those in the saved and the damned groups were stunned by it all, especially the timing. As one of the latter said on her Facebook page: "Merry fucking Christmas".
As for me, I’m feeling…well, not schadenfreude, but perhaps relief, and a validation of my decision to leave that job when I did. Had I not walked away I’d have had 18 months more of wondering what the hell I was supposed to be doing, and that’s just not for me.
And there I’d be, laid off, in Seattle, having to figure things out in a very bad place.
(BTW: if anyone ever describes a company to you as "like a really well-funded start-up", run.)
