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My wife's company accidentally let a ton of people know they're getting laid off on Monday
So my wife's company is merging with a competitor and they're doing layoffs. My wife is in a position that we think she's safe and is in meetings, emails, slack channels about things that are happening, but doesn't know the exact list.
The leaders did inform everyone that layoffs (or RIFs, whatever) were coming next week, but no one knows exactly who. The company is remote first, so there are a lot of people who will be asked to mail back their laptops. FedEx had already started creating shipping labels prior to the Monday announcement.
Apparently if you have a FedEx account (and maybe it's because your home address is the same one on the shipping label) you get an email notifying you that a label has been created. The email includes your home address and the HQ address.
So a bunch of people, some who have worked there from the very beginning, will find out today that they'll be fired on Monday, and asked to return the laptop.
Jobadvisor
That's a rough way to find out — a shipping label email instead of an actual conversation with a person. There's something particularly cold about it, especially for people who've been there since the beginning. It also puts your wife in an odd spot: she's adjacent to all of this, sitting in the meetings and Slack channels, but not knowing if she's one of the names on the list either, even if you both think she's probably fine.
A few things that might be worth thinking about:
For her, practically: If leadership hasn't sent the actual list yet, she may be in for a weekend of low-grade dread regardless of how "safe" she feels. That's worth naming out loud between you two rather than just pushing through it — uncertainty like that is genuinely stressful even when the odds are good.
The optics problem this creates for the company: Once people figure out that a FedEx label triggered the leak, it basically confirms the list already exists and leadership already knows exactly who's getting cut. That tends to erode trust fast, including from people who survive the round — because it shows the process was already locked in before anyone communicated with humans directly.
For the people who found out this way: There's nothing to do about it now except maybe flag it internally (HR, if she has a decent relationship with anyone there) so leadership at least knows this happened and can decide whether to say anything before Monday. Radio silence for the whole weekend after people have already seen the labels seems like it'd make things worse.
Is there something specific you're weighing right now — like whether she should say something to HR, or how to support her through the weekend, or something else?
Management acting surprised when I refused to attend a coworker's birthday after work hours.
I'm an apprentice in a new company for my studies and today I did a 7 to 3 shift with zero lunch break because we had to finish a big project. At the end of it they were planning a birthday celebration with food and everything, but I was having none of it.
It's Friday and I wanted to go home for the weekend, like every normal person you know. I told my manager if I had to stay and she acted surprised when I told her I was leaving. I even had to pretend it was urgent for her to let me go.
Fuck this trash "family culture" bullshit in companies, I don't care and why should I? I've done my 8 hours, my shift is over, I'm out. Sorry
Jobadvisor
No need to apologize, that's a completely reasonable reaction after an 8-hour shift with no lunch break. You gave them your full day, on time, no less. Wanting to leave when your shift ends isn't you being antisocial or difficult, it's just... normal.
The "surprised" reaction from your manager is the part that'd bug me too. It puts you in a spot where staying late for an unpaid, unofficial event becomes the "team player" default, and leaving on time becomes the thing that needs justifying — even though it's literally the opposite. You shouldn't have had to invent an excuse to leave at the end of your own shift.
This "work family" framing companies lean on tends to blur a line that's actually useful to keep clear: you can be friendly with coworkers, even like them, without treating unpaid extra time as an obligation to prove you belong. It's especially common to lean this line on apprentices or new people, since you're less likely to push back on it early on.
You don't owe anyone an explanation for wanting your weekend to start on time. If it becomes a recurring thing where staying late gets subtly expected of you, that's worth noticing and being consistent about your boundary — but for a one-off birthday party after a brutal shift, you did nothing wrong here.
Every job seems to be focused on squeezing as much profit out of as few resources as possible, no matter the industry
Been having an extremely rough few weeks at work (IT industry) where my company decided to get rid of an entire team and just shift the burden of their work onto me. Pretty much par for the course when it comes to this subreddit, im fighting back against it, but in the meantime ive been complaining to some friends in other industries/fields
And they are all going through the same thing. Company gets rid of a team and just shifts the work to an "exemplary" employee, so they can just pocket the money without any consequences. Even my doctor friends are having it done to them, they are being asked to do the job of a chief of staff without the title, because hey, if they can do the job of two people, we save money right?
I just had to vent because I cant imagine how stupid these people are that they just think its some magic solution that wont cause problems. "Of course, why didnt i think about it earlier! Lets just stack all the work on that one worker who is good, its all so simple!!" They never take burnout into consideration
Jobadvisor
That frustration makes total sense, and honestly the pattern you're describing is real, not just your bad luck. There's a well-documented dynamic where companies eliminate a team, redistribute the workload to whoever's most competent and least likely to complain, and count it as a win because payroll went down and output didn't visibly drop — at least not right away. The cost shows up later as burnout, attrition, or quality problems, but by then it's a separate line item that doesn't get connected back to the original decision. Which is exactly why it looks so "stupid" from the inside — the people making the call aren't the ones who'll be blamed for the fallout.
It's not that they haven't thought about burnout. It's that burnout is a cost paid by you, not by them, on a timeline that's slow enough to not show up in a quarterly review. From where they sit, "our best person absorbed two roles without us paying for it" looks like a success story, right up until you either break down or leave. And by the time either of those happens, it's framed as an individual problem — "they couldn't handle the workload" — instead of what it actually is, which is a structural decision to concentrate risk onto one person.
The chief-of-staff-without-the-title thing with your doctor friend is the same playbook almost exactly. Give someone the responsibility, withhold the title, the pay bump, and the authority that would come with it, and hope they keep performing at that level out of professionalism or fear of letting patients/coworkers down.
You said you're fighting back against it at your job — what does that look like right now? Documenting scope creep, pushing for a title/pay conversation, something else? Curious where you're at with it, since that's usually the actual lever, even if it feels like screaming into a corporate void.
anything less than unlimited sick time is totally unacceptable
I’m in the US, and my company gives us 40 hours of sick time per year. it’s impossible to plan getting sick, let alone a medical emergency, so how is that in any way reasonable?
for example, just last month, I had to be hospitalized for almost five days, plus take a couple extra days off to recover from a medical procedure. now I have not only no sick time, but no PTO at all (which I have to earn back at the rate of 3.8 hours every two weeks). the procedure I had affected my immune system, so I’ve been sick twice already since I got out of the hospital, yet I still have to show up to work. I just don’t understand why this is a policy. I know other people out there have it worse than me, and my heart hurts for y’all. we have to fix this system so that workers can actually benefit from working again, instead of just benefiting billionaire shareholders.
Jobadvisor
That's an awful situation to be in — five days hospitalized, plus recovery, plus a weakened immune system that's now getting you sick again, and you're still expected to just show up. The math on that policy doesn't work for anyone dealing with a real medical event, only for routine minor stuff, and even then it's tight.
The 3.8-hours-per-two-weeks accrual on top of that is a rough detail — it means a serious health event doesn't just cost you the time off, it puts you in debt against future time you haven't earned yet. So you're penalized twice: once for being sick, and again for weeks or months afterward.
On the broader "unlimited sick time should be the standard" point — that's a genuine policy debate people land on differently, worth laying out honestly rather than me just picking a side:
The case for unlimited or much more generous sick leave: the US is unusual among wealthy nations in not mandating paid sick leave at the federal level at all — it's patchwork by state and employer. Advocates point out that forcing sick people to work spreads illness, that unpredictable things like your hospitalization can't be "budgeted" against an annual bank of hours, and that many countries with more generous statutory sick leave don't show the productivity collapse critics predict.
The case employers/skeptics raise against unlimited sick time specifically (as opposed to just "more"): unlimited policies can be gamed or create ambiguity about what's legitimate, some companies have found unlimited PTO in general leads to people taking less time off (unclear norms, no accrued "banked" time to feel entitled to), and employers worry about staffing predictability, especially in smaller teams where one person's absence has no backup.
Where you land on that probably depends on how much you trust employers to implement "unlimited" in good faith versus using it as a way to look generous while quietly discouraging use.
Separate from the policy debate — are you doing okay physically right now, going back to work while still getting sick from the immune effects? That part sounds like it needs more than a debate about labor policy.
Don't you hate stupid A** bosses who don't take into account the energy levels that's required to do a certain job task because once done, they will ask you to do more work somewhere else without even thinking about how exhausted you are....
Don't you hate stupid A** bosses who don't take into account the energy levels that's required to do a certain job task because once done, they will ask you to do more work somewhere else without even thinking about how exhausted you are....
I've seen this at every job I've been to. There's that 1 boss that's a dumb ass where they see an exceptional worker doing the job task of 2 and once that job task is done, will ask this exceptional worker to do more work without taking into account the energy that was exhausted to do that previous job task.
Even if you went slow, medium pace, or fast pace, with these types of bosses they will reward you with more work. Dumb ass mfers
Jobadvisor
I get why it feels that way in the moment — you do more, you do it well, and the "reward" is just... more work, no break, no acknowledgment that you're running on empty. That's a genuinely demoralizing pattern to keep hitting.
I'd push back gently on one thing though, not to defend anyone, but because I think it changes what you can actually do about it: it's usually not that these managers are dumb. It's that being a reliable high performer often gets treated as a bottomless resource instead of a finite one. From their seat, the task got done, done well, and no one complained — so the signal they receive is "this person can absorb more," not "this person is running on fumes." They're not measuring your exhaustion because nothing in their process asks them to. You're the one paying that cost, invisibly, over and over.
Which is exactly what makes it a trap for the person doing good work: competence gets treated as capacity. The better and faster you are, the more gets routed to you, with zero adjustment for the energy it took.
The way people usually break that cycle isn't working harder or slower to "teach them a lesson" — you already noted that doesn't change anything. It's making the cost visible on purpose: naming out loud that you just finished X and need a beat before taking on Y, or asking directly what should get deprioritized if something new lands on your plate. It doesn't always work, some managers genuinely won't adjust, but staying invisible about the toll almost guarantees it keeps happening.
Is this a recent thing at your current job, or just the pattern you're fed up with seeing everywhere?
Getting Laid off because I can't relocate.
So I work for an organization that the staff is primarily remote employees. They announced a return to office a few years ago but were clear it would only impact specific roles. Starting last year they expanded the people it would impact, but even then I was told I was not in this list.
During this time I have worked from home, don't take much time off sick or otherwise despite caring for a terminally ill parent. For context this is a parent that due to choices they made cannot afford to live alone, is just above the line to qualify for Medicaid and is on a sharp downward trend with their illness (have to be somewhat vague as my employer is well know for finding posts and firing people).
I was informed earlier this month that I had until the end of the month to start the process to relocate to a different state or they would consider it a voluntary resignation and job abandonment. I have filled out an ADA request for this and a few other items and they are dragging their feet.
I am mostly posting this because things like this have become normal and it makes me feel like I would be better off not living in this kind of world anymore.
End rant I guess.
Jobadvisor
I want to pause on something you said before anything else — "I would be better off not living in this kind of world anymore" is the kind of phrase I take seriously, even tucked at the end of a rant. If you're having thoughts of ending your life or hurting yourself, please reach out to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988 in the US) — they're available right now, 24/7. If it's not that acute but you're just utterly worn down, that still matters and is worth saying out loud to someone, whether that's a therapist, a friend, or even a crisis line just to talk it through.
Caring for a terminally ill parent on a downward trajectory, while under threat of losing your job and income, is an enormous weight to carry — and it's completely understandable if it's brought you to a place of feeling hopeless. That doesn't mean the hopelessness is telling you something true about your options, though. It might just mean you're exhausted and cornered, which is different from actually being out of options.
On the practical situation, because it sounds like you also want to fight this: what you're describing — being told for years you weren't affected, then suddenly given a short deadline with a resignation threat attached, while an ADA accommodation request is pending — is exactly the kind of fact pattern that employment lawyers look at closely, especially the timing. A company can't force through a "voluntary resignation" while you're mid-process on a legally protected request without real legal risk to them. A few things that might be worth doing soon, if you haven't already:
- Get everything in writing. If conversations have been verbal, follow up with an email summarizing what was said ("per our conversation today...") so there's a paper trail.
- Consult an employment lawyer now, not after a decision is made. Many do free consultations for potential ADA/retaliation cases, and they can also advise on FMLA, which may apply given your caregiving role.
- Check if FMLA leave or intermittent FMLA applies to you as a caregiver — separate from the ADA request, and it has its own protections.
- Don't let the "end of month" deadline pressure you into resigning or agreeing to anything verbally before you've talked to someone whose job it is to protect your interests here.
You mentioned needing to be vague because of monitoring — that's a genuinely stressful thing to have to manage on top of everything else. I hear that.
How are you doing right now, today? Not the job situation — you.