Apple chip leader Johny Srouji addressed rumors of his impending
exit in a memo to staff on Monday, saying he doesn’t plan on
leaving the company anytime soon. “I love my team, and I love my
job at Apple, and I don’t plan on leaving anytime soon,” he wrote.
Bloomberg reported on Saturday that Srouji had told CEO Tim
Cook that he was considering leaving, citing people with knowledge
of the matter.
It wasn’t rumors, plural. It was one report, on Saturday, from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, and Srouji just called bullshit on it.
What a colossal fuck-up for Gurman and Bloomberg. There’s no possible scenario where Srouji was threatening to leave Apple for a competitor on Saturday and telling his staff (in a memo meant to leak to the press) “I love my job at Apple, and I don’t plan on leaving anytime soon” Monday morning.
The most gracious interpretation for Gurman and Bloomberg is that Srouji had expressed this to Cook, at some point in the recent past, and Cook addressed whatever it took to keep Srouji on board. But even in that scenario, they ran a story Saturday that was wrong at the time it was published.
If someone wanted to sow seeds of doubt among Apple employees in
an effort to help their own poaching efforts, there are at least
three publications who would have no problem offering an anonymous
microphone to that person.
I.e., the source for this story about Srouji being unhappy at Apple and considering leaving for a competitor was aligned with one of those competitors, and Gurman and his editors Bloomberg said “Sure, we’ll print that.” Meta, of course, is the competitor that comes to mind.
It speaks to Gurman’s personal and Bloomberg’s institutional influence that Srouji and Apple saw the need to shoot the bogus narrative down in public like this. I can’t remember the last time an Apple executive saw the need to send an intended-to-leak memo like this to shoot down one bogus story. After last week, though, this one couldn’t be ignored.
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Here’s a fun post by Andrew Plotkin. He’s a late riser, so the shortest day of the year, which is on the solstice, means nothing to him. He’s interested in the date of the earliest sunset, because that means his sunlight hours will be increasing after that date. He calls it the Nighthawk’s Solstice and figures that it’s today, December 8.
But there’s some ambiguity:
It’s a bit tricky to pin down which day this is. There’s a million ad-encrusted sites which show you sunset times, but they mostly work in minutes, which means there’s a stretch of days which are “the earliest”. It’s the bottom of a long flat curve.
He could avoid the ads by going to this US Naval Observatory website. But that won’t solve the long flat curve problem. He’s run into the same problem I did a couple of years ago when I was trying to position the “Sunrise” and “Sunset” labels on my sunlight plots.
As I said back then:
Because the USNO data reports the sunrises and sunsets to the nearest minute, the minimum value of sunrise and maximum value of sunset last for several days. I want the labels to be centered within those stretches.
What’s true for the earliest sunrise and latest sunset is also true for the latest sunrise and earliest sunset. My solution for positioning the labels was the same as Andrew’s solution for fixing the date of Nighthawk’s Solstice: picking the date in the middle of the flat stretch.
Since I’ve been using Mathematica a lot lately, I wondered if I could do better. And I can. Mathematica has Sunrise and Sunset functions that return the dates and times to the nearest second. So I made this short notebook to find the latest sunrise and earliest sunset for Naperville, Illinois, where I live:
It first sets the location for all the calculations to the Nichols Library in downtown Naperville and circles the location on a satellite view. It then uses the DateRange and DateObject functions to build a list of dates from the beginning of December to the middle of January.
Passing that list of dates to Sunrise and Sunset returns an EventSeries for each. The Values property for these series extracts just the time and date for each sunrise and sunset. Finally, using MaximalBy pulls out the sunrise with the latest time. Similarly, using MinimalBy for the sunsets gets the sunset with the earliest time.
As you can see, Andrew’s eyeball estimate of December 8 as the earliest sunset is correct.1 So today is (or was—I’m typing this after sunset) Nighthawk’s Solstice.
A few comments:
If you look carefully at the documentation for Sunrise and Sunset, you’ll see that they have lots of options for zeroing in on exactly what kind of sunrise or sunset you’re calculating. Are you looking for when the middle of the sun is at the horizon? The upper limb? The lower limb? And are you accounting for refraction? What about elevation? As you can see from the code, I’m accepting Mathematica’s defaults for all of those options. I’m not especially worried about any imprecision that might creep in because of this. I don’t care about the exact rise and set times, only in how they change from day to day. As long as I’m consistent in the method of calculation, the dates of the minimum and maximum should be correct.
Since I’ve brought up refraction, you might well argue that Mathematica’s calculations of sunrise and sunset to the nearest second is bullshit. The refractive index of air changes with the weather, so you’ll never know sunrise or sunset with that kind of precision. I would just say that Sunrise and Sunset use consistent assumptions that allow the calculations to proceed, real world observations notwithstanding.
If you’re wondering why the latest sunrise and earliest sunset don’t match up with the winter solstice, you should look into the equation of time. Today, solar noon here in Naperville was about 15 minutes before the noon on our watches.2 Sunrise and sunset are about equally spaced on either side of solar noon, so that means sunrise was about 4 hours and 53 minutes before watch noon and sunset was about 4 hours and 22 minutes after watch noon. It is that difference between solar and watch time that makes the earliest sunset happen before the solstice and the latest sunrise happen after.
At least it’s correct for Naperville. It could be off by a day for other locations. ↩
Some of this difference is due to the equation of time and some is due to Naperville being in the eastern part of the US/Central time zone. ↩
There have always been “director’s cuts” and “extended cuts” of films, particularly in the era of the DVD and Blu-Ray, when a film’s distributor could slap in a few scenes that were cut out of the theatrical because the movie would be too long, or too laggy, or both, herald it as an “Unrated Director’s Cut” and eke out a few more bucks from the movie’s fans. Most of the time, this additional material did not change the course of the film in any substantive way — even the extended cuts of The Lord of the Rings trilogy mostly only added detail, with only one significant deviation between cuts that I can think of (that being the final disposition of Saruman).
Then there is The Kingdom of Heaven. The changes between the theatrical release, out in May of 2005, and the Director’s Cut, released on DVD in December of that year, are significant enough that in many ways they are different movies. The backstory of the hero is significantly changed, as is his relationship to characters shown early in the film; previously unknown children show up to play significant roles in the plot; and the final disposition of at least one major character in the film is entirely changed. Ridley Scott, who directed the film, called the extended version “the one that should have been released.”
So why wasn’t it? Well, because the extended version was three hours and ten minutes long, and in 2005, really only two filmmakers not relegated to arthouse status could get away with three hour films. One was Peter Jackson, whose non-extended The Return of the King clocked in at three hours and twenty minutes, and the other was Jim Cameron, who spent three hours and fifteen minutes sinking the Titanic. Everyone else, even Ridley Scott, needed their films shorter, preferably not longer than two hours, thirty minutes. The theatrical cut of The Kingdom of Heaven? Two hours, twenty-four minutes. Scott, no stranger to “director’s cuts,” (see the multiple extended versions of Blade Runner that are out in the world), waited for the home video release for the longer cut.
Most cineastes, fans of the film and apparently Ridley Scott himself will tell you that the extended cut of this film is the one to see, but today I am going to file a modified minority report. I think the theatrical release is perfectly good — and indeed in some places better than the extended version — and it’s the version that I end up rewatching, not the lauded longer version.
In both versions of this tale, the following is true: A French blacksmith named Balian (Orlando Bloom, trying to make the transition to serious actor after his franchise hits) is grieving the death of his wife when a noble named Godfrey shows up, declares himself Balian’s father, and bids him join his entourage as they journey to the Holy Land, which is, momentarily at least, between crusades. Balian passes, but then, one significant crime later, he’s on his way.
In the Holy Land, Balian quickly finds favor with the Jerusalem’s Christian king Baldwin, who is managing a tenuous peace with Saladin, his Muslim counterpart; he also quickly befriends Sibylla (Eva Green), Baldwin’s sister. Sibylla’s husband Guy dislikes Balian, which is not great because Baldwin is dying and Guy will be king soon, and when he is king, he’s going to pick a fight with Saladin. Devotees of history will know how this went for him, and it goes similarly in the movie. Suddenly it falls to Balian to defend Jerusalem from Saladin’s forces.
Now, going all the way back to my days as a professional film critic (now — lord — 35 years ago), I’ve always warned people never to confuse cinematic historical dramas with what actually happened in history, even when, as is the case here, an actual historic event (the Siege of Jerusalem) is being portrayed. Given the choice of historical accuracy and engaging drama, filmmakers will go for drama every single time.
This is absolutely the case here; in both versions of The Kingdom of Heaven, the very broad strokes of history are (generally) correct, but almost all the details are fictional as hell. The extended cut does not gain any substantial accuracy for being longer; indeed it takes a couple of opportunities to be even more historically incorrect because it’s interesting for the story. Balian did exist! He did defend Jerusalem! Everything else you should consider as being subject to artistic license.
With that noted, the drama portion is solid — the story of Balian, from humble beginnings to defense of Jerusalem, is engaging, and Orlando Bloom is on point personifying him. 2005 was still an era where people were trying to make Bloom happen as a leading man, a thing that didn’t get much traction outside of him being an elf or a pirate. I don’t think that’s Bloom’s fault, and definitely not here. He’s working as hard as he can to sell it, and he’s holding his own against folks like Liam Neeson, Jeremy Irons, David Thewlis and Edward Norton. If there’s any flaw in the character, it’s one noted by other characters in the film: He’s possibly too good (in a moral sense) for the world he’s in. But that’s the fault of the writers, not Bloom.
Where the film really shines for me, however, is the overall political milieu of the film. Surprise: the Holy Land has been a place of contention for millennia, a fact that (to put it mildly) continues to this day. The Kingdom of Heaven doesn’t shy away from the complexity of having a single place desired and claimed by, and fought over, both the Christians and Muslims. There are lots of places where the film could have easily tipped over into jingoism — this was the early 2000s, when the US’s 9/11 scars were still fresh, and we, a nominally-secular but de facto Christian country, had boots on the ground in Muslim nations — and bluntly it might have been substantially more successful financially if it had been.
Scott and screenwriter William Monaghan didn’t take that route, instead showing (among other things) the Muslim leader Saladin (Ghassan Massoud) as a man of integrity and moral force, keeping the hotheads in his own host in line, and showing respect and even kindness, first to King Baldwin, and then to Balian. The Christians in the film run the gamut, from honorable to despicable, and all of their range is given context in the story. Again, the story should not be seen as accurate history. But as an examination of how the high ideals of religion can run aground in the ambition of base humans, it has some striking moments.
Add to this the fact that Ridley Scott has a knack for visuals that has been near-unparalleled for more than 50 years, and you have a film that is a joy to look at.
To come back to the issue of the theatrical release vs the extended cut, here’s my thought on that: the extended cut is better for understanding the wider story Scott and Monaghan were trying to capture, but the theatrical cut is better paced and presented, and is a more engaging cinematic experience. “More” isn’t always better; often it’s just more. I’ve seen the extended cut and, having seen it and internalized the bits that aren’t in the shorter version, I can keep them in the ledger of my awareness while I’m enjoying the version of the film that actually, you know, moves at a compelling pace.
This is caveated with the acknowledgement that I saw the theatrical version first, liked it perfectly well, and then saw the extended version; it’s possible that if I had seen the extended version first I might prefer it more. But honestly I don’t know if I would have. Bluntly, I want my movies to feel like movies, not like a slightly-compacted miniseries.
That said, both versions are worth seeing, even if only one is going to be on my repeat-viewing list. I appreciate Ridley Scott making a handsome movie about a complicated plot of land, no less so now than in the time the film is set, and not pretending that, either then or now, there is anything easy or simple about the struggles there. I don’t think this film will convert anyone who wants to argue otherwise. But I’m glad Scott made the attempt.
I usually buy only milk and yogurt. Last week I bought a little carton of coffee cream (18%). This morning I enjoyed cream both in my coffee and on my oatmeal.
It's been a pretty good six months. I probably won't get around to trying to write a summary. I've been intermittently reading you all, although not commenting.
Here at latitude 53 sunset is at 4:15 pm today. I don't enjoy the long nights. Only two more weeks to the solstice!
Apple could ultimately have to pay up to an estimated 637 million
euros to address the damage suffered by 14 million iPhone and iPad
users in the Netherlands.
That’s about €45/user.
The lawsuit dates back to 2022, when two Dutch consumer
foundations (Right to Consumer Justice and App Store Claims)
accused Apple of abusing its dominant market position and charging
developers excessive fees. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of
Dutch iPhone and iPad users, and it claimed that Apple’s 30
percent commission inflated prices for apps and in-app purchases.
I’m curious what these consumer foundations would consider a “fair” (and thus legal) commission rate.
This all comes back to the argument that Apple’s App Store commission inflates prices. A recent Apple-funded (and Apple-promoted) study suggests this is not true — that with lower commissions mandated by the DMA, prices paid by consumers stayed the same and the difference went to the developers. That’s good if you’re a developer, but it’s not the argument being made by these consumer advocate groups.
That said, I pointed out just the other day that Tiimo, a to-do app that Apple just named as the iPhone app of the year in the 2025 App Awards, charges about 20 percent less for subscriptions on its website compared to its in-app subscriptions. An Apple-funded, Apple-promoted study showing that the App Store’s commissions don’t raise prices ought to be taken with a few grains of salt.
Apple argued that the Dutch court did not have jurisdiction to
hear the case because the EU App Store is run from Ireland, and
therefore the claims should be litigated in Ireland. Apple said
that if the Dutch court was able to hear the case, it could lead
to fragmentation with multiple similar cases across the EU, plus
it argued that customers in the Netherlands could have downloaded
apps while in other EU member states.
I know Apple wants this litigated in Ireland because the Irish government sees Apple as an ally, not an adversary, but it does seem contrary to the idea of a single market if a company doing business in the EU is subject to different antitrust laws from each of the EU’s 27 member states.
It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past. Here are four updates from past letter-writers.
Thank you again for taking the time to respond to my letter. I really appreciated your advice, and I’m also really grateful for the commenters. I screenshotted a lot of their kind words to reread when I was second guessing myself.
So … I did end up quitting that job after a month without having something lined up. Things spiraled pretty quickly after I got your response. I was repeatedly assigned tasks I had no experience in, asked to cover more work areas that my boss was supposed to handle, and (on multiple occasions!) told to present to outside vendors five minutes before a meeting on products I knew nothing about. Any time I would ask my boss for clarification on expectations or process, I would get vague non-answers or forwarded an outdated Powerpoint that didn’t address my question.
I started having near daily panic attacks, and I really felt in my gut that this was not the right role for me and it would not get better. I decided to trust my instincts (and blow through my savings), so I quit. Initially, I felt terrible about doing so after such a short amount of time but when I told my boss, her response was: “I totally get it. I hate it here. I’m actually quitting on Monday.” So that validated my decision!
I ended up getting another job about six weeks later, and I’ve been here for just about five months now. I’m happy to report that I absolutely love this job! My boss is super smart, really supportive, and a nice person to work for. The work is interesting and my coworkers are all on top of their game. I completed a huge project a few weeks ago that was really successful, and I already have a reputation across teams that I’m a smart, dependable colleague. I’ve been waking up every day excited to log on to work.
It’s almost unbelievable that after six months of turmoil (between being fired + that nightmare job + hundreds of applications + countless interviews) that it all ended up working out. I really feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be.
I took your advice to keep responses to people’s comments about the temperature short and sweet (“it is!” “I know, right?”), and it worked great. Something I should have brought up in the original email was that I was worried people would think I was wasting the organization’s resources by unnecessarily cranking up the heat. Like many nonprofits, we’re on a tight budget and our historic building takes up a lot of it. I also realize that I was displacing a lot of anxiety about general job performance at that time onto this question; focusing on what matters and upping my game has helped me feel better about needing to use a lot of heat to do my job.
Plot twist: by the time cold weather has come around this year, the heater has broken! The board member who maintains our very old heating system volunteers as an ice climbing instructor throughout the winter, so it won’t get fixed till spring. I was given a fan heater for my office. While they’re supposedly more energy efficient than most space heaters, it’s ironic that I worried so much about a perception that I was wasting energy while the solution my employer picked is notoriously wasteful.
I have not had to move into a more direct role with Michael, the brilliant but challenging exec at our direct-service educational nonprofit. My boss, Dwight, has been out on family leave, and supposedly Michael is now supervising training, but another VP, Pam, let us all know — separately — that if we have any issues, feel free to come to her and she will deal with Michael. But now Pam is doing three jobs, and balls are dropping like it’s New Year’s on Times Square.
One interesting incident: Michael is now copied on emails for our department, and we were managing a training with a few staff out. Michael chimed in: “We can just cancel it.” I took a deep breath and emailed back professionally that we can’t cancel a training a few days before, who it would impact, and how we have it handled. “Thanks, though!” And he just replied, “Wonderful!” Another trainer, Jim, told me, “I panicked when I saw that. But I thought, “That’s okay, MyName will handle that!”
We are struggling — we can’t get staff much less qualified staff, our funding is getting impacted, our client population has more and more needs. I have decided to move back to the classroom and have let Pam know, and we are working it out. My first love is being with the kids, and I know there will be challenges but I think I will be a lot happier.
Fortunately for me, the situation mostly resolved on its own. I do think she may have noticed me flinching once or twice and took better care to not cough directly on me. However, I did simply just get used to her constant coughing — and learned that it was a smoker’s cough not an illness, which put me at a slight ease regarding my own health.
Ultimately, the company went through a merger and all the executive leadership left over the last few months, including my boss. I was sad! Coughing aside (and really, she did curtail it greatly) she was a strong mentor and set me up for success under the new team.
A guide on how (and why) to quit Spotify. “I am extremely glad I [switched away from Spotify]; it’s been a minute since I’ve felt something approaching genuine delight in discovering a new tech service.”
One of the coolest things I have gotten to do over the past years is to talk to people who are in the trenches trying to protect American democracy. I’ve done a number of interviews here on Substack, but because I’m hoping to have roots in as many different social media platforms as possible in this rapidly changing world, most have been on my YouTube channel.
We’re starting today to post those American Conversations interviews on Substack, a medium that gives me some space to explain to people interested why a particular interview might resonate in this moment. These are completely separate from the nightly Letters from an American and will have the words “American Conversations” in the title.
Linked below is an interview I did with lawyer Marc Elias of Democracy Docket last week about the case he’s arguing before the Supreme Court tomorrow: National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, which you’ll probably see referred to in the media with the alphabet soup name of “NRSC v. FEC.” Elias explains why this case about funding elections is so important and how it fits into a larger assault on democracy.
The bats are out of the bag — Wanderers is hitting in a limited edition from Earthling Publications. Landing Spring 2026. Written by me (obvs). New awesome intro from Paul Tremblay. Amazing art by Francois Vaillancourt.
It’s 7×10″, slipcased, over 700 pages, full color printing, smyth-sewn binding, 3-foil stamping to the leatherbound cover, signed by all contributors.
Let’s just get that link out of the way right now —
Note: orders start tomorrow (Tuesday the 9th) and there’s also a bundle available till Weds with Robert McCammon’s MINE (one of my favorite books, so that’s an honor right there).
This is definitely a book I hope people find worthy of a special edition like this — I’m excited for the chance to have it take on a new, fancier shape for those who might like such a thing. It’s a book certainly close to my heart, too, so maybe it’s close to yours.
Stickertop.art is a massive collection of the tops of laptop computers adorned with stickers.
Laptop stickers are more than decoration, they’re a form of self-expression. Each one is a snapshot of a moment, a place, and an attitude. But they’re fleeting; when the technology becomes outdated, the laptops along with the stories stuck to them often end up in the waste pile. I thought it was a shame for something so personal and creative to just disappear, so I created this site to preserve them.
It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past. Here are four updates from past letter-writers.
There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.
I’m afraid the ritual with the boss continues. I couldn’t find any way to say that the team might feel pressure to compliment her appearance without making it sound like I didn’t think she was good-looking.
So I just caved to the pressure and decided to start talking up her career and telling her she’d be great for more senior roles so it doesn’t seem like I’m the only one not complimenting her. And to make more of a point of complimenting other team members so it’s not just all the boss all the time.
I did end up having problems with “family friendly” culture at my hospital, although not in the way I was expecting. The frostiness from my manager subsided pretty quickly, partly because I stopped seeing her!
Immediately after my orientation ended, I started getting called off for literally 90% of my shifts due to low census (too few patients on the floor). Unbeknownst to me, they had majorly over hired on the floor I worked on, and as a PRN employee I’m not guaranteed any work. However, it’s common courtesy in my experience to not hire if you don’t actually need the help, and there were many phrases like “we can use all the help we can get” and “we are always busy/slammed” thrown around in my interview, which makes me feel that they were not hiring/negotiating in good faith. It did not occur to me to include “must allow employee to work and subsequently get paid” to my list of “family-friendly” requirements!
We are very fortunate that my income is not keeping our lights on or anything, but we have had to restructure the budget a little to accommodate me rarely working. The closest similar job is about an hour away, which is not workable with our family … so I’m kind of stuck. I’m hoping things will pick up in the winter, and I’m looking at cross-training to other departments to potentially be able to work more consistently.
Most importantly, I delivered a healthy little boy in September, and he is a joy. I am scheduled to work again starting in November, but I suspect I will get more time off with him than I initially expected!
If/when I have to take another position, I will certainly not be disclosing any medical info during my interview. Thanks for the advice and the solidarity of the commenters!
My staff member is doing great. To recap a couple of responses I gave in the comments of the original post: I had a chat with her of the form “how can I support you?” She had been employing a few of her own tactics like changing text colors and circulating things with others before sending things to me. I made sure the managers of other staff were aware and on board with them providing help.
But I was happily proven wrong about our org’s appetite for AI, and we actually now have a limited set of tools approved. She (and others, including me!) are loving the help it provides.
Roses have thorns, however, so now I have a new challenge. Without going into detail, I’ve received AI-generated work (from several people) that’s just not on point. I’m sure I’m not alone here. I wonder what the future looks like, since the reason why I pick up on this is because I cut my teeth in the pre-AI dark ages. How do we teach critical thinking and analysis using AI without requiring work that will negate the productivity benefits it provides? I’m genuinely fascinated and excited to see how this will all play out, and keen to hear the stories and advice from your readers.
This particular staff member will be fine, though, because I have already seen that she has the skills required. I’m pretty sure she’s about to get promoted too :-)
On treat day, my nosy coworker said something like, “I’ll be setting up for the potluck in the staff room at 9, so feel free to bring your … whatever you brought … any time before then!” to which I nodded noncommittally. It didn’t come up again.
I’m relatively new at the job (last year was my first year), and while I haven’t experienced it myself, our principal has a reputation for taking criticism poorly and doubling down when she feels someone is challenging her authority/judgement. So I didn’t feel I had enough social capital to challenge the whole premise of “buy treats for your better-paid coworkers week.” But the good news is that my nosy coworker retired at the end of the school year, so I think going forward I should be able to get back to my plan of just quietly not signing up for anything.
It was very validating to hear folks in the comments confirming that the whole thing was completely unreasonable!
The third array of recent standalone tabletop roleplaying games using the Forged in the Dark rules system based on John Harper's Blades in the Dark from One Seven Design Studio.
I’m working on the 2025 gift guide right now, but I wanted to separately shout-out my favorite gift recommendation of the year: Kelli Anderson’s incredible popup book about typography & the alphabet, Alphabet in Motion (Amazon).
Two years later and I have a doozy of an update about this company.
So, after the last letter, I was working at a new company that happened to employ a lot of people who had left the Email Layoffers. We kept in touch with a lot of people at that company and it was pretty quiet for a year or so, though they kept eliminating positions and letting people go every few months. They did begin to do layoffs over Zoom meetings after my letter got published.
First a small, petty update: I went to an industry conference over the summer. While talking to some colleagues from a leading organization in our field (one you would not want to burn bridges with) when I mentioned I used to work for the Email Layoffers. They told me that a year prior, their org signed with EL as a client, and this was such a big deal that the co-CEOs who stepped in to “save the company” decided to personally manage the project. After onboarding them and planning out the project, the co-CEOs ghosted. They missed meetings, dodged emails, and didn’t update the communication documents. Then, halfway through the project, the co-CEOs finally responded to an email … and informed my colleague that they were changing the contract to instead produce a much cheaper, lower-effort product that was completely at odds with the results the org actually wanted. Think: they ordered bespoke teapots, and they were told they’d be receiving dropshipped flasks instead. Apparently, even the dropshipped flasks had quality issues, and were delivered late. Unsurprisingly, they did not renew their contract.
Around this same time, the co-CEOs were asking the manager of one of the production teams to teach them how to use chatGPT. Normal enough, if a little late for our tech-adjacent industry. Except they wanted him to show them how to make chatGPT do his job. At one point, the CEO’s called this employee to one of their houses so he could talk them through a chatGPT process. They were being weirdly dodgy about why they wanted to learn chatGPT so suddenly.
Then, a few months later, our old coworkers told us The Big News.
The team responsible for the majority of the company’s output was concerned about the way our industry was changing in the face of AI. They were interested in taking on different work and had made a plan to upskill team members in a different, more AI-proof skillset, their managers supported it, and so they scheduled a time to meet with the CEOs and propose their plan. They also partnered with the manager who was teaching the CEOs how to use AI.
Alison, they laid off every single member of their production team and that team’s managers, and I am not exaggerating. In a zoom meeting where they were all planning to propose changes to the department. This included people who had worked for the company for 10-15 years, and people who were on or had just returned from maternity leave. The company right now is two CEOs, a single marketing person, an HR worker, sales, and project managers. They sold work they literally had nobody to complete. Then, over the next few weeks, they reached out to almost every single person they had laid off, asking if they could do some contract work so they could actually deliver the work they had sold. They misspelled people’s names in half of these emails. As far as I know, no one accepted the offer. Eventually they listed a few positions … for $10k-20k less than the old team was paid.
After that, of course, the Glassdoor reviews came in.
And the CEOs started responding to them.
One employee left a review, detailing that they had just fired half of their employees and planned to replace them with contractors and AI. The CEOs responded with a typo-laden multi-paragraph rebuttal that was weird and aggressive. It came off as very petty and uncomfortable. They also responded to a review that said “[CEOs] will lay you off right before Christmas without warning” saying, they “wish this employee had come to them with their concerns before leaving this review.” Um, how could they? You laid them off! They also called Glassdoor “a safe haven for slanderous claims and anonymous opinions,” which of course has become a meme among us ex-employees. Then a smattering of vague 5-star reviews came in, clearly from current employees told to help with the DIY damage control efforts. An industry publication wrote about the layoffs from the lens of companies going all-in on AI without thinking about the consequences, interviewing one of the people who were laid off. The surviving sales team posts on LinkedIn about hustle culture, with weird passive-aggressive tones about people who “can’t make it in the industry.” (We work in a pretty chill industry. You don’t have to hustle that hard).
Since then, the CEOs have been unusually quiet online. More 1-star reviews came in on Glassdoor and they stopped responding. They’ve trashed their reputation in our industry and we’re all wondering whether they’ll try to sell or just shut down. We will see!
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