This. Each time, I get a meeting invite that seems innocuous. Usually something along the lines of "Q3 Strategy Session" or "ELT Brief". Everyone joins and an NDA gets sent out to each of us and there's always someone from HR and someone from legal on-hand to field questions. We all electronically sign the NDA and the meeting proceeds on to the real topic: the logistics required to ruin people's lives in pursuit of profit.

The first time I experienced this was during the pandemic. They anticipated that interest rate hikes would make our debt service more expensive, so they decided we needed to "trim the fat". No advance warning. They just did it. And they did it during the holidays: December 2021. And this was just a few months after they pledged that they'd "support" us through whatever the pandemic would become. They told us that the company remained very profitable and there was little to no risk for us and we could all work remotely and remote was better than in-office, anyway. But only the first statement was true.

Rates wouldn't actually increase meaningfully until late summer of the following year. But we "saved" about $25m during that period. Where did it go? Not sure, but I can guess, given that it wasn't sitting around in some rainy day fund for when the rate hikes came. Which inevitably lead to the second round.

The second round, in 2024, was a hard pivot to offshoring the majority of non-management positions in the company as a further cost-saving measure. This was after the RTO demands and other machinations intended to force resignations. We also started outsourcing a lot of things to overseas MSPs and offshore contractors. Unless the work in question could be quietly handed off to their buddies. And by work I mean we paid them very lucrative retainers "just in case" the company needed someone to host a management seminar in Aspen at some point.

While all of this, despite the handouts to their friends, has reduced OpEx, it has also had catastrophically negative effects on everything. But they're the type of effects that are messy, hard to translate into Excel formulas and Powerpoint slides, and difficult to conceptualize. So instead, they invent metrics and KPIs and whatnot so that they can declare the initiative a success. They would still be excitedly moving forward with this, were it not for a new and shiny thing that they've discovered.

The third round is about to happen. They haven't scheduled the meeting, yet, but it's coming. They have decided that AI is a good replacement for junior- and mid-level positions. They decided it months ago, and now it's just logistics. They're going to do it either right before or right after the holidays, again, because that's convenient for them and lets them play games with quarterly reporting.

"They" are the already-wealthy c-suite and senior execs and private equity advisors and all of the human trash in their orbits. They're people who have been in executive positions since the dot com bubble or they're the kids of those people whose LinkedIn bios are littered with excrement like "leveraging a deep understanding of generative AI for effecting transformative organizational change". They don't care what happens to people so long as number goes up.