Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for July 15, 2021

Joan, ask Zack if Intel has anymore openings.

Had Bell Labs been shut down yet?

That is a date punchline though!

Not fired…laid off…the job no longer exists…not downsized…dumbsized…morale plummets when throwing employees away…reminds me of the worst job I ever held six years ago.

Sad state of affairs

Isn’t reverse sexual harassment just plain sexual harassment?

He’s saving the best till last. Kim should be coming up any day now.

Joan, better Jett…

(¬_¬)

This is what makes me glad to have the job I do. My employer has never downsized. People have left for other reasons, but never an impersonal “thinning of the herd.” I read recently that good leaders would rather trim the bottom line to save people; poor leaders trim people to save the bottom line. Guess what that makes Bernie?

Makes me glad that I’m mostly self-employed.

All those people leaving means the company will be more profitable and therefore Bernie’s profitability bonus will cut in and all the money saved by cutting personnel costs will cover that payout. American capitalism at its “finest.”

Is it my imagination, or does she have the appearance of a woman from a Jules Feiffer cartoon? (Especially in the profile view in the first and last panels.)

Layoffs are terrible even for those who survive the axe…they are expected to pick up the slack with no expectation of increased compensation…

Reminds me of a small company I got laid off by. They kept their relatives and friends… their choices decimated the engineering department. They ended up with only 25% of their engineering staff left – and less than 10% of its experience and credentials. No surprise, they quit winning contracts as government agencies realized that they did not have the ability to actually do the work…

The company started lying about who still worked for them. I got a call from a fed with whom I’d worked who was suspicious when he received a new quote from the company that listed me as a supporting asset (while I was no longer working on his current contract after being laid off). I suggested he just toss that quote…

The company was belly-up a couple years later, when their last contracts were either terminated or not renewed. Somehow, its managers still blame me and the others they laid off for their misfortune…

Beats getting laid off/downsized two months before you are eligible for your pension.

Times have changed, now tech workers are getting multiple offers, signing bonuses, work from home with a company paid office on and on. Those of you on the receiving end of all the goodness, put some aside for the bad times, because they will come.

Yeah, NOW she says she’d have dated him.

The Schindler’s List reference is poignant for those who remember the movie.

Every time Schindler thought he had the “problem” solved, he’d meet some More people who were about to be killed.

When he was hired, I told our Pakistani intern to keep his resume in circulation without going into details of how bad off the company was. Four weeks later, I heard him being called into the owner’s office to get laid off. Five minutes later, I heard my name …

As someone who’s been unemployed for far too long, I hate to admit, but this storyline is far too depressing to continue following…