Butchers Bill

The other oddity of any layoff: the one piece of information that everyone desperately wants - who was let go - is pointedly withheld from staff.

On the day of, or perhaps for a day after - this is defensible. Some people have not been contacted - and you don't want to have situations where a person's fate is known to others before they are told. Nobody wants zombies.

But once all of those affected have been told, it would save a lot of time to just get a list out there. If for no other reason, than it will help productivity, since the entire staff won't be hopping around gossiping about "have you heard?" and "Do you know if...?"

It also clears out the misinformation.

Source, as it turns out, was right about most things - but they were wrong about west coast dev. Thespian and Pirate are safe - and thank God. NerdHaven would plow into months worth of relearning if those two weren't around to make sense of our data.

But the west coast QA was all but destroyed. Three out of four of their QAs were cut. Bizzaro, Toad, and BK.

They still lost devs, HellBoy is gone. And ZeDev.

HellBoy I will miss. They had a fantastic logical mind - I gather they were a handful to deal with in person, and there were questions about their code quality. But I always clicked with them. They made sure the feature I asked for was at least as good as I wanted - and frequently made it better.

ZeDev just makes me sad, they were out of the office on PTO - taking care of their kid. Really nice person, quiet. The kind of person who just gets it done without being all in your face like HellBoy.

This side of the wire, BigDog's team lost a dev slot, but it was FNG's slot, who'd already left us for another job. They won't backfill the slot, so Corporate still gets their pound of flesh, but nobody has to get walked out of the building.

Dragon lost Gooner, who I was hugely fond of - they were an encyclopedia of soccer knowledge and very entertaining.

The SMEs lost Ihaq and Balin - that was known.

Hockey2 is gone. The person who said they had better opportunities outside of NerdHaven, but stayed because they liked who they worked with.

Hockey1 is safe - and again, thank God. Nobody knows the plumbing better than they do.

Services lost four folks I don't know terribly well, but this is on top of having two put in their notice a few weeks earlier. I'm guessing those won't backfill, so the load on that group just got a hell of a lot heavier.

And we lost both of our documentation folks. So, software documentation (traditionally terrible) will now stop getting written at all.

All of this will make delivering our work take longer.

And while it is pessimistic to assume that only terrible things can follow, its where NerdHaven is right now. I truly felt we were getting momentum going into this next month - people were excited.

Now morale is in the toilet and will stay there for a month or so.

We gotta claw our way forward and be professionals. And I'm sure we will.

But we're gonna bitch first.