> A tweet from Ambrosia's official Twitter states that the company is still in business
I worked at a small consulting shop that had one large client providing most of the work. There were rumours of problems with this client not having the funding to continue the upcoming projects. One day a couple people were let go which lead to rumours that serious layoffs were coming.
The next day the director sent out an email stating how everything was fine and while, two people were let go yesterday, we shouldn't expect any more layoffs.
The next week I was let go with about half of the remaining company and another layoff followed which reduced the company down to a shell.
I really don't think it was malice or lying. Most people are just optimists and want to believe that everything will turn out.
That being said, if I worked at a place again where I heard rumours going around I wouldn't wait to start looking for something new.
> I really don't think it was malice or lying. Most people are just optimists and want to believe that everything will turn out.
I might say that has the sense of a central-bank chairman saying "the market will be fine" in the middle of a downturn: even though he has information that clearly states otherwise, saying anything negative will only make the market worse. Consequentialism, pure and simple.
In a business's case, you want to lay off exactly as many employees as are needed, with the least essential going first. If employees think the ship is sinking, usually you'll lose more employees than you would have otherwise laid off, and usually those will be the most essential (the good strategists, after all, are the most aware of the zeitgeist.)
Once you let any employees go, the barn door is open. Unless the consensus is that those employees (or employee) were dead weight, resumes are already up on Craigslist and job searches are in progress.
The CEO called an all hands and gave the canonical "we're too
far ahead of our time but now we're out of cash" spiel.
Somebody raised his hand and asked "just to clarify, does that mean we
put our stuff in boxes and don't come back tomorrow?"
The CEO said "Well, actually, we don't have money for
boxes. We do have garbage bags, or you could go to
Safeway (supermarket) and get boxes."
I worked at a small consulting shop that had one large client providing most of the work. There were rumours of problems with this client not having the funding to continue the upcoming projects. One day a couple people were let go which lead to rumours that serious layoffs were coming.
The next day the director sent out an email stating how everything was fine and while, two people were let go yesterday, we shouldn't expect any more layoffs.
The next week I was let go with about half of the remaining company and another layoff followed which reduced the company down to a shell.
I really don't think it was malice or lying. Most people are just optimists and want to believe that everything will turn out.
That being said, if I worked at a place again where I heard rumours going around I wouldn't wait to start looking for something new.