If this isn’t the worst way to find out you’ve lost your job, I honestly don’t know what is. In a situation that gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “rude awakening,” now ex-Twitter employee Bart Teeuwisse discovered he’d lost his job not via his employer, but rather via a news headline and a failed login attempt.
Taking to Twitter to share his misfortune, Teeuwisse, a senior software engineer who had been part of the team since 2011, posted two screen shots — one of an Apple Finance alert and another of a “No Access” message on his mobile Twitter feed. The accompanying caption is short but poignant: “I’ve been impacted by $TWTR‘s layoffs. This is how I found out this morning.”
https://twitter.com/bartt/status/653946266938818561/photo/1
Before we collectively condemn Twitter for their complete lack of tact, Teeuwisse does note that his former employer called and left him a voicemail, but that he first checked his social media and his news updates before hearing the message.
https://twitter.com/bartt/status/653984707760156672
Teeuwisse also points out that he received a phone call rather than an in-person meeting because he works from home, which one Twitter user suggested may have been the impetus for his separation from the company. The engineer, however, vehemently denies that his working arrangement had anything to do with the decision.
@bartt @J_ I am curious, do you think you were selected because of your WFH arrangement?
— Aaron Fisher (@aaronmfisher) October 13, 2015
In an internal email to employees, ex-CEO turned interim-CEO turned current CEO Jack Dorsey wrote, “We are moving forward with a restructuring of our workforce so we can put our company on a stronger path to grow. We feel strongly that Engineering will move much faster with a smaller and nimbler team, while remaining the biggest percentage of our workforce. And the rest of the organization will be streamlined in parallel.”
But Dorsey stressed that the decision to lay off 8 percent of the firm’s workforce would be done “with the utmost respect for each and every person” and that the social media platform would “go to great lengths to take care of each individual by providing generous exit packages and help finding a new job.”
For veteran engineer Teeuwisse, however, he may not need Twitter’s help. His original tweet about his job situation has now been retweeted nearly 4,000 times and favorited nearly 2,000 times, and a number of comments on his Tweet have offered him new positions. For his part, though, Teeuwisse says that he will first be taking some time off before deciding how to proceed in his career.
