The Deorg

I got my first job in 1995 so i have been working for about 30 years now. This is the story of the worst thing to ever happen to me at work. Which, in the scheme of things, is not that bad compared to what some people have gone through. I do realize that. But it’s still pretty bad. It’s also a very interesting and wild story, and I think I have enough distance from it now that I can tell it without raging out or getting sued. Let’s try it and see.

I had been working at my job for a long time and was used to it, the good and the bad, both of which there was plenty of, when the CEO retired. An interim CEO was installed and for reasons passing understanding, he was allowed to implement the following re-org scheme: two departments, not the whole company, just the two most vulnerable (ie., creative) departments, would have their job titles reassessed and their whole org charts rethought. Then the employees in those departments would have to apply for those jobs as if we were external applicants—ie., with cover letters and resumes, and go through the whole interview process. This was announced in November and it of course agitated people greatly. No one knew if this re-org was a sneaky way to do layoffs but it sure sounded that way.

As it turned out, in November, no actual work seemed to have been done on the project—it was just an idea. No one knew what the new job titles would be, and we got to about March before they were announced. During that period, a number of really good people found other jobs and quit, and many other people were so distracted and worried that productivity and morale dropped sharply. We spent a lot of time on things like resume writing workshops, which you can imagine did not improve morale. The newly hired HR rep who led that workshop looked aghast when the situation was explained to her—who knows why she thought she was teaching existing employees to revise their resumes, but she was startled at what the real reason turned out to be. She left the company very soon after.

When the re-org jobs were finally announced, it was clear that many were simply the old jobs with slightly different titles—they hadn’t been able to re-imagine certain jobs that had already been worked down to the bone of efficiency. Others had been significantly altered—my own had been expanded in scope and looked…really hard, but interesting, I guess. We were also ordered to apply for TWO jobs. There was some guff about widening our horizons and thinking beyond what we had always done, even though these jobs were all clearly earmarked for existing staff, and I would be applying for someone else’s job. I still have not been able to guess the real reason for telling us to do this, but I did what I was told and applied for the closest thing I could possibly do, which still looked like…I job someone else should and would be hired for. Also…we didn’t talk about it too much, but since these job descriptions were written for an audience of people who already worked there and were well-known to the bosses, you could sometimes tell who they were aiming to keep and who was supposed to be left standing when the music stopped. You didn’t want to be right but it was easy to guess—I was certainly right in my guesses.

We finally managed to get the applications submitted in May—after six months of fretfulness, gossip, attrition, and workshops to learn about behaviourial interviews. Then there was a long long silence, which of course freaked everyone out and lowered morale further. There were more resignations. One theory some people had was that they dragged out the process to lower headcount by rage attrition, but that seemed too intentional, and also eliminates some of the best, most motivated people, which seems wrong (not sure what it says about me). I think they were just disorganized.

Then the interviews began. It was a very long, very serious process: an interview with the head of HR, then with the departmental head, then a skills test, and then for some reason, an interview with the CEO. Because I had had to apply for two roles, I had to do it twice—two tests, and five interviews (they let me skip the second CEO interview). The chat with the CEO was actually really pleasant, but inside I was seething that he had wasted SIX MONTHS OF MY WORKING LIFE.

The worst was yet to come.

There was another long silence after the interviews were over. I was exhausted and dispirited—of course, we’d all been doing our rather hard and demanding and thankless jobs through all of this mishegas. I kept saying to everyone, “Nothing could be worse than what we’ve been through, it will be fine if I get let go.” But I didn’t—I got the role! The most logical one, on my old team with my old boss, and just an expanded scope. I was made full-time with benefits and a raise. I was really quite startled and even though I didn’t want to be full-time (I had always stayed contract for writing purposes), it all seemed rather nice.

Two really great people were let go in that process. That’s it—just two. It was the dumbest meanest thing, that they couldn’t have just shuffled our original roles slightly and packaged those people out without all that misery. Or just found work for them. I’m still mad about that.

After the contracts were signed, I was very eager to earn my new salary and do my brand-new much harder job. I started trying to schedule meetings with people I thought could collaborate with me to figure it all out but they seemed hesitant. I tried to urge them to talk to me, “Hey, this is going to be fun! We’ll all pitch in, like a quilting bee, and figure it out!” (I am fun to work with if you like that sort of thing; if not, not) and finally my boss just told me to cool it. We had officially re-organized but in actual fact, things wouldn’t be taking shape for another little while yet.

I was disappointed—I had really amped myself up to do a new hard thing—but of course it was easier to do the old thing so it wasn’t that disappointing. So I just did that for a few weeks and then it turned out that the interim CEO was being replaced with a new permanent CEO. The interim CEO left the company entirely and after a few more weeks it emerged that the new CEO hated the whole re-org and thought the new roles were dumb.

And then they un-did the whole f*cking thing.

After nine months of effort, all the people who quit in dismay, the two people who got let go, the resumes, the interviews, the hours and hours and hours of work and the FIVE INTERVIEWS AND TWO SKILLS TESTS, they put me and everyone back in our old jobs and re-instated the workflows we hadn’t really begun to change anyway. They also let go of the one new hire of the re-org, a sweet admin who had been with us less than two months and who had LEFT ANOTHER JOB for this garbage. It was all very chaotic for a period—I kept trying to call it the De-Org but it didn’t catch on— and then the company never officially addressed that re-org/de-org period again.

I’ve always known that capitalism didn’t care about me, but I thought capitalism cared about ITSELF—I thought business was an efficient machine. Not such a FAAFO model that would waste 100s of person hours to try out someone’s dumb idea and then lose interest after a while. And this would be the question I’d wonder if I heard this story—nobody ever asked for my raise back or the benefits or to put me back on contract and I certainly did not want to have a conversation with anyone with anyone about my status at the company so I left well enough alone. It was not a huge raise but it was a raise for doing nothing. Of course i got let go five years later but even that experience was better as a full-timer than it would have been if I’d gotten my way and stayed on contract.

I have absolutely no idea what the lesson is we can learn from this story.

Palette cleanser:

MS: I was watching a YouTube video by the author Brandon Sanderson…
RR: Is that the Wheel of Time guy?
MS: He finished the Wheel of Time series when Robert Jordan died, yeah.
RR: Robert Jordan died? When? I just met him last fall.
MS: You did not meet Robert Jordan last fall.
RR: I did meet him. I met him last September at Word on the Street.
MS: You didn’t meet him because he’s dead. (looking at his phone, googles, then holds it up) See, Robert Jordan died in 2007.
RR (peers at phone) Oh. Then who did I meet at WOTS?
MS: I don’t know who you met at WOTS, Rebecca. (puts phone down)
RR: Is he wearing a cape in that photo?
MS: It doesn’t matter. I don’t know. Maybe you met Robert J. Sawyer? Did you meet Robert J. Sawyer?
RR: I don’t know. What does he look like? Is he alive?
MS: He’s like 60 or so and alive. (googles) He looks like this. (holds out phone) Is that who you met?
RR (peers at phone) Huh, maybe. He was wearing a hat. Do you have a photo of him wearing like a baseball cap?
MS (googles, holds out phone) Like that?
RR: Oh yeah, that’s who l met. Robert J Sawyer. He was nice. Glad we cleared that up.