Layoffs are never pleasant, but this CEO is notorious for his callousness, and now he wants to learn something new.
The cover image is a symbolic image.
Who will fire 900 people via video conference? Nobody likes being fired, but there are methods that are particularly painful. If the other person lacks any decency to make at least some effort to soften the blow, a situation arises that no one will quickly forget.
This happened to 900 employees (around one in ten of the workforce) at the financial services provider better.com shortly before Christmas 2021. During a video conference he announced to those gathered:
If you join this video call, you will be part of the unfortunate group that will be fired. Your job here ends immediately. You will receive an email from the HR department.
If you would like to see a recording of the approximately three-minute call, you can still find it on X, formerly Twitter.
After that, events came to a head: a wave of outrage broke out, a letter was written and the CEO disappeared from the scene. Now he’s back and has something to tell everyone, as he announced in an interview with Techcrunch.
Incidentally, the same thing happened to this company boss, although he did not stumble over a mass layoff but rather over something else and lost his company.
Boss ruined his company in 59 seconds on Twitch – what happened to him?
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Is the CEO still at the top of the company today? Yes, Vishal Garg is still or much more responsible again. After the scandal, a storm of criticism broke out over the company and especially him. The board then withdrew him from the firing line and Garg wrote an open letter asking, among other things, to apologize for the action.
He had previously spoken badly about employees in leaked messages, which further tarnished his reputation as a boss.
What does he want to do differently now? He recently went through training courses for managers in order to learn more. Vishal Garg wants to become a nicer boss and earn the trust of the remaining employees: “I worked very, very hard on it.”
However, there were still waves of layoffs in 2022 and 2023. Since the infamous video call, a total of around 4,000 employees have had to leave. Maybe their last conversations were a little more personal and conciliatory.
A boss from the USA would probably have preferred never to hire a certain person. Because anyone who was noticed here with their first paycheck from a security company in their hand could have done bad things. There was a spy hiding behind the supposedly qualified and committed young software engineer. The new colleague is a cybercriminal from North Korea: computer security company from the USA escapes attack