Grubhub Layoffs

A difficult day today, at work. While we were told that there would be restructuring and the potential for layoffs… I don’t think anyone anticipated the depth and degree of what happened today.

Yesterday (Thursday), we received an email telling folks to work from home – and that all our offices would be closed. Today, over the course of the morning, meetings were held with people who were informed they were let go.

Talking with coworkers via Slack, I learned a few telltale signs: if you lost access to GitHub, that was a sign you would be let go. Additionally, if you had a meeting prior to 10:30 AM, that was another sign (others who had a 10:30 meeting seemed to indicate you were “in the clear”).

The morning was a mixture of uncertainty and sadness. And watching colleague and coworkers showing up as having a “Deactivated account” in Slack.

Today was a pretty big hit for Grubhub – we lost an incredibly large amount of smart, talented, knowledgeable individuals. While the cuts happened across all levels, Engineering took a pretty big hit. There were several close coworkers from my team that were let go.

It’s a very big change, and something I’m still trying to wrap my head around. At the moment, it’s not about processing the change – it’s that I don’t even understand the change to begin with.

We lost a lot of good, good people. And there’s a large part of me that doesn’t understand why.

Related:
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