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    Not just the CMs. And in fact, this time around the CM team was hit much lighter than many other teams, because of the critical role that it plays here. But ultimately, decisions needed to be made to reach a certain target, and there was no way to protect the CM team entirely. Nobody has more respect for the CM team than I do. I'm feeling the cuts very personally today. I was blessed to work with them, and once they're on my team, that's forever, and I will celebrate every time I see them. Commented Oct 16, 2023 at 17:56
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    @Philippe You're missing the point (and the "CMs and other employees" bit). The point is that over the past few years, the company has fired many of the outward-facing staff members who actually believed in, and advocated for the community. With this last round of employees being fired, the list of remaining community advocates (that, more importantly, also has the faith of the community) has shrunk. You claim to believe in the community, but we're left with a continuously shrinking list of staff members that both engage with, and more importantly, understand and are willing to discuss Commented Oct 16, 2023 at 18:04
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    how to improve the situation for the community. Commented Oct 16, 2023 at 18:04
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    @Philippe "and once they're on my team, that's forever" - forever? You mean until they're laid off. I'm really sorry, but your actions (of the company which you're key part of) conflict with the nice words. Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 8:54
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    "Nobody has more respect for the CM team than I do. I'm feeling the cuts very personally today." And yet, they were made, and (by your own admission) not for performance-related reasons. Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 10:17
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    @Philippe We can understand that decisions have been made to reach a certain target. That's a given. What we don't understand is what this "target" was set this way. However, it is the company that sets those targets themselves. Why the target was set in such a manner that it forces CM's to be removed makes one wonder if the target is actually in line with the stuff that is actually needed to make this site work, or is more focused on "profits" here and now. Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 11:19
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    We can be angry about this (I sure am), but it's disingenuous and potentially insulting to call it a "firing." Generally, employees at fault get fired; folks who get laid off would probably never describe it as getting fired. Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 20:10
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    @Stuckat1337 You're assuming bad faith here. The dictionary definition of "to fire" does not assign blame: "to remove someone from their job, either because they have done something wrong or badly, or as a way of saving the cost of employing them:", i.e. precisely what happened here. The US quietly assigning legal blame based on which word is used is not something I was aware of. Besides, it has clearly gotten the point across, and that's good enough for me. I don't really care what specific semantics the US attaches to it Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 22:01
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    @KarlKnechtel Giving the benefit of the doubt, companies can't survive if they aren't making money, so layoffs may (at least sometimes) be necessary to avoid the alternative of the whole company going down and everyone losing their jobs. This, of course, doesn't mean that some layoffs aren't driven by greedy capitalism. But still, it seems better to focus on the choice of who to lay off (or what they're spending money on). Commented Oct 18, 2023 at 8:55
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    @Philippe This is the highest voted community question, and deserves a straight answer. In your comment above, you make tangential statements (first two sentences), hand-waving ("no way to protect the CM team entirely" when the question is just about two specific people), and for the rest of it, you change the topic to your personal feelings about losing them. (1/2) Commented Oct 21, 2023 at 22:55
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    @Philippe (2/2) Elsewhere you suggest other members of the team CM are up to the challenge, which is also hand-waiving because the question is not about them, but about the trust and rapport slowly built up with incredible effort that's now gone. Please directly address the question of the extent to which the choice of people to be laid took into consideration how close they were to the community. Commented Oct 21, 2023 at 23:05
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    @Philippe I think there's the big picture here. In the last rounds of downsizing, we lost Shog9, Nicholas, Robert, Cat and V2blast, all of whom have had a long history with the community. We also lost Salmon - who was a good CM but like most of the current team, didn't quite have the visibility. . Building trust takes time, and it seems the average shelflife of a CM is ... about 5 years before involuntary termination. We've... two CMs left with a history on the network pre-employment - and the company pretty much has made it impossible to get any more. Commented Oct 24, 2023 at 1:52
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    I mean, it pretty much is a hostile workplace if you're basically going to get randomly offered up as tribute. And even if we survive, a lot of folks passionate about the network - are and do remember many of these choices. I don't want particularly to see anyone lose their jobs but whoever made these choices on who had to be cut chose, and consistantly chooses poorly, and in ways that hurt us - which I feel is unacceptable. If the community matters, perhaps in the process of downsizing the impact of staff should be a concern. We've already lost many in the company who were Commented Oct 24, 2023 at 1:55
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    great communicators, and had built up trust over years. I'm taking it personally cause I'd been loudly, if not effectively advocating for more community hires in the company, yet there seems to be just a reversion to the same behaviours we saw before. Promises not kept - key folks getting downsized because "we need to survive". We literally had the exact pattern leading to having only 4 community managers left. We don't trust the company to have our best interests because we've seen exactly where this leads, and its not good. Commented Oct 24, 2023 at 1:59