U Got Fired – Technology Bites
South Korea’s third-largest credit card issuer fired a quarter of its workforce via mobile phone text messages on Friday, after negotiations with striking unionized workers broke down.
When I was finishing up graduate work, I was looking for a job. I interviewed with SAP. The interview went well and the interviewer told me to expect a call some time soon. Long story short: SAP started not doing well.
Then SAP did one of the dumbest things in the history of dumb things. They sent out a mass email to 60+ potential employment candidates that had a Power Point attachment. I get the email and am excited. I think that it’s an itinerary, some HR paperwork, or a schedule of some kind. I open the Power Point file and it’s one page instructing all 60+ of us that SAP was going through lay offs and wouldn’t be hiring any of us.
SAP should have called each of us individually. At the least, they should have sent individual emails without the Power Point files telling us that. The group was pretty mad about it and a volley of emails went back and forth telling them how unprofessional they were. Some SAP shill intimated that it was the most efficient way and SAP was an efficient company. Lame. No excuse for treating people like that.
I hoped some HR peon got fired over that. I didn’t want to move to Atlanta any way.
On a lighter note, in 1997 a girl I was dating dumped me via email. That was pretty bad but I don’t hold a mildly neurotic woman to the same standards as I would a company like SAP.
