I think it is fair to say that the whole There membership community is alight
today with the news that There have reorganised, resulting in the loss of an
unknown number of staff positions. Many of the people without a job today are
well-known in-world as event hosts and all-round nice people and will definitely
be missed. It remains to be seen how many of them will continue in their
non-staff avatars.
I have some sympathy for There’s management: I’ve seen this kind of thing
several times in real life and in one case even been on the management side when
we were forced to trim the company down for financial reasons. To say that
these are “hard decisions” for management is much more bloodless than the
reality: it hurts you to have to do this to anyone, particularly as in this case
when people have been doing their job well.
However, There Inc. have brought another kind of pain to the world in doing
this: the people who have lost their jobs are well-known, and this means that
management are being seen as having sacked my friend. This is quite different
to a bank shifting its call center to Bangalore; members know the people
involved on a much more personal level, even though that probably wasn’t part of
the job description.
I’ve been relatively lucky, in that I’m new enough to There that I know of only
two people on my buddy list who have been laid off. I’m sure the fast hot spike
of shock, anger and betrayal I felt when I learned about their misfortune must
be magnified many, many times in the feelings of longer-term members.
The bad news is that those long-standing members who have just had a slew of
their friends laid off are likely to be the very people that There, Inc. are
assuming will be able to pick up the load. Somehow, no matter the financial
reasoning, that doesn’t sound like a good decision from a community standpoint.
