Masterclass in Chaos
Let me walk you through how this little “reorg” actually played out. First, you get a calendar invite for a 3-minute Zoom with some director you’ve never seen before-someone who couldn’t pick you out of a breakroom lineup if their Group Director title depended on it. They read from a script like it’s a hostage video, ask for your personal email, then just sit there blinking while you process that your entire career just got turned into a bullet point on a PowerPoint. I asked one question-got told to “wait to hear from HR.” Two days later? No HR contact. No email. Just a locked laptop and a delightful little sense of corporate abandonment.
severance? lol. anywhere from 3 to 40 weeks, apparently. No one can explain the formula, because there isn’t one. Or maybe there is, and it’s just a dartboard in Bentonville with “3 weeks,” “10 weeks,” and “sorry, you get nothing” scattered around it. You know what I got? Confusion. You know what I didn’t get? Transparency, support, or even a PDF. I’ve been with this company for years. Gave it nights, weekends, holidays. But when they were done with me, they were done. Like I was a browser tab they forgot they had open.
the cherry on top? The people making these decisions are still here. The bloat didn’t get cut-it just changed outfits. They’ve got all these new Amazon imports playing corporate musical chairs, while the people who actually knew how the place worked got booted. Oh and let’s not pretend this is just about performance or strategy shifts or “removing layers.” Please. The layers are still here, they just speak in buzzwords and get stock options.
Then I got cut. Cold. Walked out.
No, I’m not bitter. I’m informed. I’ve seen how this company operates in moments that count. And when it mattered most, they showed exactly who they are. So to everyone still pretending this was “inevitable” or “strategic” or whatever, enjoy the script-just remember, they don’t care who’s reading it next...
I worked for Walmart for 26 years. At age 67 I decided to retire. I then found out that the company stopped paying for unused vacation and personal time, but I had never heard about it. Talk about the final insult!
one unread email, a locked laptop, and a gentle corporate ghosting. truly a case study in how not to treat human beings
blink twice, you're deleted. no info, no severance clarity, no dignity. just vibes and a locked account.
it's all AI and what they are expecting with this. we are betting big on AI, agents, automation, etc. at the same time we are ki^ling the base that's creating content for feeding the AI, mostly developers whose code is being used to train AI.
at some point you'll not have content to feed AI and we'll just keep looping through the old stuff.
this is horrible and inhuman and walmart will pay dearly for this.
also, dont even start me on offshoring - it's a losing game even though they may be saving some money now.
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oh trust me, i don’t need a walk-through as i lived the same episode, just on a different day of the week.
mine was a 10-minute zoom, which i guess was the deluxe package. same blank-eyed exec reading from the same “we appreciate your contributions” script like he was trying to remember if his doordash was arriving mid-sentence. i had to ask twice if this was a real layoff or just another one of those awkward “realignments” we pretend aren’t happening. no straight answer. just a referral to hr, who—spoiler alert—never showed up. my access vanished before i could even screenshot my own resume off teams. internet gone, phone dead, accounts wiped. but sure, i’m sure someone somewhere marked the transition as “complete” in jira.
severance? that’s the walmart lottery. you spin the wheel and maybe land on 15 weeks if you’ve sacrificed enough pto and blood pressure over the years. i know people who got 4. i know people who got nothing. i also know people who had been forced to relocate just to stay employed, and then got cut anyway... because apparently watching someone uproot their family isn’t humiliating enough without adding “and also, you’re fired.”
and yeah, don’t even try to tell me this was about performance. this was a spreadsheet purge. the ones who stayed were either too new to be expensive or too high up to touch. the dead weight didn’t go—it just learned how to say “platformization” in meetings and now it’s untouchable. meanwhile, folks who actually kept this place from imploding under its own bloat got iced out. if you want to find the real decision-makers, just follow the trail of vague job titles and six-figure confusion.
no, i’m not shocked. i’ve seen this dance before. except this time they didn’t even pretend to know the steps. so yeah, maybe i’m not on the org chart anymore—but i’ll tell you this: i’d rather be off it than a name on the list of people who sat silently while it all went down...