The tech firm had been cutting people all year, and somewhere in it my boss decided the process needed a theory. He said it in meetings. That’s evolution, the strongest survives. After that the tests started, except nobody called them tests. He’d ask something strange in a one-on-one, write your answer down, and two weeks later a desk would be empty.
Lynn was 24 and four months in. By month two she was carrying what had been three people’s work, without ever making it a thing.
Then he gave us 24 hours. Name one person who should be let go tomorrow. Six of us, one name each, no discussion.
I wrote Lynn. So did everyone else. She was newest, the smallest job title on the team, and if she went the rest of us stayed where we were.
The next morning he fired all six of us and kept her.
She asked why in front of everyone, furious, not like someone who’d won. He said it the way you’d read out a delivery time. “Every one of you named the person doing your work. She named herself.”
She called me eleven days later. She’d found something at a competitor and put my name in. She did that for four of us. She knew what we’d written, because he told her, and she did it anyway.
