Jon's Job Blog

On April 30, 2024, I learned that efficiency has a bitter taste.

The termination meeting lasted less than twenty minutes. My manager, joined by an HR partner, explained that my position was being eliminated as part of "budget cuts". The decision, they said, had nothing to do with my performance. It was purely financial. Purely strategic. The kind of difficult choice leadership had to make to meet budgetary constraints.

And then my computer was immediately deactivated.

No transition period. No knowledge transfer sessions. No two weeks to document processes or hand off projects. Just a separation letter, a severance agreement with a seven-day decision window, and instructions to return my laptop.

Later that same day, while starting my job search I came across a new job posting that had just appeared on PPG's careers site: RPA Business Analyst, based in Wrocław. Job ID: JR2411404. The description matched my role almost exactly—same responsibilities, same technical requirements, same team. The position was listed in my manager's region, where he'd been recently hired himself thanks to a referral from a friend in IT management.

Shortly after, the posting vanished from the public portal. But the position was filled. Quietly. While the company maintained in formal communications with oversight agencies that my role had not been replaced, that the work was simply "absorbed" by other team members.

As I spoke with other colleagues who'd been let go in the same restructuring, a pattern emerged. Many had received 30 to 45 days' notice. Some in senior positions received even more time. They'd been given transition periods, knowledge transfer protocols, dignified exits that acknowledged both their contributions and the institutional memory they carried.

I wasn't even allowed to keep my headset that almost certainly wasn't reused.

The inconsistency raised an uncomfortable question: If this truly was about cost reduction—systematic, strategic, necessary—why were termination protocols so wildly different? Why did some positions deserve months of transition while others deserved none?

The answer, I came to realize, wasn't about efficiency at all.

The False Economy of Outsourcing

When companies talk about "efficiency," they're usually talking about headcount reduction. The logic is deceptively simple: reduce labor costs by eliminating positions or moving them to lower-cost regions. The spreadsheet shows immediate savings. The quarterly report looks better. Shareholders are pleased.

But spreadsheets don't account for institutional memory.

My role involved building and maintaining robotic process automation tools—digital systems that automated repetitive business tasks. Over four and a half years, I'd developed not just technical solutions but deep process knowledge. I understood which workflows were brittle and which were resilient. I knew which stakeholders needed hand-holding and which needed autonomy. I'd documented the hidden dependencies that existed nowhere in official process maps but were critical to keeping systems running.

This knowledge wasn't proprietary or mystical. It was the accumulated wisdom that comes from doing a job day after day, solving problems as they arise, learning which shortcuts work and which create technical debt. It was context.

And context, in an immediate termination model, walks out the door with the person carrying the box.

The cost savings from moving my position to Poland were real in year one. Lower salary, lower benefits burden, perhaps even access to a deeper talent pool in certain technical areas. But those savings assumed the new person could simply pick up where I left off—that the work was modular, plug-and-play, easily transferable.

Anyone who's ever inherited a codebase or taken over someone else's project knows this isn't how knowledge work functions. There's always a ramp-up period. There are always questions. There are always moments where the previous person's reasoning becomes critical—and that person is no longer available to ask.

Research backs this up. A McKinsey study found that 70% of digital transformation initiatives fail to achieve their stated objectives, with "loss of institutional knowledge" and "inadequate change management" among the top factors. When companies prioritize speed and cost reduction over knowledge retention, they often spend years—and far more money—trying to rebuild what they hastily discarded.

Peter Drucker famously warned against "doing the wrong thing efficiently." Moving work to a lower-cost location isn't inherently wrong. But doing so without proper transition, without documentation, without even a basic knowledge transfer protocol—that's not efficiency. That's institutional amnesia disguised as strategy.

The Human Price of Speed

The speed of my termination revealed something more troubling than inefficiency—it revealed a decision-making process that was neither systematic nor strategic.

If the elimination of my position was truly part of a thoughtful, department-wide cost reduction plan, there should have been consistency in how separations were handled. Transition protocols should have been standardized. Knowledge transfer should have been mandatory. The timeline should have been predictable.

Instead, the wildly varying treatment of separated employees suggested something else: ad-hoc decision-making. Some managers fought for their people and secured dignified exits. Others didn't. Some positions were deemed worthy of transition plans. Others weren't. The rhetoric was systematic. The execution was arbitrary.

The company's explanation for immediate terminations was that my duties—and those of others like me—could be "absorbed" by remaining team members. This is corporate speak for "we're going to quietly overload the people we kept and hope they don't notice or complain."

In practice, "absorbing duties" means several things happen simultaneously. First, critical work gets dropped because there simply aren't enough hours in the day. Second, remaining team members experience increased stress and diminished job satisfaction as their workloads balloon. Third, the quality of work suffers because people are stretched too thin to maintain previous standards.

And fourth—perhaps most insidiously—the organization loses its ability to innovate or improve. When everyone is running at 110% capacity just to maintain existing operations, there's no bandwidth for strategic thinking, process improvement, or creativity. The system calcifies.

This is the hidden cost of aggressive cost-cutting: you don't just lose the people you let go. You slowly erode the capability and morale of the people who remain.

The immediate termination model also signals something about how the organization views its workers. If I'd been given a month's transition period, it would have acknowledged that my departure represented a loss of knowledge worth capturing. It would have treated me as someone whose contributions had value beyond the period I was on payroll.

The immediate termination signaled one thing: You are fungible. Your knowledge is replaceable. Your contributions were transactional. Goodbye.

This isn't just emotionally callous—though it is that. It's strategically foolish. People talk. Word spreads. Current employees watch how their colleagues are treated and adjust their loyalty and engagement accordingly. Prospective employees hear the stories and think twice about joining. Customers and partners notice the turnover and instability.

The short-term savings from an immediate termination can easily be eclipsed by the long-term costs of reputation damage and employee disengagement.

Sustainable Systems Over Extractive Models

Before I worked in corporate technology, I studied forestry. One of the foundational concepts in forest management is the difference between sustainable harvesting and clear-cutting.

Clear-cutting is exactly what it sounds like: removing all trees from an area in a single operation. It's fast. It's efficient in the short term. It maximizes immediate timber yield. But it destroys the ecosystem. Soil erodes without tree roots to hold it in place. Wildlife habitat disappears. Water quality degrades. Biodiversity collapses. And regeneration takes decades, if it happens at all.

Sustainable forestry takes a different approach. It removes trees selectively, maintaining the forest's structure and health while still producing timber. It's slower. It requires more planning. It demands that managers think in terms of decades, not quarters. But it preserves the system's long-term viability.

Corporate cost-cutting often follows the clear-cutting model. Leadership identifies a target—reduce headcount by X percent, cut operating costs by Y dollars—and implements it quickly. The quarterly earnings call shows immediate results. But the underlying system is weakened, sometimes irreparably.

The alternative—sustainable workforce management—would mean thinking systemically about organizational capacity. It would mean identifying which knowledge needs to be retained and creating transition plans to preserve it. It would mean being honest about what work can realistically be absorbed and what will be lost. It would mean measuring success not just by cost savings but by long-term organizational health.

This isn't just theoretical. Some companies have figured this out. When IBM underwent major restructuring in the early 1990s, they implemented "resource rebalancing" that included substantial severance packages, retraining programs, and phased transitions. The approach was more expensive in the short term but preserved critical institutional knowledge and maintained employee morale. The company emerged stronger.

Other companies—the ones that treat workers as line items to be eliminated rather than resources to be stewarded—often find themselves in perpetual crisis. They cut costs, experience operational problems, bring in expensive consultants to fix the problems their cost-cutting created, and then cut costs again to pay for the consultants. It's a doom loop disguised as fiscal responsibility.

The McKinsey data on digital transformation failure rates tells this story clearly. Companies that invest in change management, knowledge retention, and gradual transitions have success rates three to four times higher than companies that prioritize speed and cost reduction. The math is straightforward: spending money on transition planning is cheaper than spending years trying to recover from a botched implementation.

But this requires long-term thinking. It requires leadership that's willing to defend transition costs to shareholders. It requires performance metrics that account for organizational health, not just quarterly earnings. And it requires treating workers as something more than expenses to be minimized.

The Real Cost

When I think back on my termination, what strikes me most isn't the financial impact—though that was real. It's not even the personal disruption—though that was significant.

It's the sheer waste.

The company spent four and a half years investing in my development. They paid for training. They funded certifications. They gave me access to tools and systems. They assigned me to projects where I built expertise. And then, in twenty minutes, they threw all of that away.

Not because the work was unnecessary—the job posting in Poland proved it wasn't. Not because I was underperforming—my manager confirmed I wasn't. But because the immediate cost savings looked good on a spreadsheet.

This is what happens when efficiency becomes disconnected from effectiveness. You optimize for the wrong metrics. You save money in ways that cost more money. You move fast in ways that break critical things.

True efficiency doesn't eliminate the human element—it integrates it. It recognizes that knowledge workers aren't interchangeable parts but carriers of context, experience, and relationships that make systems function. It understands that transition costs are investments, not expenses.

Cost-cutting that destroys organizational memory isn't efficiency. It's expensive ignorance on a payment plan.

The Poland job posting disappeared from the public careers page. But the position was filled. Someone new is sitting in what was once my role, probably grappling with systems they inherited without documentation, fielding questions from stakeholders they've never met, trying to understand processes that exist nowhere but in the collective memory of people who are no longer there to ask.

The company saved money on my salary.

But I wonder what it's costing them now.

What's Coming

Next in the series: "Ownership Culture Ends Where the Org Chart Begins"—examining why empowerment slogans fail without reciprocal trust.