- An anonymous Chennai IT manager was told to fire 12 team members by Friday without warning
- The manager described close bonds with staff, making the layoffs emotionally difficult
- Senior management gave orders but left middle managers to deliver the bad news alone
Twelve names on an Excel sheet. Fifteen minutes to end each person's job. A decade of working together reduced to a task that had to be finished by Friday.
An anonymous account attributed to a delivery manager at a Chennai IT company has prompted a Reddit discussion about layoffs, government jobs and the limits of workplace loyalty. The thread carried a blunt prescription: “Get a central government job and never go through this.”
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The screenshot shared in the discussion came from the Madras Techies page. In it, the writer described sitting alone in an office parking basement, crying into the steering wheel after being instructed to dismiss 12 members of his team.
Also Read | Layoffs Are Rising In Tech, But These Skills Are Helping People Unlock Better Pay
The account does not identify the manager or the company. Its details could not be independently verified.
They Called Him ‘Anna'
According to the post, senior leaders called the manager into a closed meeting room and handed him an Excel sheet. He was told to complete the dismissals by Friday, without discussions, warnings or second chances.
These were colleagues he said he had worked with every day since 2016.
“We stayed in the office until 3:00 AM solving production issues, ate late-night meals together, shared tea at the roadside stalls outside the tech park, and went to each other's weddings,” he wrote.
He had held their newborn children. They called him “Anna”, the Tamil word for elder brother.
That relationship made the instruction particularly difficult. The manager said his team had repeatedly agreed to work weekends and holidays when the company needed them.
“They worked tirelessly because they trusted me.”
Now he was expected to call them into short meetings and tell them their employment was over.
One senior developer, he wrote, had taken a large home loan four months earlier. Another colleague's mother was undergoing cancer treatment, with the family relying on company health insurance. A third had a pregnant wife due to give birth the following month.
“How do I look into their eyes on Friday and say, ‘Your access is deactivated, pack your bag and leave?'”
The writer accused senior management of leaving middle managers to deliver decisions taken far above them.
“They don't have to see the tears,” he wrote.
He had considered resigning rather than carrying out the dismissals. His wife, he said, reminded him that another manager would do it anyway, while their own family would lose its income.
The Government Job Argument
On Reddit, the account became the backdrop to a familiar Indian employment debate: how much is job security worth?
The suggestion to get a central government job treated security as protection from the abrupt decisions described in the screenshot. But the responses supplied by users were divided.
One commenter argued that people entering private employment already understood the risk of layoffs and accepted it for the possibility of higher pay. The user compared that trade-off to choosing futures and options over equity investing.
The comparison drew an approving response: “Well said my brother.”
Another commenter challenged the premise that a government job should offer protection without scrutiny.
“Job security shouldn't mean freedom from accountability,” the user wrote.
Get a central government job and never go through this.
by u/Terrible-Class-4569 in SSCCGL
The commenter argued that government officers should write honest performance appraisals, prevent undeserved promotions and use provisions such as Rule 56(j) where warranted. The same response said cumbersome disciplinary proceedings could discourage officers from pursuing cases.
“Unfortunately, disciplinary proceedings are so cumbersome that initiating them often becomes a punishment in itself for the Inquiry Officer,” the commenter wrote.
The original account, however, gave no performance-related explanation for the proposed dismissals. The writer described an instruction to cut jobs and the personal consequences for the people on the list.
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