A similar anecdote from one previous employer: at that company, we had a lot of remote B2B sales people all over the country and even one overseas. On rare occasions, there would be a sales meeting where all the sales people come in to meet with the top executives personally and discuss strategy.<p>Well, my first couple of years at the company, there was a sales meeting to coincide with the Christmas party. Basically, all of the sales people were flown in to attend the Christmas party and they justified it as a business expense by having a strategy meeting sometime that week. One year, that didn&#x27;t happen. I mentioned offhand to somebody &quot;too bad the sales guys couldn&#x27;t make it&quot;, and I was outright told that they skipped out on the sales meeting to save money. So we had a Christmas party, but we cut back the invitations.<p>That was no surprise, given the events of the previous few months. They had been actively trying to shrink the company by attrition; i.e., letting employees quit and declining to hire a replacement. I also don&#x27;t know anyone who got a raise that year. We ended up losing a lot of people just from that alone. They also fired a bunch of sales guys for underperforming and hired a bunch more who were almost exclusively paid on commission... and I&#x27;d heard that the CEO specifically intended to flood the company with commission-only sales hires because he didn&#x27;t have to pay them more than peanuts unless they brought in money.<p>The next few months were brutal. January opened up with two executives being fired -- while the actual <i>reasons</i> for the firings were because of a power struggle, they weren&#x27;t really replaced. One of them had his power distributed among the people who reported to him, and another was replaced by &quot;promoting&quot; multiple existing employees while still making them do their previous jobs. One of those was fired only a few days after being promoted, too. The next month, I was laid off. I heard through the grapevine that shortly after I was laid off, they laid off another guy and closed the entire India office, letting everyone go except one or two employees who were transferred to the home office.