The abrupt way that my relationship with my former company ended, and our cold interactions since then, hurt like hell. I went from being told how important I was to the company, to being quickly removed from Slack. It’s been humbling, to say the least.

(For those who haven’t seen my previous post, I faced hostile and dismissive behavior for two years and eventually decided to leave the company because of it.)

Friday, May 24

~10:30 AM CT
I was halfway through my two weeks notice. We had an all hands meeting and I asked my manager if there were plans to announce my upcoming departure - he said no.

~10:50 AM CT
During the meeting, the CEO announced the upcoming departure of a different employee, thanking her for her contributions and giving her a nice sendoff. Then the meeting moved on without any mention of me. In what seemed like a cruel joke by the universe, the other employee’s name was also Sarah. Seeing the Zoom chat blow up with messages like “Goodbye Sarah!” and “We’ll miss you Sarah!” felt like a knife through the heart.

~10:51 AM CT
I DM’d my manager and told him I had to leave the meeting because I was so upset. He never responded.

~10:51 - 11:05 AM CT
I broke down in tears. All of the emotions from the past two years were resurfacing at once. This was the last heartbreak I could endure at the company.

~11:05 AM CT
I messaged HR and told them I wanted that day to be my last day.

~11:15 AM CT
After the all hands meeting ended, the CEO DM’d me asking if I could talk. I told him I wasn’t in an emotional state to talk at the moment. I assume he was going to give me an excuse for what happened during all hands.

~11:35 AM CT
I received a Slackbot notification saying my manager had removed me from the internal engineering channel. This was the channel I was going to use to say goodbye to my team. I later found out:

1. Some of my coworkers in that channel thought I’d left the channel on my own since it said “Sarah left #engineering-internal” and my manager never let them know he’d actually removed me.
2. After I was removed, my manager called a team meeting in the channel and told them that was my last day. I didn’t even know this was going on. Why wasn’t I invited and given an opportunity to see my team one last time?

~11:45 AM CT
The HR rep called me and offered to let me go early, instead of waiting until the end of the day. I told her I’d prefer to wait until the end of the day so that I could say bye to my team and other close coworkers, and wrap up a few things. She told me that most people were at lunch, so nobody would be around for me to say bye to, so we might as well wrap me up early. She said I could draft a goodbye note to the team, and email it to her and she would send it on my behalf. I called BS on her reasoning of everyone being at lunch, but said she could do whatever she needed. She told me I’d lose access to everything soon.

~11:50 AM CT
I hurriedly typed a goodbye message in a channel I still had access to. Right before I hit send, Slack logged me out. I was officially cut off from the company I’d spent the last seven years with.

I sat there, shocked at what had just happened over the course of an hour. Shocked that the company could discard me so quickly and coldly. At 10:30 that morning I was one of the most tenured people at the company, imagining what my heartfelt goodbye from my manager would be like. By noon I was an ex-employee who had received no goodbye from my manager, publicly or privately.

I know that I’m the one who decided to exit four days earlier than planned. But that was only because of yet another mess-up on the company’s part. Did I not still deserve to be told “Thank you for everything you’ve done for our company. We wish you the best”? Could they not have sent a quick message in the #people channel saying “Please join us in wishing Sarah Bruce farewell. Today marks her last day with the company”? Instead, a private team meeting was held behind my back. Then I was cut off.

The feeling of betrayal and lack of closure have almost been too much to bear. To some people, their employer is simply a place they clock in and out of, with no personal attachment. To me, the company was my family. I joined as the first full-time web developer. There were only 15 other employees at the time. At our annual summit a few months ago, the CEO looked at me and said “we built this”, referring to the large crowd of employees dancing and laughing on the dancefloor. We had taken our small startup and turned it into something more magical than we could have imagined. And now I’m sitting here typing this, still in disbelief.