Let's start with the most important part: laying off 50% of the tech staff at a profitable company. I am quite certain it’s not because of AI. The real reason, I assume, is the investors demanding an increase in profit per employee. AI is just an excuse. In fact, many of the most active and efficient AI users were among those laid off.
To be fair, if this is the case, the investors are right about one thing: the company is horribly inefficient. For years, they overhired for completely useless, vaguely defined roles, and buried under three layers of incompetent management, it was incredibly hard even for talented employees to deliver a quality product.
Every decision of any significance, including technical ones, has always been dictated by top management. They harbor unhealthy delusions about their own technical competence, even though they haven’t touched actual product code in years. Any bottom-up initiatives are either killed in the crib or bogged down by layers of micromanaging supervisors. There is zero trust in the actual contributors. The result - phenomenally incompetent, absurd systems propping up Brevo’s entire architecture.
Naturally, when it came to increasing profit per employee, our "effective" managers didn’t organize AI workshops, didn’t trim the fat in middle management, and didn’t ask the people who actually build the product how to improve their efficiency. Instead, they did exactly what they read about on Twitter: layoffs, "because with AI, every employee is 5 times more productive."
Meanwhile, of course, the criteria for these layoffs remain a total mystery to everyone outside the C-suite. No one bothered to ask the line managers how their teams were actually performing. Meaning, some clown who only ever saw a person as a row in a spreadsheet gets to decide that this specific individual is expendable.
All that’s left to add is that the entire company is thoroughly soaked in hypocrisy and top-tier corporate double-talk. And at the helm is a highly toxic leader who fosters a cult-like environment where blind loyalty is valued above all else.
