Email from the CEO Jack Lynch talking about restructuring. How many were impacted and what locations?
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@nd Where? I was a veteran contractor until work was brought 'in-house' in 2025.I'm still looking for another job.
Employees have to be honest with themselves. Veritas, Jack and Veejay want to make greater profits and the US, Canadian, and Irish employees are an obstacle to that. You can wait to be laid off or you can go find another job. There really isn't any other option. That's the harsh truth. Veritas/HMH isn't an employer, is a liquidator.
Agree unfortunately. Companies used to be very happy making a little profit, providing employment to their communities and, in HMHs case, providing education support to their children. Now they expect a 5 year 300% return on investment while driving the company into the ground, promoting megalomaniacs and firing the talent.
@269 cost cutting will be there only solution they are business people not educators.
All they have done is buy up company after company and tell hmh to integrate or link or merge or some new joining of the systems within 3 months then lay off 90% of the staff once done.
Most of the systems they have cost a fortune, the design, the architecture not needed cost a fortune. Just rushed decisions without cost in mind for years just catching up.
I would advise having CV up to date as all tech is going to India. All they do is advertise India and how great they are. Just think of your futures not your Hmh future
Cherie, Elaine, Padma & Stephane. There was a very brief time where it seemed possible that the technical leadership of the company could have been passed to these 4 people who actually could collectively work together, respect each other, and maintained the respect of their staff and customers; but instead the company missed a golden opportunity to do this right, it’s so obviously a stronger technical leadership it’s unbelievable that someone as smart as Jack couldn’t recognise this to be true (Won’t mention already obvious incompetence of VJ and team already VERY well covered in comments below)
We all know business is tough, we understand reorganisation and accept some change is necessary, especially when communicated with respect for the work that people have already contributed and some positivity and hope for the future.
We’ve had none of that.
We’ve had a series of very stupid decisions, missteps, zero accountability, no direction, no vision, no plan, and the quality of communication my middle schooler would be embarrassed by.
Siphoning off what little money the company has remaining into your own pockets is not a strategy.
You have thousands of HMH families that you are responsible for. You have enough money already.
Get rid of these absolute id--ts TODAY, form a technical leadership we can all work with; we understand the next year or two is going to be tough but you have the best education technology team in the work ready to mobilize behind the right leadership. Or had until you started constantly laying them off at least.
There is no other road towards success here.
If cost cutting is your only idea, lay yourselves, and all of your very high paid friends off. You won’t be missed.
@1x3 Because we are the ones who built this company, not anyone in the ELT or Veejay and his mostly incompetent SLT.
@1x3 Nice, try, Vijay!
@1x3 Let me guess? Veejay? Uday? or Jack?
@1hj actually, he'll unplugged your life support, so he could save on electricity, and buy gas for his Porsche.
you fu..kin. dum--ss. If you don’t like your company leaders, then why don’t you find another job instead of complaining. Move the f-k on….
@1g8 The HR dept haven’t done their job if Uday passed his 6 month probation; after being overheard (reportedly) belittling the people in the Irish office. How is that even possible?
That decision has opened the company up to years of legal action from anyone laid off by TSG. Instead of getting rid of two people (VJ and Uday) who haven’t done anything at all for our company and who will never regain respect from the workforce at this point)
If you’re being laid off in TSG and your HR dept haven’t acted on any complaints against your “firing managers”, you have the rights to all of that information before agreeing to anything.
If any case against your manager had been investigated ever, and we all know that they have, you have rights to that details too.
If any of your direct management chain could realistically be suspected to have introduced bias into their decisions, either during normal operations or during decisions to reduce workforce, you have the right to request access to all of their teams messages, all meeting transcripts on file etc…
And you should
@1jj the business should be already if it had any sense? The last years of Peter George’s era delivered twice as many features to customers for half the cost 🤷♂️
@1hj are we entering the Peter George nostalgia period?
CTO is the type of guy who would plug out your life support machine to charge his Porsche
So we have a “learning company” who were making good money and serving their community and doing alright by it…..
Who have since become really, really, really greedy in the hope that they might make a quick buck before Jack’s retirement; and have since then missed all targets so have gradually discarded the needs, and respect towards, all of their customers and employees?
And are now openly aggressive towards the most talented staff they do have remaining; have zero innovation or product development pipeline because they haven’t got a clue what quality or success looks like in this business, and have hired 💯 idi0ts to further abuse the people that do know how to.
Instead of challenging and (unthinkably!) supporting their existing, experienced, team to go do something GREAT while they’re still employed, instead of treating them like 💩 ,attempting to measure their output through the most id--tic algorithms ever witnessed, and essentially waste the dwindling company resources to justify the fact that you’ve hired you’re friends into a positions you can’t begin do yourself.
Why not try supporting them? Treating the well? We’re tired of our good friends being discarded around us and we know the impact their departure will have on our customers.
And now business results ain’t going so well 🤔
Could be a lesson here somewhere?
Stop talking, start listening.
Engagement survey findings already contains all of the information that this ELT needs, Or are these surveys just used to pinpoint people to layoff now? Seems likely (and also Illegal in Canada at least)
I’ve never worked anywhere with such disregard for this CTO ever - I wouldn’t trust him to feed my goldfish, nevermind run a large tech organisation.
He knows nobody’s name, he seems to know very little about modern technology in general, and edtech specifically. He’s not welcome anywhere he arrives, he speaks poorly about his own teams behind their backs. What else do we need to know him at this point?
We are losing absolutely amazingly talented people while welcoming pure egomaniacs that are running this company into the ground rapidly.
Epictetus: “ It’s impossible to learn that which you think you already know”
@1dk I am thinking that Dublin was hit first because it takes longer to lay people off there. By the time those are completed it will be the US employees turn.
Dublin hasn't even got 160 employees to layoff.
The people I know who were made redundant last week were some of the most stellar, highly-skilled, experienced and much loved colleagues in the office. A massive loss and those of us still in Dublin feel the pain and big gap of expertise that has been left behind.
@1er I've heard 160 in Dublin. 260 company wide total.
@1bh anyone know how many were laid off?
I'm wondering do we fall under a collective redundancy.
Hard to know the current office numbers, but could be as low as 5-10 people being laid off:
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/unemployment-and-redundancy/redundancy/what-is-redundancy/
@1dk Yep. https://www.thelayoff.com/post/@xj+1kz8vjj1g
Anyone expecting more layoff October/November time?
@1a0 it's a massacre. Without doxxing myself it was sudden, brutal and cold.
Communication was non existent with folks being hit with emails at early wed am from the states scheduling calls.
These calls did not have hr on them, and had been scheduled for late afternoon Irish time. Jack sent out an email confirming layoffs and hr got added to those calls within a few mins.
A lot of us had to sit waiting for late afternoon calls having already gotten jacks internal communication.
I have never in my life felt so discarded and out to sea. No communication, and middle management were told to simply disappear offline to avoid having to answer panicking employees questions.
Dublin office won't last much longer IMO.
@13b former Dublin based HMH person here - interested to hear more about Dublin impacts - to be honest I left because I couldn't take the annual cull any longer - and decided to leave on my own terms.
@12x Heard rumors it's at least 250, with more than half of that in Dublin. It's an absolute tragedy.
Jack and leadership can continually mismanage, overspend, and fail fail fail and it's the people who make the damn products and produce the damn content that get punished.
How may were impacted?
@s1 if it is true that jobs moved to Pune resulted in Veejays family profits, every single layoff in Canada while he is, or was, CTO will be ruled an unjust dismissal in court.
Ethnic slurs against his own Irish team, attributed to him and Uday in comments below, won’t help in public court either and EU have similar protections. If you’ve been laid off in Canada or Ireland fight this, you’ve got a clear case.
@xj if you want to know whether there will be additional layoffs ask yourself this: are there still some US or Ireland employees left? That's the answer to your question.
no amount of hard work is going to change the answer. Veejay needs to pay for his new Porsche.
@nd you are still commenting about a company that let you go in 2017… Really! Someone needs to move the fu-k on…
To those still at HMH, note that Veejay slipped up in his clown hall on friday and said there would be another round of layoffs.
Questioner: "With the recent layoff occurring without formal knowledge transfer, what strategies or processes are being put in place to recover and manage the critical knowledge lost?"
Veejay: "So, in terms of an upcoming or the one we just went through?" Has an oh-sht face as he realizes what he just said and starts stammering*
Questioner: "The one we just went through..."
Assume another round will happen in October so do what's best for you with that expectation (resume prep, interviews, staying in the hopes of a severance package, etc). As others have said, working around the clock will not save you if you're not in India. You likely care about the teachers and students that will be harmed by HMH's lack of effective leadership but you also can't make things better for them against this backdrop. Don't ki-l yourself in the hopes that things will turn around. They clearly won't at this point.
HMH is being transformed into an Indian company by Veritas. That's no longer speculation it is a reflection of the actions they have already taken. Veritas will make money off of that, Jack will make money off of that, Veejay will make money off of that. American and Irish employees and US customers will pay the price for that. What needs to happen now, is for each school district in the United States to consider if they want all their education materials being provided by an Indian company that is "American" in name only, managed entirely by Veritas who has only their investment objectives as priorities.
@se agree with this but the sad reality is that these mo--ns have got to where they are by having no shame and no shyness. Their golden parachute will be a he-l of a lot fatter than the salaries of the people they lay off. We’re the losers here.
Very soon HMH will be THE company profiled on how good company’s were destroyed by a combination of pure greed and buying Microsoft’s A.I. sales team bullsh*t..
I had a golden retriever that could run the technical service group with more skill and precision than VJ, it’s astounding how bad this technology leadership are at their job in every single way, it’s like being managed by kindergarteners who haven’t had their nap.
Advice to management: please retire and move on, you have failed. Learning hasn’t learned, and neither have you, we’ve had enough now. You’ve gouged enough cash and have had enough Michelin star meals from you staffs efforts at this point - we sincerely hope you choke on your next fillet mignon, we’ve heard enough of your bullsh-t and seen enough of our friends and their family suffer through your self serving nonsense.
We are not on your side, we are sick of listening to your bullsh-t, we are the actual humans that care about our customers of educators and students and you have failed all of us and it’s time for you to go.
There is no coming back from this. We expect your resignation by the end of the year or there will be repercussions.
You may think you have the power. Veritas may think they have the power, Veejay (laughably) may think he has the power, for someone that has no education tech experience at all 😂;
I used to be #️⃣ HMHProud. I’m now genuinely embarrassed to work for HMH. The company are throwing away amazing talent and are showing yourselves up as ignorant and arrogant fools.
You may think you can rehire these amazing humans that you’ve devalued over the past years, The truth is we’re gonna thrive together while watching you fail. 👋
@r4 So I don't doubt you on that, but do you have proof that Veejay is self dealing?
@OP
HMH should no longer be able to label themselves a US based company. They are actively shuttering and firing all US employees.
We are being replaced with India based people who know nothing about our business, do not even bother to pretend to learn, but who are being touted as better than us merely because they can hire 3-5 of them to accomplish half the work that one of us is capable of doing.
Everyone affected by these layoffs should file a class action suit against VJ and Veritas over this outsourcing.
Everything about what he’s doing with Pune is dirty. His family’s business is directly involved with and benefitting from the new center in India.
Add all that to the fact that they no longer even fake a moment of empathy about layoffs says everything we need to know. ELT no longer even needs to pretend because no existing employees will be around long enough for those opinions to matter.
Veritas Jack and VJ ran this place into the ground.
They fired and abused amazing employees who had dedicated decades of their lives keeping this company running without a moments thought.
This is the death throes of HMH.
@n2 I don't know why Jack talks anymore. When he does he's just wasting peoples time. There is nothing he says anymore that has any value.
@n2 He is a hostage..a very well paid one. All he is now is a Veritas flunky. Riding the wave until either the company is sold off, or until he gets his parachute money. The rest is him just burning time until the inevitable.
So glad I was out of there in 2017. Landed a way better job for more money.
@n2 What you expect him to deliver that plan live? He was probably up all night trying to get that triangle animation just right. Power point is hard.
The 7 minute prerecorded message from Jack was pathetic. It lacked anything of substance. He showed absolutely no empathy. He was reading from a script, and poorly at that. Given how many times he has led large company layoffs I would think he could recite this sh-t in his sleep.
The pre recorded message looked more like a hostage video than anything else. Like, he couldn’t even be bothered to deliver it live?
Second what previous poster said. I would work overtime, deliver wild amounts of work in a single shift, and in general deliver way above my pay grade.
In the end, Jack, Jim, Jean...none of them give a sh*t about you. You are just a number.
Take a longer lunch, set boundaries, have a work life balance.
Oh and if anyone asks you if you are using AI. Always say yes.
I refused to use AI for design and today I paid for it.