Getting fired is now like a subscription service with multiple cancellation tiers.
“Layoff” if they’re feeling honest.
“Restructuring” if they’re feeling corporate.
“Performance management” if they want you to blame yourself.
“Voluntary separation” if they want you to fire yourself.
“Attrition” if they want to pretend nobody actually did anything.
“Role elimination” if they want to make it sound like your job died peacefully in its sleep.
“Strategic realignment” if they want you to believe your career simply took a wrong turn.
“Workforce optimization” if they want to imply the workforce was somehow the problem.
“Doing more with less” if they want to give you three jobs and one salary.
“Organizational simplification” if they want fewer people doing twice the work.
At this point, the only thing being optimized is the dictionary definition of unemployment.
They don’t need an HR department anymore.
They need a thesaurus with a severance budget.