Payments software company, Stripe, has made 300 people redundant but their emails came accompanied with a picture of a cartoon duck.
As the tech job lay-offs look set to continue into this year, this has got to be one of the strangest stories to date.
While staff at Intel had their coffee removed before the notice of redundancies hit desks, no other employees as far as we know have reported cartoons in their lay-off process.
Accidental Email from Stripe
Employees reported receiving the image of the duck alongside emails announcing that their jobs were being cut. The image was in an attached PDF and accompanies with the caption: “US-Non-California Duck.”
The impacted staff were also sent the wrong date of termination in this massive HR fail.
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Business Insider broke the story having seen the leaked internal memo that addressed the mess-up. In it, Stripe’s chief people officer, Rob McIntosh wrote, “I also want to note that some impacted Stripes received a notification error to their personal email accounts Monday evening PT I apologize for the error and any confusion it caused. Corrected and full notifications have since been sent to all impacted Stripes.”
No Reprieve on Jobs
However, the apology didn’t come, unsurprisingly, with a note saying that in light of the mess-up, people will keep their jobs. Instead, the Irish-American financial services company has confirmed that it is pushing ahead with the jobs cull. The cuts are mainly from the product, engineering, and operations teams.
McIntosh did add, though, that the company is planning on recruiting later in the year to boost its employees up to 10,000.
Job Losses Continue in 2025
While 2023 was horrific for job cuts, especially in the tech sector, they continued into 2024 and already Mark Zuckerberg is warning Meta’s employees that this year will also be “intense” and some jobs will go.
There is also rising concern that AI could see some job roles replaced. The World Economic Forum gave the dire prediction that 41% of companies will cut jobs due to AI in the next five years.
Duck or no duck, the signs are there that we might be in for another year of job cuts, whether straight redundancies or people feeling forced from their roles by strict RTO policies. However, Stripe has just given HR teams everywhere a lesson in how not to handle it.
