For the life of me, I cannot imagine what it would have been like finding out I hadn't managed to keep my job on the very same day that my company recorded a nice, tidy year-end profit.
Even those who successfully kept their position within the company can't count themselves lucky.
Nicola Mawson, deputy news editor, ITWeb
The thought of having no desk to go to for three months, having to sit at home on full pay, twiddling my thumbs and looking for gainful employment, is enough to drive anyone to tears.
However, according to current and former staff members, that is exactly what big-four bank Absa did on 10 February.
Almost 200 IT staff members were told they had not been successful in applying for their old job, or other new positions; they had to pack up their desks, and were then escorted out by security.
I can only imagine the heartbreak; leaving behind colleagues you've known for years, while you head off home under a cloud of uncertainty over whether you will still be gainfully employed by mid-year.
The uncertainty of whether you will rejoin the group in a new position, or end up retrenched in the fourth month, must be excruciatingly painful at a time when the global economic outlook is rather murky.
Yet even those who successfully kept their position within the company can't count themselves lucky. Every single person across the group's IT department - that's 1 600 - were told to reapply for their jobs, and given two other possible job choices.
The mood was apparently awful, with some staff members saying it was like there had been a death in the family.
New broom
All of this is because Absa is reorganising its IT department, matching available skills with what it needs. Fine, everything needs a bit of a spring clean every now and then.
However, what is not so fine is the way the company has handled it. ITWeb was able to speak to some Absa employees still inside the building, but this took quite a bit of doing - many just wouldn't talk for fear of losing their jobs.
That's plain scary - and amounts to a bizarre sort of censorship. Of those who would chat, most have put their CVs on the market.
I can only imagine the uncertainty and panic plaguing the bank's IT department at the moment. At the hint of any uncertainty around jobs, those who can are all too quick to get out.
It seems like other players in the sector, such as First National Bank, are in a position to take advantage of the turmoil. FNB issued a rather well-timed tweet indicating it is looking for IT staff just after news of Absa's staff shuffle started doing the rounds.
Trimming costs
Absa's ongoing drive for efficiencies and better use of resources has not only hurt its IT staff. The bank has also asked all its suppliers to cut between 10% and 15% off the bottom of invoices, squeezing already wafer-thin margins even more.
The net effect of this little exercise for suppliers will be simply not to bother tendering for contracts, or put less experienced and less expensive contractors on site.
All of this begs the question: how will the bank keep its IT systems up and running - the very backbone of its entire multibillion-rand operation? How else would ATMs work, money get transferred between accounts, and credit card transactions be processed?
Perhaps the bank's ultimate goal, as some readers have suggested, is to move the whole IT department to India, where skills are apparently dirt cheap and in far more ready supply than SA.
Myopic answer
Yet, that's a short-sighted, short-term solution in a country that desperately needs not only to create new jobs, but also to upskill the people we have in the workplace.
SA should be heading towards a knowledge economy; instead it seems to be heading to one that sees lower costs as the pinnacle of success - more bucks for shareholders to take home after dividends are paid out.
We all need a good retirement fund. But if this sort of thing is not stopped, perhaps through changes to tax incentives or other measures, SA will end up with no workforce at all, because all the jobs will have been sent to some-or-other country.
That's no way to grow an economy, it's no way to transfer skills, and it's no way to get millions of people out of a never-ending cycle of poverty and crime.
Today, tomorrow, together? I think not.
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