Tech CEO posts crying selfie on LinkedIn after layoffs
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Layoffs are hard. But it stands to reason that the affected employees — who now have to deal with the precarity of not having a steady income while dealing with a job search and taking care of themselves and likely others — have it harder than the boss who laid them off. Evidently, a tech CEO in Columbus, Ohio, did not get the memo.
Braden Wallake is the CEO of HyperSocial, a marketing tech company that relies on LinkedIn cold contacting as a way to drum up business. He’s evidently familiar with what goes viral on LinkedIn, having amassed more than 30,000 followers in addition to the countless “connections” he has on the service. So, in a post written in that LinkedIn style where every sentence warrants a new line — coupled with a weepy face shot — he defended good, not-at-all “cold-hearted” CEOs such as himself.
“This will be the most vulnerable thing I’ll ever share,” he begins the post, sounding not unlike the beginning of an Usher song.
“Days like today, I wish I was a business owner that was only money driven and didn’t care about who he hurt along the way. But I’m not,” Wallake wrote in the post. So, I just want people to see, that not every CEO out there is cold-hearted and doesn’t care when he/she have to lay people off. I’m sure there are hundreds and thousands of others like me.”
He goes on to tell his employees that he loves them. “I know it isn’t professional to tell my employees that I love them,” he added Tuesday. “But from the bottom of my heart, I hope they know how much I do.” (He also identified the employees who were laid off in the post, which he has since edited to remove.)
The post has racked up more than 30,000 reactions; a vast majority of the reactions were in support for his sad spiel.
But of the few thousand comments, a healthy number of LinkedIn users called him out for the post. One described it as “emotional manipulation.” Another rightly pointed out that workers need “a generous severance package and a strong letter of recommendation,” not a pity party. In response to comments both critical of and praising him, he said that his salary is $0 a week and that he’s a full-time van lifer.
To Wallake’s credit, he did recognize in an interview with Motherboard how cringeworthy the photo was. Wallake since apologized, stating in a follow-up post Wednesday that his “intent was not to make it about me or victimize myself.”
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