He claimed he earned around CHF 100,000 (around ₹ 1 crore) a year and described the incident as an example of how little control employees have over their careers.
This happened to me,” he revealed. “Here is an insane story about what it means to be an employee and totally shows that employee = slavery. “I was working as a software engineer at a big tech company in Switzerland . Since this week, I am now officially unemployed so I can write this now,” he explained. He later realised that the towel belonged to a member of his company’s upper management. The Swiss executive also asked the software engineer to go to the gym reception and get him a new towel, which he did. However, he suspects the sauna incident may have played a role. The techie also pointed out that there were no cameras inside the sauna, meaning he had no way to prove that the executive had threatened him with dismissal. These lists exist unofficially and employers share them,” he claimed.
The salary was good (about 100k CHF annually) and the work environment was decent enough to keep me there since 2022. On Friday, May 8, he went to the sauna after his workout and accidentally picked up another member’s towel. Five days after the sauna incident, on May 13, the techie said he received a Teams call at 7:30 am with HR.
He regularly went to a gym on Tuesdays and Fridays, according to the techie. When the executive realised that the techie had used his towel, he remained outwardly calm but told him that he could “start to look for a new job”. He was told that he was being laid off for “economic reasons”. The engineer said his company was already carrying out large-scale layoffs at the time and believed he was simply added to the list of employees being let go. “I asked ‘Rechtsschutzversicherung’ about this and they said that nothing can be done as layoff due to economic reasons is always legal and without evidence there is nothing possible,” he wrote. “In addition, I am now on a “hidden” blacklist containing “antisocial” people which should never be hired.
He described the experience as a reminder of what he sees as the lack of power employees have over their careers and often suffer at the whims and fancies of upper management. HT.com has not independently verified the claims and does not endorse them.) Because he was laid off while working on several projects, the techie said he was particularly frustrated.
“My performance at the company does not matter as I was fired in between of several projects and due to my layoff the deadlines had to be postponed indefinitely,” he wrote. “I am now unemployed for 3 months and do not expect to find anything in the future so I am probably forced to create my own business somehow,” he wrote. (Disclaimer: This report is based on user-generated content from social media.
