Siddharth Jawahar spent years climbing the product ladder at some of the most recognizable tech companies in America, and he finally landed the kind of job that gets its own LinkedIn announcement template.
Then the company handed him a performance review written in part by a system he helped build, and the vibes officially died.
Jawahar, a product lead who worked on AI-powered tools, says he was let go after an internal model flagged his output metrics as "below trajectory." Translation: the software decided he wasn't crushing it, and the humans in the room just nodded along like it was a restaurant Yelp score.
Here's the part that makes your eye twitch.
He reportedly asked to see how the model reached its conclusion.
The answer was basically "it's proprietary," which is corporate speak for "we don't actually know, and we're not about to find out." If this sounds like a Black Mirror episode, it's because we've been speedrunning that show for about a decade now.
Companies keep bolting AI onto hiring, reviews, and layoffs because it feels objective.
It's just bias with better marketing and a dashboard.
Half the commenters were like "skill issue, should've gamed the metrics," and the other half were like "this is why I do the bare minimum and log off at 5." Honestly, both camps are correct in a way that should terrify anyone with a 401k.
Workers get judged by opaque systems, can't contest the score, and then get told to be more transparent in their own communication.
It's the workplace equivalent of being grounded for something your sibling did, except the sibling is a server rack in Virginia.
Jawahar isn't the first person to get algorithmically managed out the door, and he won't be the last.
There's a lesson buried in here somewhere about not building your own replacement, but let's be real, your manager already put "AI fluency" in your goals for next quarter.
You keep a paper trail that a human can read, because arguing with a black box is a losing game and HR knows it.
The uncomfortable truth is that "the computer said so" has become the laziest excuse in corporate America, and it works because nobody wants to admit the computer is just a mirror.
Jawahar's exit is less a cautionary tale about robots and more one about people who'd rather trust a spreadsheet than a colleague.
Our take: if your employer can't explain why you're being cut in plain English, that's not a you problem, that's a them problem.
Final Thoughts
And if the only person who can explain the algorithm is the algorithm itself, maybe the algorithm is the one who should be updating its resume.