Requiem for a Day Job
When I started at my job back on May 20, 2002, I was employee number 150. On Monday, I was number 50 on the seniority list out of some 5200+. I will rise no higher, because on Monday they laid off more than 1000 people, and I was one of them. Yesterday was my last official day, ending my tenure at the only real post-college job I've ever had at 46 days short of 21 years.
This was my company's second official layoff in three years. I say "official" because there were at least two much smaller lay-offs in years far past, in the range of 20-30 people. The official lay off was actually while I was on paternity leave in January 2021, which was a fun text to get while I was out. That one took out 150 people in the Product Development teams, almost all of whom I knew and many of whom were at least "work friends" if not actual friends.
That first layoff, which was officially a "reduction in force," was incredibly painful, but at least if you squinted the reason that they gave and the people targeted made a little bit of sense. It still wasn't a good idea, and the onset of The Great Resignation shortly thereafter made it a worse idea. Many employees who never would have thought of leaving prior to that layoff decided they should look around, and in a world where most people in tech could now work remotely from anywhere, they found a lot of better options. We may have laid off 150 people, but far more than 150 left voluntarily in the next year, most of them people I had great respect for.
I thought about leaving after that layoff like so many others did. I even joined Linked In just in case. However, while I'm confident I could have gotten a job elsewhere, I enjoyed the massive job flexibility I had, especially working from home with a new baby. While my work wasn't very challenging my team was great, and I was also waiting to use my second sabbatical.
This newest layoff quite frankly makes no obvious business sense except in the very narrow "short term benefit of the private equity firm that owns the company" sense. While I don't see a full list of the people laid off, the ones I know about were all over the place, and I wasn't able to detect a noticeable pattern beyond "get rid of layers of management." That in of itself might not have been a terrible idea in isolation, but they also axed not just the expected "senior people who make a lot of money" (aka, people like me) but entry level folks as well. They went across all sorts of departments. They went across all our product lines, including the group working on the brand new hotness. If I had survived the layoff, my seniority number would have jumped into the mid-30s or so, just from the people I knew about.
I own a nice chunk of stock, which depressingly will probably be goosed in value in the next valuation, but beyond that the future of the company is no longer my problem. I got a decent chunk of severance, so I'm going to take this week off and then start looking for the next job.
My father worked for the same employer for exactly 43 years to the day before retirement, albeit in at least five different geographic locations and as many different job titles. Sometimes in my heart of hearts I hoped to do the same thing, and I'm disappointed that I won't have that chance.
This was my company's second official layoff in three years. I say "official" because there were at least two much smaller lay-offs in years far past, in the range of 20-30 people. The official lay off was actually while I was on paternity leave in January 2021, which was a fun text to get while I was out. That one took out 150 people in the Product Development teams, almost all of whom I knew and many of whom were at least "work friends" if not actual friends.
That first layoff, which was officially a "reduction in force," was incredibly painful, but at least if you squinted the reason that they gave and the people targeted made a little bit of sense. It still wasn't a good idea, and the onset of The Great Resignation shortly thereafter made it a worse idea. Many employees who never would have thought of leaving prior to that layoff decided they should look around, and in a world where most people in tech could now work remotely from anywhere, they found a lot of better options. We may have laid off 150 people, but far more than 150 left voluntarily in the next year, most of them people I had great respect for.
I thought about leaving after that layoff like so many others did. I even joined Linked In just in case. However, while I'm confident I could have gotten a job elsewhere, I enjoyed the massive job flexibility I had, especially working from home with a new baby. While my work wasn't very challenging my team was great, and I was also waiting to use my second sabbatical.
This newest layoff quite frankly makes no obvious business sense except in the very narrow "short term benefit of the private equity firm that owns the company" sense. While I don't see a full list of the people laid off, the ones I know about were all over the place, and I wasn't able to detect a noticeable pattern beyond "get rid of layers of management." That in of itself might not have been a terrible idea in isolation, but they also axed not just the expected "senior people who make a lot of money" (aka, people like me) but entry level folks as well. They went across all sorts of departments. They went across all our product lines, including the group working on the brand new hotness. If I had survived the layoff, my seniority number would have jumped into the mid-30s or so, just from the people I knew about.
I own a nice chunk of stock, which depressingly will probably be goosed in value in the next valuation, but beyond that the future of the company is no longer my problem. I got a decent chunk of severance, so I'm going to take this week off and then start looking for the next job.
My father worked for the same employer for exactly 43 years to the day before retirement, albeit in at least five different geographic locations and as many different job titles. Sometimes in my heart of hearts I hoped to do the same thing, and I'm disappointed that I won't have that chance.