Where are you in your company's layoff list?(blog.kdgregory.com) |
Where are you in your company's layoff list?(blog.kdgregory.com) |
I've never been let go. No doubt I've been lucky. But there's a saying: luck favors the prepared. I consistently get shit done, and have a reputation for doing so.
Do your job. Do your job well. Make sure you're not invisible. The rest is out of your control, but it's worked for me.
Knock on wood.
1. First are the flight risks. They're likely to split soon after a layoff event anyway, so might as well factor them in.
2. Second are functions that would be otherwise crippled or left unable to do their job well (eg: if you fire a flight risk manager and her team is working on a project that will no longer be needed, might as well cut the rest). Smart companies do the whole layoff this way.
3. Performance based. Highly paid employees are generally highly paid for a reason, and their value in terms of revenue impact generally exceeds their pay. Judgement calls will be made about performance; if the company is old school and still doing performance reviews, they'll be taken into account, but they're most likely incorrect anyway.
Politics will always come into play, but people tend to take layoffs more seriously than either hiring or promotion, and make a huge effort to make the best decisions they can to leave the company with a team that they believe works.
Full disclosure: at my first job, I went from 50K to mid-100's in less than 4 years. My current total compensation is in the high 2xx as an individual contributor. I would be surprised if that were under-market.
Being part of a layoff has nothing to do with how well you perform in the company. Sometimes, decisions are taken at a higher level, and you excellent performance is not enough to "stop the train".
Yes, productivity is important, but is not enough to stop a layoff.
I was interning for a recently acquired ~10 person startup that basically operated like it had before the acquisition. The parent company lost confidence in the product we were building (and a few other things). As a result, they came in one Friday and laid off everyone in one fell swoop, including intern me.
It was a humbling experience at 19 to be handing my company provided laptop to an HR person and signing away the offer letter I had only gotten a few weeks prior. Definitely a good lesson in job permanence in this industry.
Sometimes, it probably doesn't matter how good you are, shit happens.
This same company 2 years prior laid off a friend because his manager didn't like him (his manager was laid off a year after this because he was generally bad at his job). A bunch of people realized this mistake within a two days and they offered him 2 options (termination here was immediate, so he was already gone from the office). He could just leave as was the current course, or they would keep him on for 6 months so he could do some critical work that he was best to handle. He decided to stay for the 6 months and still got the severance package initially offered.
At this point, they didn't need me anymore and I was let go (which I knew was going to happen, but I enjoyed the relatively easy paycheck).
I also used that extra free time during work to start the company I am still running today.
Are you going to forget the highlights of the work you have done? Not really.
Does it take a lot of work to update a resume, such that upon being laid off you have to delay your job search for a significant amount of time because you have to go into full time 'resume updating' mode for a month? Not at all.
Updating a resume takes like 4 hours. If you've been at the same job for 20 years, it might take 8 hours. There is just no reason to 'always keep your resume up to date'. Not a real reason not to do it, but no reason to do it either.
It's like advising people to always wash the bottoms of their running shoes with an old toothbrush after every run. Will it hurt? Not really. Will it help? Nope. Should you do it? If you feel like it or enjoy it, shit, go for it, but it's also a waste of time.
If "the buffer" ever gets laid off, my friend has to be concerned. Until then, "the buffer" is a source of comfort to my friend.
Lots of teams have someone who is not pulling their weight but the boss doesn't want to have to fire them.
You may be told that you are low on the list or think you have a "buffer", but honestly if push comes to shove you will be laid off. It doesn't matter where you may be positioned.
A business relationship such as employment works as long as it works for both parties. Pretty much like other relationships, when it stops working for one party, it's time to move on.
He was layed-off and I got the charge of handling his system, in addition to mine, with no promotion. Apparently the only thing mattered was how much "value-for-money" an employee is bringing to the table. I came to know later that almost all team leads were layed-off because the systems in question were in existence for last 10 yrs and were stable.
Its also not a big deal for me - employers are replaceable too. ;)
It feels like the reasons for layoffs boil down to:
- Money (Run rate/market/shareholders)
- Strategy (Company decides to go in a new/different direction)
- Politics (Internal to the company/executives/board)
But my last job...
All of my product code, even stuff I'd inherited, had been stabilized, documented, and had decent test coverage. Strike one.
I was given a manager title but had no direct reports. Strike two.
I was moved to an architect role on a struggling cross-product effort. Strike three.
Keep your resume up to date; give some thought to what you'd like your next job to be; do that learning/practice/professional development you've been putting off because it wasn't needed for your last job but might be for your next; make sure you're still in touch with your friends at other companies whom you've been meaning to catch up with but you've both been busy; consider whether there are any company perks or equipment you've become reliant on and decide what you'll do if you lose them; and look over your finances to make sure your arrangements reflect your expectations for the future.
I do.
I implemented a specific kind of distributed calculation in the financial industry before it was a thing. We (I didn't design the calculation) literally invented something that hadn't been done.
Totally forgot about it. It just got patented 15 years later. It's not on my resume.
Right now, I'm applying machine learning to a domain that hasn't yet had it applied and it feels similar: it's going to be awesome, going to do great things, and I probably won't remember it when I need to update my resume.
If I were to start all over, I would write down every single thing I ever did in the resume and when it came time to send that resume out, I'd whittle it down to the things that apply just for that job.
Here's to hoping I never need to send out a resume again, otherwise I'm screwed.
The jobs that ask for a resume are the same ones I don't ever want to have again.
I also think it would be useful to keep notes on the hard problems you've faced. I find that line of questioning difficult to answer for a couple reasons: first, most of the problems don't seem that difficult once solved, and second, the interviewer is likely to probe for details which I've likely forgotten after a few months.
It's less about the highlights and more about the numbers. I found (when I worked FT) that if I spent a little time every month or two--and I mean a little time, maybe ten minutes--reviewing my LinkedIn and my resume and updating anything that might be useful. Like--oh, hey, I was using Ruby now, and I'd like to keep using Ruby, I'd better update those. Or I might have gotten hard numbers about the outcome of a project I worked on--HR and prospective employers love hard numbers--and could go back and update a bullet point from before.
In addition, it made me think more about the story that my resume is going to tell a future employer, and made me think about what I wanted out of my career in general. Because I was doing it on a regular basis every so often, and it became a habitual thing.
So, personally, I wouldn't be so dismissive of something that helps you be prepared and helps you be mindful.
Absolutely, because you always need to be your own best advocate, even as your current job evolves. By taking a very small amount of time here and there to note down accomplishments, skills, etc. you're also taking time out to think about and shape the ongoing story of your career. Beyond job hopping, this awareness can help you realize that you should maybe push for more recognition and reward in your current job; now you have notes in-hand to start your pitch. Alternatively, maybe you realize sooner rather than later that you're stagnating and need to change things up.
The bosses probably didn't enjoy doing this (the ones who had to actually break the news) but they also didn't care too much either. If firing the most experienced people really had an impact on productivity, then the team would just be reassigned to do different work, clients would be cut, budgets would shrink, whatever it required to ensure that whichever personnel you happened to have were acceptable for whatever work your team did.
I think a lot of people don't realize this. The company exists solely to service and enhance the lifestyle of executives. If the executives see a way to maintain the same lifestyle for less business cost, even if it means terminating an entire business line and upsetting many happy customers & laying people off who are doing great at their jobs, so be it.
They utterly don't care. It has literally nothing to do with productivity except as a totally unintended side effect of how to service the lifestyle of some executive.
As companies succeed and grow, they start investing in wargaming scenarios for effectively having total bargaining power over their staff. When HR types meet with executives in these kinds of firms to talk about strategies for hiring, a high priority is how to structure the business so that it is never "dependent" on employees.
If it means ending an otherwise profitable business line, so be it. It just depends on whether ending that business line is going to have any serious impact on the lifestyles of executives or not.
You see a lot of job advice that advocates working really hard to "become necessary" to your employer. It's just wishful thinking, though. Rule number one is: no employee is necessary. If we ever discover that an employee is necessary, then we simply restructure the business, changing as much as is needed, to make sure that property is no longer true.
The best you can hope for is to be "necessary" for a short period of time as the business recognizes that this is the case and immediately begins plotting about how to restructure so as to ensure no one in your position can possibly be necessary.
"You may argue that this doesn't take into account productivity, but I believe that's irrelevant. If you're at a company that values productivity, then everyone will be productive; the idea that there's a 10x difference between top and bottom is a myth"
If someone does play the aggressive pattern I'd highly recommend saving up a lot of cash so you can weather longer spells of unemployment. This is especially true if you intend to be selective in who you work for after getting laid off.
If you're not productive, you certainly do have to worry about getting laid off (or fired). But when I've known folks who were fired for non-productivity, they didn't really care all that much. In fact, they were fired because they didn't care. These folks often get let go before an official round of layoffs, although in some companies they accumulate until the first round of layoffs.
The fact that you're worrying about your place on the layoff list at all is an indication that you won't be laid off for productivity reasons, only for salary/strategic reasons.
As to why lay off instead of waiting for them to quit, probably because you've been told to reduce headcount now, not at some indeterminate future date.
Its possible you just are dealing with small sample size right?
It's not a bad way to live, but a few career coaches I've heard talk on the matter suggest that managing a team through a corporate downturn is valuable experience for climbing up the ladders.
While you might say my LinkedIn is my resume, every single interview was the result of a referral or me reaching out to the company directly. I didn't submit a single job application. Nobody looked at my resume and made a snap judgement about whether to pursue me as a candidate.
BTW, I've needed a resume a few times even when not looking for a job -- e.g. a potential investor or acquirer wants to see resumes of all key personnel.
At a certain point, you take the date of your degree off the resume, and if they want a full history, they can ask for it.
The best plan is to have two documents: a career tracking document that covers everything you did, and how well you did it, and then your resume is simply a summary of the most important parts of that career document.
Perhaps you've worked for employers when they could afford to be decent - which is not quite the same thing.
Being fired for being too expensive is a very real thing. Ask anyone laid off by IBM recently, or who was put on a PIP and fired for non-performance a few months before qualifying for retirement and a company pension payout.
Tangentially, talk of non-productive employees always reminds me of this:
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/DEC/dec.be...
My guess is that you're working contract at a very lucrative rate? Or perhaps you're at some kind of financial firm that offers a hefty bonus :-D
1. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Senior-Software-Engi...
I'd love for this to be common knowledge.