The company I work for had a big layoff this monday. I feel lucky not to have lost my job it but this type of thing always feel pretty miserable regardless.
A few of my reactions are as follows.
First, it is shocking how quickly and cleanly you can be severed from the “job” part of your identity. I have seen people who worked all the time and clearly viewed work the as main source of their sense of purpose be laid off and it is remarkable how fast the company moves on. It is an important reminder to cultivate a sense of self that cannot be taken away by an executive who doesn’t know your name.
The people inside of a corporation can care about you personally, and they can choose to treat you with respect. But the corporation itself will put its needs above yours no matter what your personal circumstances are.
I think a good measure of how successful you were at a job is the number of coworkers you’d be excited to catch up with and ask for a recommendation a year after leaving a company. If you meet people you connect with and get to know them deeply and admire them and they respect you, that is a good indicator that you’re spending your time in a valuable way.
“Visibility” to the top people in your organization unfortunately matters a lot in protecting your job. It matters that the people who sign off on who stays and who goes know who you are and what you do.
The tone of the technology industry has shifted dramatically and management teams no longer feel the need to coddle employees. I attribute this to the following:
Urgency put on management teams to lean down and get profitable induced by higher interest rates
Management teams looking at prominent examples like Elon slashing a huge part of Twitter or Meta cutting 20%+ and hearing that things still work
The feeling that AI is going to change the industry profoundly: technical talent will no longer be as scarce and companies will not need as many people.
On a more optimistic note, I’ve seen lots of people pivot into better positions and do more interesting things after having been laid off. It seems like big shakeups to life like that tend to work out better than one would expect.
Happy for you that you still have your job and happy for you that your attitude would have helped you weather losing it.
The only path to organizational stability is financial viability. It is best if the company has revenues > costs so that painful layoffs are unnecessary. Of course, investors want to increase their growth, and often put large amounts of into a business, which temporarily allows the business to acquire outsized costs. Then a reckoning may come if the anticipated growth doesn’t materialize. one hopes that the recent changes do put the company into the zone of financial viability.