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Comment by at-fates-hands | Hacker News Reader

I'm always surprised people can never seem to see these things coming. If I was working there, I would've started looking two or three months ago.

Maybe they had some stock options or something they were holding onto??

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Maybe they have families and don't want to upset the status quo until it's absolutely necessary.

I wonder if there are any risk metrics for one's primary employment. We apply sophisticated risk models to our investments, but I've never heard of anyone doing the same to their employer.

As a logical exercise, if we assign some risk to your employer terminating you (I imagine especially for publicly traded companies one could come up with some more-accurate-than-guess-formula), then there would be a point at which the risk of your current employer would outweigh the risk of leaving to find another job. Or, another way, the risk-reward between two different jobs could be measured (e.g. working at risky Startup X vs stable Retail Bank Y).

Links welcome!

Someone posted an algorithm to determine the likelihood of bankruptcy on here a while ago, you could modify that I guess.

http://www.stern.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/assets/document... "Estimating the Probability of Bankruptcy"

One of the things companies do when growth stops and they want to increase profits is lay people off (it's kinda a classic MBA move).

Most people don't apply the even the crudest risk model to their investments nor their primary source of liquid capital, their job.

Which then in most cases is too late, and you're left in the lurch behind the 8-ball.

Case in point - Target's acquisition of the Zellers leases on their locations.

I had over a dozen people I know who were offered pretty lucrative jobs there. I know another half dozen who balked at their offers (including myself). The people who went were only there about 6 months. Right away, there were signs this was doomed.

For several months all I heard and read was stories about how this was not going very well at all. Two of my friends who took jobs started looking as rumors swept through their departments. They both found employment in short order, right before the roof collapsed and Target announced over 1,700 layoffs.

If you decided to wait it out, you were now entering a market were you had a lot of competition for your same job at any number of businesses in the area. Thus, reducing the likelihood of finding something quickly. I have several friends who still haven't found a job six months later.

I went through the first dot com bust with two startups. Because of that scary experience, I've always been leery of my continuing employment anywhere. I'm become somewhat adept at reading signs and realizing when something is about to go tits up. As such, I interview constantly, and always have an exit strategy for any position I take, whether its a perm gig or a contract gig. I constantly look over my shoulder and its served me well.

All of the engineers laid off could have job offers this week if they wanted, so this is not exactly like that situation. There may be people whose skills aren't in as high demand, but these are the folks that are often the last to see the writing on the wall.

Since the stealth layoffs last year at the same time, Twitter has been bleeding engineers left and right. The writing has been on the wall since August 2014.

Of the people I knew well when I worked there, the more talented ambitious has been gone for 6 months already.

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