Getting Laid Off in Tech: The Myth of Upper Middle Class Security
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You are disposable. Even the CEO is disposable (as I've seen many times). Once you realize that, you'll stop the BS about loyalty to your company. It's a business arrangement, nothing more. Your job is to get the most you can (money, experience - whatever floats your boat). If it no longer works for you, leave. They'd do the same to you.
I thought I always had that somewhat-cynical outlook by default, coming from a leftist family; but still, the unfairness of this process (first time for me in 20 years of work) boils my blood. Metrics massaged to target this and that, backstabbing, disrespecting people who built the company... all that will forever scar the company, no matter what. Your best and brightest don't want to live in fear, once you scare them like this they will leave.
I don't understand why companies with troubled books don't just spin off the departments they want to cut: give people a chance to fend by themselves, keeping teams together and offloading risk without losing knowledge and propagating fear.
I worked for an employer who did exactly that when one of the new product/business they'd built wasn't growing (enough?) to warrant more investment. So he set up a couple of the developers working on the product with the rights to the product and helped work out new contracts with the existing handful of clients (it was large enterprise software). There was enough revenue (maintenance contracts) to support the two guys, and so the existing customers were taken care of in terms of maintenance. Worked out pretty well for everyone as far as I know.
Specifically, in the case of the article, spinning off the redundant employees leaving them in a new firm with no product and no revenue sounds like a cruelly dystopian option. And if the company was willing to put money into it, I'm pretty sure most employees would prefer that as a severance package instead.
Possibly, but I think the employee should be given a choice. If even just 1% of laid-off people took the choice and succeeded, the entire economy would clearly benefit.
In this case I expect he might have made a spot for those employees working on a different product, but that's not certain - technologies & skills were different & the vertical markets were completely different.
And in this specific case, the two staff thought it was an amazing opportunity for them - I think their short-term salary went up & they got a lot more flexibility plus potential upside if they could grow the business even slowly. Obviously some downsides in terms of benefits, etc. But even if it didn't work out it would have been a pretty good line item on their resume. :)
In the B2B space, the costs of switching vendors/products is often a really big deal. Spinning the product off released him from the obligation (allowing him to focus on more promising products), and avoided (most of?) the pain for his clients.
I agree with allanienhuis, that it can work well for products.
I was myself working on a mobile app (before they were really a thing) at Nokia. The app was for analyzing golf swings. There was a department working on sports related products. Someone decided to streamline the company (around 2002 or so I guess - nothing major back then), and this department was killed.
We were allowed to spin off the app and related IP to our own company, and were able to continue working on it. At the time I think it was a win-win for both sides.
It's not just troubled books. Many have lay off quotas they need to fill: jack walsh style of management. It's just how modern day capitalism works.
There is however, one upside. All that laying off means they'll have to do a lot of re-hiring to replace all the employees they laid off.
Definitely not the case for me at the moment, but I won't bore you with the details.
I don't think it would be cruel at all. If a company cuts entire chunks of the business (products, departments, what have you), it's because someone made a management call that they don't want to bear the risk and/or losses associated to that particular segment, or they cannot imagine new strategies. That does not mean that such a segment is completely unviable, it might simply be that it's not as profitable as that someone decided it should be, or requires more effort that that someone is willing to invest (money, time, creativity etc).
It might still be a perfectly viable lifestyle business for the people working there, who only want to make a decent living. Giving them a choice and a fighting chance, imho, is a win-win situation: the business offloads risk, knowledge is not dispersed, relationships are kept positive. At worst, the spin-off fails, the company has executed a cheap round of layoffs with no hard feelings; at best, the spin-off succeeds, they get some service for cheap and/or dividends, everybody is happy.
I'm surprised nobody said "well, the laid-off people can still do it themselves, nobody stops them" and that's absolutely true; but doing it in an organised manner, with support from an established "mother" entity, is much easier.
Say I switch to the cloud and don't really need most of my datacentre anymore. Instead of just chucking it all away, people and machines alike, I set them up as a separate hosting company where i'm a minority shareholder, buy from them a small contract for my little bit of legacy stuff, and let them free to go find new customers or do their thing. If they fail, nothing of value is lost and I still have access to their talent pool because no bridge was burnt; if they succeed, my shares are worth something and I keep getting good service for cheap.
In a way, it's similar to what Amazon did when they first introduced AWS: they had internal overcapacity for some services and just turned it into another business. (sure, it was a new system etc etc; but when you boil it down, it's just that: they had more internal resources than they needed, and rather than scaling them down, they started selling excess.)
I did see it and a win-win, but it takes a lot of resources from the company. I don't see a say 1000 employee company in the middle of some crisis (hence the layoffs) having the capacity to execute such things. Or at least it's easy to see why this would not be a priority.
It was purely a business decision for them, but I left dazed and wondering what to do. I had always planned job changes on my terms. But it was also freeing in that I now could find opportunities I would've missed. I'm much happier where I am now.
that starters don't have a clue.
Which is a different situation that needing to be employed to put food on the table.
So an employee leaving does have some impact. On the employee side, of course there is the food-on-the-table issue, which can be important if there isn't a safety net. Which is why it is critical to live within 75% of your paycheck, so that every year you can survive 3 months unemployment.
And then you get sudden medical bills or more months unemployment or some other sudden expense :-(
Highest grosser in the region 5 years straight. Aced the performance review. Brought in several clients, a few of which are YC graduates. But because Bob in NY wanted us to hit 25% growth for the 5th year in a row and we were only going to reach 5-10% YOY, someone had to get cut so the partners wouldn't see a drop in expected take-home payments. And I was the most expensive employee in the region.
Fuck loyalty.
On the bright side, my new job was only a small pay cut, but literally half the work load and all the vacation I could ask for. In a sick way, getting laid off worked out for the best. But those weeks between jobs were the most stressful of my life.
Likewise, if you're working at a company (Facebook say) that has a scandal, get laid off, you're probably gonna be able to find another job.
It's not "feelings management" or "people support", it is HR for a reason.
But of course, it's function, to protect the firm from it's employees, won't change.
That's part of the problem right there:
"We only hire the best".
"We need to protect the company from the employees."
It seems like if you really did the first statement, there wouldn't be a need for the second. If you find yourself using the second statement to justify a management action, then your management (you or your company) has failed.
Isn't that just doubling down on what you were doing before, being a "good performer" and "critical" to the team? The problem is that external forces (to you, your team, division, or your company) can come in at any time and make people change the calculus to want to pay you. And there's nothing stopping them from pulling the trigger, and suddenly you're out of work. We do not have a system designed to help you, we have systems designed to save companies money. The only real solution is to constantly make sure you could move if you had to, and that you're marketable. Part of my newbie years were spent at a big company watching very competent but experienced people get the axe and be replaced by 2-3 new hires - sometimes its not even about the money they'll save.
Then, when you're out checking whether you're marketable, you can do regular checks to see if you really want to stay where you are.
How many here remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard Steve Jobs passed away? Almost like being able to recall where you were when 9/11 happened.
When I heard of his death I was shocked, I wondered how Apple would survive, how the world for that matter would move on? But sure enough the next day the sun still rose and and the earth still rotated. Today Apple is doing just fine without Jobs and is making record profits. Everyone is disposable and money will always make the world go 'round.
The results from what I’ve read have offered no answers. One place spent $20 million trying to answer how much productivity is gained from having email. Nothing.
I suspect it’s like the food industry and fossil fuels: they are selling us on nonsense and hiding the reality.
Economics was the latest long con, like religion before it, the masses buy in hook line and sinker
But yeah we DEFINITELY need to make more phone apps and web apps! Fawk yeah!
Is this sarcasm that I'm not picking up on? I literally can't remember what year SJ died. I can't even remember what generation iPhone was his last.
A kinder way might be to say that no one is irreplaceable. I'd argue that that's actually a good thing.
But yes, the first time you go through layoffs it is shocking, especially if you've built your identity around your job.
I think it's mistake to recommend life-changing events like this so glibly. A given person may recover and become wiser and stronger. Another person may never recover in terms of career, relationships or mental health.
It's better to look and learn that the market is a harsh place and you should take steps accordingly. If you have to have that lesson engraved on your body, so be it but remember, each person has only so much productive career-time, some many opportunities to make and keep relationships, etc (fired-to-divorced, etc is a common path just for example).
Well, of course working for a single hot company at 22 doesn't mean your career is set for life. What, did he think he was going to retire at Snap?
There were idiosyncratically high expectations here... and now there's an idiosyncratically low mood, concluding "you do not have power. Remember that, always... being a well-ground cog is exactly what sustains our machine of systemic oppression, benefiting no one but those above."
That reads more like personal depression than an accurate extrapolation of lessons from his recent experience. Wait until he sees a dot-com crash, or a 2008-recession – then some broad despair might be (temporarily) justifiable. But even then, people with skills and creativity bounce back, and thrive. Not just in tech, but other sectors, too.
But to do so, you can't let a disappointment like a layoff (of yourself or, as here, others) send you into maudlin rumination about your own inherent powerlessness, and the 'systemic oppression' that sometimes paying gigs end sooner than you'd hoped. At least you can't stay in that mindset for very long.
You can look at the same facts and instead focus on what power you do have – the time and ability to build skills, relationships and savings that can deliver security across many possible futures and industry cycles, without reliance on any single employer's choices.
The people actually laid-off here may handle things better than this author – because they have no choice but to dust themselves off and engage with a broader world. And when a few months or a year later, they realize they're in a better place than Snap, they'll have less of the "woe-is-us" hopelessness expressed by this author.
Isn't that the promise of silicon valley? That there's so much money to be made that it turns engineers into entrepreneurs in their 20's?
Or has silicon valley now gone the way the rest of society has where huge corporate profits no longer get passed to the people who make it happen on a day to day basis?
And engineers still get much more equity in SV than is true elsewhere, and so have a shot at becoming wealthy.
But the reason I mentioned it was that you were talking about SV in the context of this article, and I just wanted to make sure that you knew he wasn't actually in SV. But yeah, I guess that's mostly relevant because they're very different areas.
I was recently job hunting and got a great job offer from a startup in Culver City. Their compensation was competitive (for LA at least) and my impression of the team was extremely good. I also liked LA the last time I was there (strangely enough, for an Onsite at SNAP) so was really excited about it.
I chose a competing offer from an SF based company in the end. But It wasn't an easy decision. So don't rule out LA without at least giving it a chance.
To most people, the idea of expecting to have a job waiting for you upon graduation because you interviewed in the fall of your senior year is mind-boggling. Most people, I venture to say, are lucky to have a job by graduation. I'd think it's far more normal to start looking around that time and hope to find something by summer.
The proscribed promotion and 'levels' and 'staff software engineer' titles that apparently make one impossible to fire (?) feel like something out of a fantasy. Something, by the way, this piece shares with a piece posted a few days ago about climbing the latter at FaceGoog or something to that effect, and how you're either up or out. It all feels like something out of a foreign country or planet to most of us, I venture to say.
In a sense. Probably believed the (almost) fairy tale: work a few years, cash out big, do your own thing.
The middle class is ultimately defined by the ability and need to build your own safety net. The upper middle class is able to do this with plenty of wealth to spare for luxuries like private schooling for their kids, income security is provided by their network. Just tap your network and find another job. The upper middle class is unconcerned with skills and only concerned with leeching off of the upper class.
The 'regular' middle class still needs to lean on their skill set and willingness to move in order to provide income security. If a layoff is enough to throw your lifestyle into disarray, you're not upper middle class, in fact you'll never be upper middle class because you probably spend too much time messing around with getting stuff done and not enough on greasing the political wheels.
The upper class doesn't need to fool around with a network, they are networks unto themselves. At this level, enough ambient wealth is floating around that you can hire professionals to manage it for you and never have to do anything you don't want to.
The difference between the lower class and the middle class boils down to whether you have enough to provide for your daily needs, much less a safety net. The lower class cannot meet expenses each month without assistance, has no ability to build a safety net and so has no safety other than what the government provides.
What distinguishes the lower middle class from the regular middle class is whether they have enough left over every month to save for the future or a rainy day.
Also, my descriptions aren't intended to be prescriptive, just descriptive. You want to know what the landscape looks like before you try to safely navigate it.
Doctors and lawyers typically work incredibly demanding jobs that require a lot of up-front investment of time and money to make their outsized salaries, and they make up a huge portion of the class you called "leeches". And far from not needing to maintain their network, networking is incredibly important for upper middle and upper classes.
Who do you consider to be upper middle class, if not them? You mention middle management, most of whom make less than financially successful doctors/lawyers.
Edit: Addendum, access to capital is key to reducing risk on the path to success, and it can be formally there or informally there. If you listen to podcasts, try "How I built this", interviewing a range of business founders. You have to listen for it, but a huge number start as, oh I worked in the financial industry and then had this idea..., or oh my parents were a lawyer and a physician... etc... The founder of Starbucks, Howard Schultz was saved from being ripped off from his business by a Seattle mogul by Bill Gates, Sr (yes father of that Bill Gates...).
A gradational view would be looking to sort people into grades, for example based on income. A relational view addresses how groups of people relate to each other, like one class might direct the labor of another.
Neither view is wrong, but to intelligently talk about class you should realize that it's not a two dimensional spectrum, there are probably 4 or 5 dimensions to consider.
Upper middle class delineation to me isn't about security, its about being able to scrounge better quality things. Sure, there's money put away in a 401k, investments etc.
> The upper middle class is unconcerned with skills and only concerned with leeching off of the upper class.
I've seen in broken down before as separate ladders according to social class - Lower class, Working class, Upper Middle class, and Elite class, with different values and principles for each. Is the successful county plumber who owns several businesses upper class, despite blue collar values? There's a delineation here between economic and social classes.
Im modern world, the working class started being called middle class so they woul stop complaining about their poor lot in life.
“Business owner” was the original (well, feudal) middle class named the “bourgeoisie”, they became the capitalist upper class (with the same name.) Small business owners (more particularly, those who live by applying largely their own labor to their own capital) are the middle class (“petit bourgeoisie”) in the original descriptions of capitalist economies.
> Im modern world, the working class started being called middle class so they woul stop complaining about their poor lot in life.
No, the higher income subset of the working class got called the middle class to forestall the development of common working class identity.
The idea of alternate ladders based on values, how that ties into money and economics, and how groups can become inaccessible to each other, is a worthwhile and big idea I think to hold onto.
This is incorrect. Elites in every society are highly politically exposed. Their network is critical to maintain. America's elite also consist of a large number of self-made men and women--they don't stop fighting just because they're billionaires. And those who turn into trust fund kiddies tend to dissipate their wealth within a generation or two.
Its completely anecdotal - we don't have an international standard definition of "middle class" but if you have an upper class of wealth owners who live off capital, and a lower class that has no wealth and lives off labor, middle is the hybridization of the two. To be truly middle class you would need half your income coming from investments and half from labor, which means at todays rates you would need about a million in investments to make the median salary and have the same income coming from your savings.
A lot of people do fall in that category, but I'm of the opinion nowadays that the dilution of the term is an actively intentional weapon of the globalist elite - when people admit they are poor, working class, or lower class they recognize they have much to gain and little to lose opposing the status quo of society. If you can convince everyone, including the rich (who can shamelessly exploit markets so long as they don't see themselves as the elite ownership class) and the poor (who would rather not recognize their own exploitation) to call themselves middle class you can abuse the poor as much as you want, they can never collectively act against you if you are all claiming to be in the same economic class.
A middle class does exist, but its not nearly as large as anyone - rich or poor - likes to think it is.
+ Have many of your laid off peers had trouble finding work, post-layoff?
+ Do you think you'd have a difficult time finding another job if you were laid off?
Most people in tech, who are willing to live in one of a half dozen specific cities, have job security prior generations could only have dreamed of. Tech skills are far more portable than a skilled line worker at Ford's River Rouge plant in the 1960s, where job-hopping was nearly impossible due to union senority regulations.
I work at a VC firm and every company struggles with hiring enough talented people. I don't know many, really any, people who are moderately skilled and unable to find work in this environment. That could change if there's a big macro swing.
That's not to say the broader criticism of job security is wrong. I have plenty of 50+ family members that are struggling on the finish line to retirement. Other people in my circle never had a fair shot at the start, but I don't know that there's ever been a better time to be a member of the professional class, even at a mid-skill level.
At the end of the day there will still be a dozen programming jobs in .Net or Java to every one in the latest and greatest web tech. In equal parts because on one hand finding people who stay contemporary with the "latest and greatest" is expensive and because businesses don't want to use the latest and greatest if it means changing the software they already wrote twenty years ago.
What do you think happens to all the software written in languages / frameworks after all the hotshot devs have moved on? They still need features and maintenance, and they’re not rewritten nearly as often or as quickly as people want to think.
If you are one of the right sort of people, with the right skills...yes. Many people with degrees never successfully transition into being a full fledged member of the professional class. That is much, much worse than before and the cost of failure is much, much higher than before outside of tech.
2017-2018 are the high point of this particular economic cycle and we are at full employment but that does not mean people have succeeded at the level they have in the past.
> I work at a VC firm and every company struggles with hiring enough talented people. I don't know many, really any, people who are moderately skilled and unable to find work in this environment. That could change if there's a big macro swing.
Can I find work? Yes.
Have I plateaued at my current level of pay and everyone wants to try to pay me 20% less if I change jobs? Yes.
It isn't just "Can I find another job?" but "Can I find a comparable job with the same work life balance, benefits, and financial compensation?"
That is the real fear with the lack of job security for mid-level professionals as they age and don't move into management. Paycuts, relocation to cheaper regions, or work/life balance cuts have to be taken to some degree.
Sure, I'm posting on HN but it is mainly because I work 10+ hour days, 5-6 days a week. I have to break that up somehow.
My most recent layoff was hard personally, because I was leaving an amazing group of coworkers that I still consider friends. But it took me about a month to find another job, which ended up being a company that almost immediately got acquired. Beyond being pretty lucrative for me, the relationship with the CEO of that company has led to him now investing/advising my new startup.
It's natural that we panic a bit when circumstance takes the reins and starts to direct our lives. Being in control is just so much more comfortable. But when we learn to take a step back and see the full situation, layoffs can be a really good thing for a lot of people. Ideally, we'd all like to work at hugely successful companies. Having to look for a new job may not be ideal, but the worse situation is continuing to work at a company with limited prospects for success. Being in the group that's laid off first stings a bit, but it's usually better than being one of the the ones that's retained.
This really resonated with me, for a number of reasons. Primarily, it's because I am hyper aware of how delicate this "tech boom" really is. The good times will end, and I believe they will end sooner than most believe. I was layed off once before because the company I worked for outsourced their entire engineering department. That was a quick lesson for me early in my career that you are EASILY replaced. There are people in India, China, the Ukraine, you name it... who will do your job for half the cost.
There is an enormous, GLOBAL, influx of software engineers that is rapidly diluting the worker pool and is quickly reducing the implicit bargaining power that we've enjoyed for the last 10 years. Big "thanks" to all the initiatives by well meaning, but naïve, individuals and organizations who want to "spread the wealth" without realizing that the wealth is already spread very thin, and is being spread thinner, and thinner, every day by mechanisms outside of our control (cost of living, housing, taxes, etc.).
I am trying my best to save, but somehow the cost of merely existing seems to increase month over month. I don't have kids, can't afford them. I don't have a car payment, I bought a junker. I have minimized my expenses down to the bare necessity and even then coming up with the down payment for a home is going to take years. At my age, my parents were already on to their second home. My wife has enormous student loans that cripple her ability to save so even our dual income seems weak in this environment.
So what can you do? I'm starting a business in my after-hours and weekends, desperately trying to establish a source of low-overhead income. I'm specializing within my field, attempting to learn new skills in a niché programming field that can't be easily learned by bootcamps and YouTube videos. Above all, I'm remembering that right now things are good. This is the calm before the storm.
Obviously it's still smart to save and plan for a period of unemployment though.
You are the lucky beneficiary of restrictive immigration and employment policies.
The supply of decent programmers is just not enough to cover demand.
2. Even for non-EU citizens, it's way way easier to get a software job (the company can get a visa for you). There is no H1B style cap. If you get an offer, you get the visa & job. True, for the first few years the visa might be tied to the job, but this just means that you need to have a new offer before leaving the previous job.
Much less so than in the US, though. To be honest I think that's more an effect of different cultural values ("novelty" and "bootstrapping" here are not as celebrated as in the US), but there is definitely a difference.
So one company can stagnate a whole sector- basically killing off any innovation for the duration of its existance. No innovation - no coders really needed.
The last big place that I worked could easily cut tech headcount in half and hardly notice. A decade from now they can probably reduce headcount 80% in IT and 75% in the business.
The impact of global growth won’t impact jobs directly for awhile. When Chinese companies start pumping out superior product that westerners cannot even read the manuals for, that will be the big crack.
That's a definitive statement that is more nuanced than that. There are definitely people (myself included) who have been directly impacted by global tech outsourcing.
I won't get into the specifics but I can tell you that there are an increasing number of dev shops outside of the US that are specializing in solid communication. That's been one of the biggest problems and hesitations from US businesses. You need a manager in the other country, who is good. These companies are specializing in providing a excellent teams that at a fraction of the cost of a US team.
The perspective I was coming from was a little more meta. To date we’ve seen outsourcing of business functions and consolidation of job functions where technology advancements have reduced labor needs. VMWare eliminated datacenter hardware teams. AWS eliminated data centers. Modern clients eliminate all of the bullshit associated with Windows PCs.
We are getting to a point where business functions will go down the same path. This is an age of giants.
This is sometimes true, but you have to be careful about myths about occupied capacity (of people and machines). If 100% of the people are occupied, it's very likely that the company is very understaffed and can easily get into trouble too. When xx% of the people are idle, you might look next week, or the next phase of a project and a different slice will be idle, and this may be the fastest, most efficient way to get the work done for large or complex work.
And sure, people typically don't run on 100% capacity. What however seems to happen in many bigger orgs with vague performance metrics (as much of IT work is), some people do solid 60-80% productive work throughout the day, while some barely hover over 0%. So you have a kernel of workers pushing the cart and a bigger cohort of watercooler crowd. When peak load time comes the latter don't ramp up their productivity to 100%, but instead it's expected the employer should expand the staff.
Nothing short of impending layoff rounds seem to affect this dynamic.
Why not codify that bargaining power into a series of employee-owned organizations that are able to negotiate for salaries in line with that cost of living?
There might be some growing pains, but it would certainly be better than the current trend of a few CEOs, VCs, and upper managers hoarding capital for little more than artificially expensive Bay Area real estate.
Where I work now longevity is highly valued, and I think leadership is disconnected with the reality of today's job market.
Keep in mind, this is me. Your mileage may vary.
Come back and talk to me when you have actually been laid off.
I was laid off once, I made it through the first round, the day they cut me in the second round I accepted another job offer.
Any time a company started cutting, I started looking. It was always a good signal to leave.
If you are relying on a business to pay your living expenses indefinitely because you've been loyal or whatever other nonsense, that is lunacy. If you're not producing some kind of value then you are dragging your company down, and you should be let go. In my opinion businesses aren't proactive enough at firing non-contributors. Layoffs aren't great for anyone because they kill the culture, but to avoid that someone really has to pull on some pants, swallow their pride, admit to hiring mistakes and rectify them.
Have you worked at big companies? This has nothing to do with producing value. It has to do with whatever "strategic direction" the company wants to take. You can be profitable, but your whole division will be cut off if there is a conflict with whatever a more powerful exec is doing.
Layoffs are different from firing "low performers".
One the one hand, tech might have less regulation than others - you can call yourself a "software engineer" and work as one without any formal credentials.
But on the other hand, plenty of other fields have optimistic futures and good guarantees of employment, the exact things the author is worried about (and the regulation in those fields often helps achieve those goals).
For example, nurses need to be certified but then they work in a field with good salaries and plenty of jobs in a rapidly growing market:
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/registered-nurses.htm
Tech is an ok industry to work in, but there are others. Anyone that says "tech is the only good career" is either uninformed, living in a bubble, or a snob.
This is why I think we need to build more communities around cheap housing (think manufactured homes) and shared agricultural space. At least if you lose your job in that type of community you won't have to worry as much about homelessness or starvation.
We're far too dependent on others for life's basic necessities, and that drives millions of people to work themselves to death doing jobs that make them miserable for employers who don't care about them.
It shouldn't change that we take risks. Taking risks is important. But it should make us more aware about which risks to take (e.g. waiting might be a risk too), and how to approach risky situations.
After layoffs the company's priority should be to reassure their remaining workers that they're OK because a shocked, shattered workforce is not a productive one. Employees are humans and they should be treated that way, and that should have been their priority. Snap seems terribly run based on this post. If I had experienced this I would be looking for new work. As long as the same people remain in charge who made those bad decisions, more bad decisions lie on the horizon.
I remember when one big corp I had long term contract decided to 'trim the fat' and laid us all. My neighbor felt bad and wanted to make lunch for me. I explained her that the same day, I went to another big corp (pretending to be startup) and got much higher rate I always wanted.
That lasted a year, then I was on my own again.
It really makes you stronger, your wife more stressed out, but my skills are way more awesome, I contribute way more and I don't care if you need to fire me. It will make me sad for sure, as I care about people I work with.
Anyhow, this is still true. I would love to have a place I can stay for 10-15 yrs like 'normal people'.
I was at a company from 2008-2011 that went through quite a few rounds of layoffs until they finally shut the door. Without fail, everyone who was laid off had another job within a month.
We all knew the writing was on the wall in 2011. Management was completely honest with us. When the day came, we all went out to lunch after our layoffs joked around and from looking at everyone's LinkedIn profile, everyone had a job within a month - we all got a months severance.
I'm in my mid 40s and have no desire to start a company or go into management. I never want a job that doesn't involve hands on coding. These days I go back and forth between contracting, full time "senior software Engineer" and "architect". But I am aggressive about learning, I keep my resume up to date and I'm always networking.
I don't expect any loyalty from a company. I do my best work while I'm there and all I expect is a check twice a month. I know they will let me go if it's best for their business and I'll leave if I can get a significantly better offer or if I'm not growing and keeping my skills marketable.
It's never in 20 years taken me more than a little over a month to get a job making more money from the time I've started looking - and that includes a two week notice. I'm not bragging. In my market (not on the west coast), most developers who know current technology can say the same.
https://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.ca.htm
https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/washington.htm#eag
as i said, the next best.
Compare the scenarios:
- a 10%, 4K layoff from AMZN would present a high, by tech standards, unemployment situation of 4% (4K / 90K of the rest of tech capacity in WA with almost half of it - 40K - being just one employer - MS). So it would be very hard to choose and pick and negotiate on a new position, if any.
- a 10%, 4K (judging by various sources, 4K is probably a bit more than 10% of Google employees in CA) layoff from Google would just result in a hiring frenzy by the rest of the 500K industry trying to fill the positions.
Way to disprove the myth of upper middle class security!
A lot of decisions that can impact the lives of many are often made for short term self interest of a few. And upper management who make these decisions or run companies to the ground keep floating from one high paid job to another.
The 2 senior most execs of Well Fargo for instance responsible for the fraud and a $1 billion dollar fine get a golden parachute of around $250 million between them. Who is going to pay for this? Customers or job cuts? And this is not an exception. There seem to be a huge dissonance between idealized values and reality in upper segments of society.
Ultimately as a society you commit to a set of values. These values are reinforced by politics, media and your own experiences. Maybe you have a great life and you don't question them, maybe you are born privileged and your perspectives and life experiences are by definition different. But as educated adults its your job to understand and define your society. You make the bed and you have to lie in it.
This clearly isn't the perception at that level. At least some number of people at the board level, as well as presumably these top people themselves, probably don't share that view[1]. This probably extends to the layers immediately beneath them.
I know from my own work that I'm not bothered by the fact that other people I sometimes interact with (I'm not the last layer before them nor do I think "doing their bidding" accurately describes my relationship with them) are paid significantly more than I am. I can plainly see that they are bringing skills and experience to the table that I or others at "my level" simply do not have.
1: Never mind the fact that the market also doesn't agree. The departure of a good CEO can move the market cap by a substantial multiple of the CEOs compensation.
Why should your personal opinion - "I'm not bothered" - be a political universal? The reality is that there are increasing numbers of people who used to have steady jobs, and now have gig economy pseudo-slavery which barely makes rent, if at all. This is an unstable basis on which to run a large economy.
Market cap is not the only measure of economic effectiveness. If all the rhetoric about "highly paid job creators" doesn't lead to the creation of real jobs, what use is it?
> Through the 1970s—when the ratio of CEOs’ pay to that of the average worker was much lower, at somewhere between 20:1 and 30:1—the lodestar was “internal equity,” or how an executive’s pay compared with that of other employees in the company. A nascent industry, executive-compensation consulting, changed this. Consultants recommended switching to “external equity,” meaning compensation would be based on what other CEOs were paid. This was merely a useful sales tool—even though the consultants didn’t have solid evidence or theoretical justification for this method, they could attract business by vowing to set ambitious goals for their clients. Still, corporations adopted the standard of external equity, and CEOs got a lot richer.
The days of company loyalty are long gone. If you work at a large company and have been there over a year keep actively looking for the an even better position. You are expendable and therefore owe your employer nothing more than what you are paid to do today. I hate being so negative but sadly this seems to be the state of affairs these days
Ultimately, to paraphrase Machiavelli, our ability to thrive rests on our own prowess. I only wish such statements were immediately useful instead of requiring lots of introspection, filed-testing, etc.
I escaped all of the layoffs, and finally had my fill of the VP Eng who told me that Linux clusters had no future, and big SMPs were how SGI was going to rise again.
I turned in my resignation a week later (early 2001).
So, I argued that I should form a company, start working on selling, marketing, developing, etc.
I used my layoff severance, loaded up credit cards to buy what I needed. Built a business that survived for 14.5 years. Generated millions a year in revenue. Had a small team working for me.
Until a bank came along and shot us in the head over an out-of-formula LOC.
So I am back working for the man. But I have so much more experience now. Much richer in business, in management, in sales and marketing, in addition to engineering and support. I would have done a number of things differently.
This said, having the control over your own destiny, to some degree, as much as your customers allow, was fantastic. You winning or losing was predicated on how hard and smart you worked.
The article is fairly accurate. Coding tests have become a thing. I've noticed that some places ask esoteric irrelevant questions specifically to stump people. Others are genuinely interested in your experience.
If only there was a way to avoid wasting time on the former to spend time with the latter.
- https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qdtzLMrb8zQ
- https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bC1ScfCny38
I like to think in a small way if you own any stocks/bonds, you are in a sense hiring employees (indirectly at arms length of course).
If you are buying SNAP, you are giving Evan Spiegel, the employee, his own business unit and promoting him. If you are holding SNAP and not buying more, then that's like putting Evan Spiegel on a PIP. If you are selling it, its basically like firing Evan Spiegel for poor performance.
I'd recommend to the OP spending any remaining time after your side coding projects learning about businesses/cashflow. To just blindly hold S&P Index funds in your 401K is a bit a kin to hiring never doing an initial coding review and never doing an annual perf review on your employees.
Still, the best insurance is to stash money for rainy days and have the resumé up-to-date. As soon as the weather starts to turn (which you can detect in many, but not all cases), jump ship. Company has zero loyalty to employees, so theirs should not be much higher than zero either if they want to be fair.
One job means you get fired and you're looking for a new boss.
10 clients means if one fires you, you still have 9 you're hopefully keeping happy.
I try to follow what I read about Gates starting Microsoft in some Biography. He tried to keep 2x the salary of all the employees as cash on hand, so if something went bad, they could try to weather the storm as long as possible.
So before hiring anyone as an employee (including myself), I do this with my startups. (I work 1099 in the beginning as well and I fire myself [work without pay] first).
Getting laid off lets you know where your loyalties should lie. The circle of you, is what I call it.
Each circle goes out from there. For me that's the circle of my wife. Then my immediate family. Etc.
Two bits of advice:
1. The first check you don't write is usually the one to yourself. You're the only worker that will show up for free.
2. The problem with being your own boss is that your boss is always around.
I've never known stress and uncertainty like being a business owner. But I feel like I've learned a lot and am better for it. And if I ever work for anyone else again, I'll be a much better employee as a result.
I guess I'm well rounded so that doesn't really apply to me. I hire for roles that consume my time but still provide value (the necessary busy work).
I'm a much worse employee as the proud failure of 7 startups (on #8 at the moment). So much bullshit, waste, politics, needless meetings, etc., that working for a company again is one of the most painful things I've ever had to do besides death of a family member or divorcing my first wife (that was #1 BTW).
I will agree with your #2, work life balance can be hard. But if you find yourself not wanting to work on a Wednesday, you can just not work that day. If you're particularly inspired on a Saturday, you can go all in.
My biggest issue was around this (startup #3, first fully self funded). I felt if I was not working every waking moment, I was failing. I learned my way out of that one eventually.
Discipline is the key in working for yourself. I'm lucky that my parents were both entrepreneurs. I saw them fail and succeed (and fail and succeed again...).
Why would you ever hire employees when you can't pay them? I love the internet sometimes.
Have a whole team of eager engineers ready to go for the next big project. That's 90% of the reason your company gets the contracts they do; they (claim they) can get 5-10 qualified engineers in the building by next Thursday. Which is something you obviously can't do.
It's hard to find good work as an indie dev unless you have a skill-set that works well in that setting. Either you're an industry specialist in a field, or you're awesome at stuff that small companies need. And the market for the latter is getting tighter every day.
Everyone I know that makes a good living as a indie contractor has themselves as an employee, working on apps or niche websites to pay the bills during the lean months. The outstanding ones I know can learn a new technology by creating a marketable product from it. As in, their very first iPhone app / website made them money.
I hope the author learns about labor unions some day, hopefully soon.
I also enjoy the ignorant response implying governments are responsible for worker protections, not the organized labour that pushed for those regulations in the first place. The same meager protections that the current anti-labour government would love to roll back.
Well, sort of. At 22, and in IT, still way better off than any single mother, non-college educated, or 40+ yo laid off person, in any other industry.
A fair severance package is 1 months salary per year of employment.
Nothing last forever. Not a job — not even one's life. Make the most of it while you can.
In her mind, success could ONLY come from a) college and b) a good job (doctor, engineer).
But here's the thing -- white collar jobs are just as subject to cost-cutting and instability as any other job. And perhaps, in the end, a "perfect" job in which you work yourself to death for a paycheck is hardly a happy or rewarding way to live.
Open your mind. Life is insecurity. Be open to change and you will thrive.
To realize that whatever security there once was on corporate jobs is at best a vanishing illusion. To realize that the way forward isn't to build on a rock that will likely be flooded at some point, but to realize that you must surf.
While that doesn't mean that it'll all be great, it does prepare you for when the wave does crash down on you and pummel you into the sandy bottom -- you get back in the mix a lot faster and more capably than those who bought into the expectation of stability.
Also can lead to a much more interesting career, even if not as consistently lucrative.
Programmers have a much better shot at establishing this kind of security than most people, because you should be making 2x to 3x median income for your area, which means you can live on 1x median income and invest the rest.
A lot of the people I've worked with as a programmer over the past 14 years have done effectively that, so by now they have a lot of assets. That is what upper middle class security looks like.
citation needed!
Here are three:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death
Truth is they are dumb and naive.
The only thing that will make you who you need to be is you, and that is going to require hard work to determine who you want to be and who you are capable of being.
The only entity that can provide for you is yourself, and your determination and willingness to work hard and take advantage of the environment you are in to the best of your ability.
Did he need to get laid off to realize that a) no job is forever and b) doing all "the right things" won't ALWAYS lead to success.
I figured those were common sense.