Not fun for those laid off, but this is a great life lesson for all those people who have given "loyalty" to their employer.
We - the people who you often view as cynical and negative - live by the following rules:
- People at work are not your friends. You can have friendly relationships, but they ain't your real friends. You will only know if they can become your real friends once you don't work at the same company anymore.
- NEVER accept less pay for your work than the market rate. If they don't pay 100% you never work 100%. Take a second job and do only 50% or less for a company that doesn't pay you market rate.
- Don't work as a full time employee if you can make twice as much as a contractor. Employees have supposedly the benefit of "job security". LOL. Contractors get paid more because they need to factor in dry spells. Also there are tax benefits for companies to use contractors. The software industry is so robust and even despite all the layoffs the demand for devs is higher than the supply. There is no reason to take on full employment if you can contract with the same level of job security for much more money and much less internal politics.
- Shares don't mean anything if the company never IPOs. Fuck shares. Ask for hard cash. If you want to have shares and become a millionaire over night then start your own startup. Why suck up to some stranger who gives zero shit about you. You didn't invest money into the startup, you didn't found it, you are a nobody to them. You do a job for them and they fool you to take on company shares so they can massively underpay you. If you want to earn little and have lots of shares then start a startup yourself. In every other case tell them to get fucked and ask for hard cash.