Microsoft laid me off after 15 years of service. Life after Microsoft?

I don't know the details of the Microsoft case, but my job was made redundant a number of years ago and I definitely was able to bounce back.

There are lots of legal regulations around terminating employment and one of the easier legal ways is to remove a particular job or position. That's why generally people are not made redundant, their job, position or title is. It's a legal method of cutting costs by pruning the organisation.

It's nothing to do with whether you are a worthy employee. Redundancies don't work that way. They are a practical, legal way of reducing numbers - payroll and staff. In the video, he's wondering why they couldn't simply find another position for him where he could apply his expertise. It's probably because they had to state his job is no longer viable and so the job (and the person occupying those jobs) are let go. If the company were to find other positions for their favorite employees, it opens all kinds of legal problems for HR.

While I am aware that this is the reality, I find the attitude underlying this reality rather unfortunate.

As an interviewer assessing a candidate, I would like to believe that I'm thoughtful enough to see that corporations lay people off for any number reasons. The macro-scale conditions at Microsoft likely have no bearing on the candidate's quality.

Imagine if the candidate were from RIM. We'd hardly question the reality that RIM has to lay off people, many of whom are competent.

I don't think that's the case if he is one of 17k others.

Being laid off is different from being fired. It doesn't necessarily imply anything about you. I think anybody who really wonders that probably hasn't witnessed a large-scale corporate layoff before.

It can still be devastating, though. It depends heavily on how general your skills are. Being laid off is much worse for someone whose knowledge and skills were mostly institutional.

Not necessarily. Having a "brand name" on your resume tends to really impress the small-to-medium sized companies. I think there's plenty of places that'll roll out the red carpet for "the guy from Microsoft", so to speak and look past the fact that he was laid off.

Not in my experience, no. There's no stigma when you are part of a mass layoff that was national news. People understand the ax swings wildly at times like this.

not at this moment, not after such a massive layoff

Be willing to move.

The hard part about this is convincing the HR department that you can self-relocate and don't want relo money.

That 15 years of experience at one of the world's top software companies is seen is a negative disgusts me.

It seems disrespectful to judge an employee based on the negative perception of an entire company. For all the broken things within a company like Microsoft, I think it would be foolish to mark the company's talent pool as tainted.

Perhaps this reflects a subtler form of the fanboy-ism that exists in technology culture today. The sentiment is that companies we dislike must have incompetent employees. Competent employees would surely build a better product, right? Obviously this is naive.

Absolutely right, ageism plays into this as well. If you're hiring, keep in mind that, while fashionable, it is illegal to discriminate based on age. I wish this law was slightly easier to enforce.

Agreed, but at the scale they're talking about, trying to rank competent people out of the tens of thousands being let go... you're gonna need a lot of Bobs ;)

>>I don't get whz he should be unemployable anywhere else..

Your ability to get work done has nothing to do with getting a job.

Getting a job depends on clearing interviews. These days that means live coding over shared sessions, all kind of crazy math and puzzle questions, getting grilled over esoteric corners of CS, and your regular tests of algorithm wizardry.

If you haven't interviewed in 1.5 decades. Its very likely you are going to go through hell before you find something you like.

I don't know of too many places other than Microsoft where testing Microsoft software with Microsoft internal testing tools is an applicable skill.

Q: What have you been doing since you were at XYZ?

A: I took a year off.

I don't think it's really that bad. People do that. It's not like you're going to be looking for a job on Mars, when you come back you'll call your friends (who by then have found jobs or started new companies) and through them you will find plenty of opportunity.

Those places where you're a cog - you probably don't want to work there anyways.

We need to rewire these workplaces. If they want cogs don't work there and let them know why.

I was talking about one specific scenario (no kids, living very frugally).

If you want kids and you want to do it on a single income, you're going to have to make compromises, very serious ones. Unfortunately, that's all there is to it. Keep in mind that one possible compromise is that you move--take a 20% paycut (or more) and move to an area where you can afford the lifestyle that you want while still saving a reduced but proportional amount to my example.

It's frankly a really bad idea for someone making very low six figures to try to raise a family on that income alone in an area where homes cost $1M (as you suggest they do).

I said "sufficiently frugal" for a reason. You can't do this if you want to buy the big house in the big city and a fancy car right off the bat.

The way you do this is fairly simple: don't buy the house. Rent an apartment (not a luxury one), possibly even share it with a roommate.

I recognize that not everybody will be willing to do this. But owning a home in a major city is a luxury these days IMHO.

Besides, this is assuming you're doing this all on your own -- no income from a spouse. Why do you need a house by yourself?

(By the way, the income figure I cited was $8.8k/month in WA after taxes, not $6-7k.)

Unless of course you'd take some extra measures to increase your job security: https://www.thc.org/root/phun/unmaintain.html

Anecdotally it seems like a lot of the people let go were in SDET roles.

Private insurance has always had the chance of being cheaper if you could get it - COBRA's advantage was in cases with preexisting conditions.

Since this is in the context of COBRA, the ACA has something called a Qualifying Life Event that includes changes in income, family size and state of residence. With those, there's a good chance you'll qualify for a Special Enrollment Period and be able to purchase coverage (though you might still keep COBRA for a month until the new coverage kicks in).

There may also be some limitations on the non-exchange catastrophic plans that will curtail their availability in the future - I haven't paid attention to this, but one of the "Obamacare killed my insurance coverage!" issues was that the ACA mandated certain minimum levels of coverage or service and the plans that were being killed off were ones that didn't meet those minimums. After the outcry I believe there were some deadline extensions to grandfather in existing plans, but those will end at some point.

Actually, if you experience a "qualifying event" such as job loss, marriage, or having a baby, you can enroll under something called a Special Enrollment Period. (Private group employer plans also have open enrollment and qualifying event enrollment). For example, https://www.healthcare.gov/screener/marketplace.html?state=V...

I went through layoff six months ago. ACA definitely has helped with health insurance. If you are unemployed (no income), you are most likely to get subsidy as it is income based. Our premiums after subsidy is little bit higher than what we were paying when I was employed.

I wish there was something similar to ACA for dental insurance. Most dental insurance plans on open market are expensive and with ridiculous terms, like 18-month waiting period! We had to take dental insurance plan through COBRA (almost 6 times as expensive as regular employee). Not sure what we will do with dental insurance after 18 months of coverage through COBRA.

This is a very thorough answer.

German here who lived in the US for a year. I lived there during the time when obamacare was presented and I had a lot of discussions about this. The main reason which I heard over and over again (and sometimes word for word) "The German system is communism. We don't want that here!". I am not even kidding, there are people who truly believe that a german insurance system would be the beginning of communism in the US. One guy who told me this broke his arm and had to pay about 15000 dollar because he had no insurance. An other couple paid 75000 dollar behause at the birth of their first child there were some medical problems during birth and they did not have insurance. And still both got angry at me when I told them that I'd prefer the German way.

After hearing this stuff for half a year I am really glad to be back in Germany. I am funemployed since a few months and I pay 150 euro per month. Next week I have an appointment at the doctor because of my severe hip problems. I might get some xrays done and perhaps some MRT. What will this cost me? Nothing! I am so glad that I live in a deeply communist country...

A lot of people didn't like ACA because we would have preferred single payer. Many others felt we would just be sending much more money to the for profit insurance companies who were already treating us horribly and making record profits.

We also have heard many stories of people having to wait months if not years for non-emergency treatment. Such as getting an MRI for an injured knee in Canada for instance. As a very healthy avid runner it would be very frustrating to not be able to pay for something critical to me like that (once again I am not saying this is always or mostly the case but it is a scenario I have heard about). I suppose our imaginations extrapolate if health care is more or less free for all then our level of care will be much worse. I am not really sure.

If it was up to me, I'd kill all insurance companies with fire, have us all pay into a pot for medicare and just use that.

We don't actually want to live like that.

We just have such distrust in our government that we don't want them running the health care system. Witness, for example, the recent VA Hospital scandals. Our government is dysfunctional. And it's already incredibly intrusive, too, and some of us don't want the feds knowing all of our health problems (even though they probably already do).

I would love government health care, just not from this government. The free market doesn't work for health care.

Most people don't want to live like that, but health insurance companies profit from the current system and they have deep pockets to influence the government to keep it that way.

>But it seems US citizens want to live like that. Why?

Well first, not all US citizens do.

Primarily this seems to stem from a free-market, conservative viewpoint. Central to this viewpoint is the thesis that not only is labor just, but the sociological outcome of labor is also, always, just (unless the government interferes). In other words, those who can afford healthcare have earned the right to it, those who can't were simply to lazy or ignorant to work hard enough to afford it.

Also, there can be a deep aversion to the government (any government) interfering with a person's property and income, where any program which requires people to give for the "greater good" is seen as not only theft, but an existential attack on the fundamental ideals of American individualism and personal liberty. The argument here is that governments are by definition corrupt, fascist and incompetent, and only a free market with as little regulation as possible could handle something like "healthcare" efficiently and fairly.

Therefore, advocates for limited government will see social programs as interference by an increasingly "big government" regime which has no right to force a moral imperative on people or relieve them of their property, and conservatives and free-market believers will feel that social programs undermine the moral principles of capitalism while insidiously creating a dependent class of lazy left-wing radical neo-immigrants.

Also, it's probably worth mentioning that not many Americans appreciate that there is a difference between liberalism, socialism and communism, and nor would they care.

There's a lot (a lot) to be said for universal healthcare, but to answer you question in the general case (why americans don't want to be more like Europe), this might give a good hint:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/05/daily-c...

Becoming Germany, Britain or Sweden would probably be a tolerable tradeoff, but a lot of factors go into that, it's not something that happens as a result of a single policy or two. Do note that in Portugal the rich are worse off than the poor in the US, and Italy and even France aren't far off.

Germans get more benefits provided by the government than Americans because Germans pay more taxes. The trade off is Americans get more take home pay and get to decide what benefits they wish to buy on their own, in the private market.

At least in theory, anyway...

> But it seems US citizens want to live like that. Why?

Only "god" knows for sure, but I have a strong suspicion you answered your own question, at least in part:

> And still this system is generally not exploited: People work hard here.

> But it seems US citizens want to live like that.

US citizens, in aggregate, want to live like that (or, perhaps more accurately, want other people in the US to have to live like that) when opinions are aggregated by effective political power, sure, but effective political power in the US is largely a function of wealth, which is extremely unequally distributed.

It is the health insurance lobby that doesn't want it. Also corporations don't want the flexibility because it encourages people to stay and keeps salaries down.

COBRA is impossibly expensive for many people. When you simultaneously have your salary drop to $0 and your portions of your insurance premiums triple (say, if you have a spouse and kids covered by the plan), that's a rough situation to be in.

About the only good thing about COBRA is that it covers preexisting conditions.

Should be noted that in most cases your employer would cover most of that premium. My insurance went from $10/month (with my employer covering $580) to $590/month on COBRA when I was laid off.

In the US this doesn't make sense (for most people), unfortunately.

Employers offer group plans which tend to be much cheaper and offer substantially better benefits than individual plans. The larger the company, the better the arrangement tends to be.

COBRA is designed to fill in that coverage gap when you leave, but as others have noted in this thread, it is not always economical.

How is that better than COBRA?