How’d that work at Google? Loyalty is zero guarantee of safety during any sort of reduction in force. You’re just a line in a spreadsheet. Also, you can have the best working relationship with your manager and if they don’t have enough juice, you’re still out.
Tips: Robust emergency fund, keep your network warm, work enough to keep your employer reasonably happy, show up every day like it might be your last.
Spot on. IT workers need to realise this and start acting accordingly. You are no more important to an exec of a tech company than a barista is to Starbuck’s exec.
Unionise and stop being jerks during technical interviews.
Or even better, use your skills to start your own company.
I’ve never seen a unionized software company make good software. And I’ve seen lots of different types of software.
I don’t think programmers are interchangeable cogs and there’s so much variance and diversity across people, I wouldn’t want to work for a company that paid me the same as everyone else and fired based on seniority.
> I wouldn’t want to work for a company that paid me the same as everyone else and fired based on seniority.
Are you insinuating that pay and layoffs are done based on merit today? Because that’s totally not my experience after a couple of decades in the industry. And I’m leaving myself out of the sample.
Not sure if you ever attended a meeting with just directors and above. If you do you will hear only one word used for engineers: “Resource”.
Also great software, made by the megacorps, has to do as much with the engineers as McDonald’s burger have to do with the person flipping the patties.
>I’ve never seen a unionized software company make good software.
This is a non-sequitur. Are you misunderstanding how unions work?
It's not that a particular company should unionize, but rather the software developers at every company.
The union's role is to advocate for the interests of software developers in the industry as a whole, not oversee particular software development projects.
Not everyone works for massive tech companies. If you work for a FAANG or MANTA or whatever it is, then sure, you're probably viewed as another cog in the machine.
Perhaps, this whole topic becomes a lot more nuanced if people want to talk about net benefit, and situational benefit, and honestly a lot more interesting.
E.g.How and when do you decide to pull out the stops and put in a lot of extra work for your company or boss? That's the kind of stuff make or break careers and build lasting reputation.
If your whole department or project is being let go loyalty and personal relationships doesn't matter. If your department or project is one of the ones told to manage out poor performers more aggressively or to cut X% of headcount being someone your manager can count on is going to make you substantially less likely to be one of the people managed out or cut.
Sure, they might bring in consultants like it's Office Space but those consultants ask everyone what they think of their team members and keep score and in that scenario it's still better to be the person everyone likes and/or respects with more than the absolute bare minimum work output.
Loyalty isn't rewarded per se, but someone who is committed to their work/team/company is going to be lower on the layoffs list than someone who's doing rest and vest while doing the bare minimum.
Prove your assertion. You are attributing logical, rational behavior to orgs and their participants that rarely are those traits. I have personally attempted to defend directs from layoffs, and that quickly turned into me making calls to other orgs so they could land safely elsewhere, facts and value be damned.
I support rational decisioning (“here is the evidence this person delivers value, is committed to the org’s success, and should be factored into retention”), it’s just rare imho. YMMV. Perhaps I’ve just been unlucky in my journey. If that is the case, n=1, build your assumptions off of competing data.
> Prove your assertion. You are attributing logical, rational behavior to orgs and their participants that rarely are those traits. I have personally attempted to defend directs from layoffs, and that quickly turned into me making calls to other orgs so they could land safely elsewhere, facts and value be damned.
And what am I supposed to do if my experience was the exact opposite to yours? Do you want me to dig up emails and/or other company documents that show there was "logical, rational behavior" in my organization?
Nah, I’m just saying that our experiences are going to wildly differ and my recommendation is to plan for the worst. Please don’t take my comments as anything other than that, and I absolutely did not intend it as a personal attack.
If you’ve worked at amazing (logical, rational) orgs that value commitment and will take care of folks in return, I am genuinely happy for you. Envious even. It is more rare than you would think. Regardless, workers must protect themselves. If you’d like to discuss further, contact info in my profile.
I have seen people who were loyal and worked for the same company for 20 years be thrown to the curb like trash, and they were not poor performers.
You are just a number on a spreadsheet, and if you have been there awhile its an expensive number, you are probably older with a larger salary and higher healthcare costs.
Layoffs in large firms are typically handled in complete secrecy by third-party consultants, and 'loyalty' isn't an input they plug into their formulas.
The decisionmakers that, at the end of the day, approve the recommendations of the consultants are usually incredibly removed from any actual work that gets done. I'm talking about people with 300+ reports. They have no fucking idea whether or not you are 'loyal'.
The people who have an idea of that find out that you got laid off at the same time that you do.
Likewise, when an entire department gets gutted (with no internal transfers available), nobody with any influence over that decision is going to care that you were busting your ass for the firm's bottom line every Saturday.
> What metrics do you think the "third-party consultants" are using?
Closing their eyes, and throwing darts at the historical record of your three-point "NI/Meets/Exceeds" score, where you are on the org chart, and whether you're being paid more than your peers.
If there was any method to their madness, you wouldn't be seeing people with strong performance histories getting canned (In divisions that haven't been shut down).
As a CEO who had to do some lay-offs, I would terminate loyal workers who care about the company the last, even if I had to change their focus.
At a certain size when you know all people in the company, a CEO always know which 15 % of people will be let go first and which 15 % will the company keep even if the business is losing money every month.
>My company is small enough to know everyone personally.
OK, so how do you identify, evaluate, and rank loyalty? If there's an objective mechanism for it, you shouldn't need to personally know everyone.
What I'm hearing is that you go by "feel" (aka the sum of all your biases) and make decisions based on that. How is this remotely objective, fair, or scalable?
