It means that you need to be responsible for yourself, and not allow thoughts like "I'm a valuable employee", or "I have too much seniority", or "my manager and I get along great" to convince you management won't lay you off or fire you or that they owe you anything.

As others have said, the employer-employee relationship is first and foremost a business relationship, i.e. transactional: you work and they pay you. When that relationship doesn't work any more for one side or the other, it ends.

It does often happen, of course, that professional friendships or even personal friendships develop. You are, after all, spending a lot of time with your co-workers. But don't think your good relationships or friendships will help if the business decides a layoff is necessary.

In my opinion it should mean that you not only consider the relationship transactional, you consider yourself as an independent business operating within a business transaction, an LLC or sole proprietorship if you will. Remove yourself from emotional attachment this way.

This line of thought leads people to naturally adopt the exact same sort optimization (exploitation) strategies businesses (your employer) does with the same justifications they use. As such you should focus on diversifying your employment or making sure you’re diversely employable should you need new revenue streams, have savings and cash reserves for economic downturns, and focus on your profit margins (time invested vs paid) and so on and optimize around these sort of criteria.

Obviously if you have a good transactional relationship and are to some degree dependent on that relationship you don’t do everything possible to undermine it (just as employers have limits they’ll stop at before employees start to flee) but never consider it at any sort of emotional or attached level, it’s merely a strategic relationship and be ready to optimize wherever you can for your LLC depending on its goals (i.e. your goals).

But that’s exactly the kind of relationship it is. Instead of maintaining some fantasy, you should call a duck, a duck.

I've seen family members fire other close family members, because a business is a business. Nothing special about it.

You can be friends with your colleagues, but when you understand that their role at a company is separate from your personal relationship - you may just get friends that transcend your employment.

My personal attitude towards employment - "I work for you while our goals align". Businesses most definitely treat any employee the same way.

I was once in a meeting with an SVP who was going over what he was going to say in an upcoming all-hands meeting. He kept referring to employees as “resources” and I told him he should call them people or team members as resources was dehumanizing and made it sound like we’re just line items on a spreadsheet and pawns on a chessboard. He looked at me and said you’re right - that is how they look at things, but thanked me for reminding me of his audience. He was candid with me only because I was also high up in the org.

Companies are not your friend. The people above you in the org are not your friend. You are not special or different or immune or safe. Ultimately, you do have to look out for yourself. If a company is able and willing to terminate your job for financial reasons, you need to be willing and able to terminate your job for financial reasons too - on your own terms and with a better higher paying job lined up. It’s just another business transaction. Loyalty is dead. Act accordingly.

The classic comeback for this is to refer to management as "overhead."

Companies pay taxes, operate in a community, and employ people. Shareholders may not care about such trifles... until the race to rot is complete.

It’s barely real, it’s hardly law, and the more we say it, the worse companies will act because we’ve all accepted fate.

Companies exist in our society. They don’t have a right to profits. Any profits is a result of patronage and goodwill of the population. We can change laws, and cultural norms, and worker and environmental protections. We don’t need to be victims of greed like it’s some inevitable consequence of capitalism.

Google is cutting a few hundred R&D jobs out of their 180K employees, and countless ventures. These people could be repositioned, these people could be absorbed elsewhere. Google is wildly profitable, with record profits, which by definition means what they’re not falling on hard times.

Loyalty is dead.

Something that has never existed cannot die.

But the myth, and the brainwashing, of "employee loyalty" is still very much alive. Some even buy that crap.

There is absolutely still some loyalty in the other direction. Lots of people here would say it's misplaced. When it works out for you (cachet in the org, seniority, whatever) it can pay off, but for lots of people it only gets them burned when they get laid off with outdated skills in outdated tech because they were a "company man" for the last decade.

A particular person above you in the management chain may actually be your friend. It does not mean that that person would be able to protect you from a layoff; that could be a conflict of interest. That person might give you an earlier warning so that you could start looking around ahead of time. That person could give you a glowing review and references for prospective employers. That person might introduce you to someone who might be interested in hiring you. But that person operates the machine, and plays by the rules of the machine, to which you have agreed when you have signed your offer.

Build good relationships with coworkers; this can be helpful, and is just more pleasant. But don't try to build a relationship with a company; you can't.

- never assume that just because it’s obvious to you (and your coworkers and boss) that it would be really stupid to lay you off or fire you, that they wouldn’t do it anyway.

A lot of what is going on IMO is burnout and disconnection from the on the ground reality at the executive layer.

That means short sighted, stupid, long term self harming decisions.

But just because what someone is doing is clearly stupid, doesn’t mean they won’t do it. A hard lesson to learn sometimes.

Or, you may have a division that is profitable, but it takes an outsized attention in the organization relative to its profitability and the loss of revenue is made up for focus in the rest of the organization. (Ideally, you would find a way to spin that off or sell it, but there are times where the tight integration makes this unfeasible.)

And yes, there is disconnection from the on-the-ground reality too. (and all sorts of things) - but this all goes to say that layoffs, when executed, often are not correlated with individual performance.

There is that, and it does happen that way often.

There is also sometimes people just do stupid, self harming things. Either because they are not able to properly process/know/understand what the consequences will be, or because their short term incentives encourage them to at their long term detriment.

Or because the organizational incentives make it worthwhile for them to harm the actual organizations long term interests, and they will be rewarded for screwing over the organization this way.

It’s easy for engineers in particular to look at 2+2 and assume that everyone else knows 4 is the obvious answer, and hence will act appropriately. and they just need to be shown the truth if somehow they don’t understand this

But that isn’t how people often work, especially when dysregulated, stressed out, under outside pressure, etc.

Often, there are many people between the decision makers and the folks who know the actual truth and the inevitable consequences who have incentives that will make them actively hurt anyone trying to tell the decision makers the truth - often because the decision maker implicitly or explicitly wants it that way.

even engineers, though it’s often hard to ‘know’ that when you’re in the middle of it.

Many people will burn their lives to the ground until everyone agrees 5 is the correct answer. Or happily reassure their boss 5 is the answer while burning everyone else’s lives to the ground.

That can make many real life situations very surprising and frustrating for engineers in particular.

Because how could someone do that based on ‘wrong’ (usually just not the same) information? It’s stupid!

Because sometimes for many people, the individual/self interested ‘smart’ thing is to be as ‘stupid’ as possible. And that strategy is not something someone can just change on a dime. It’s inherent.

And sometimes people are just stupid. Even otherwise really smart people.

Also, sociopaths exist and they are often in management.

But in both cases, the key insight is that layoffs are often past the control of the engineer.

With the caveat that everyone responsible is also going to attempt to deny/deflect/reverse victim and offender, etc.

It’s amazing how ‘helpless’ some management/execs get when unpleasant decisions need to be made.

The company is not your friend and not your enemy, I agree. However, people _do_ develop personal relationship with each other. Sometimes even across the different levels in the company hierarchy. Yes, as with any other relationship, circumstances and interests might override this, but relationships still do matter. People have emotions, and there are managers who're not psychopats and find it very hard to e.g. let people go.

And yes, value yourself, absolutely. And your job is not your family or your identity, and manage risk, and there are bad bosses and bad company cultures. But it's not uniform.

But please don't think that nobody cares about you in your workplace and you're a completely fungible cog. It's a horrible life to live. Let's not tell the already cynical young people that this is how the world works.

Even at big, bureaucratic companies like big investment banks, if you're at a certain level (not that high), eventually you'll mostly be taken care of. Not everyone and not always, but e.g. if you're an ED at an investment bank, you can have a job for life, maybe not at your current place forever, but the industry will take care of you. Similarly if you've been at dunno, Mercedes for 15 years and you're not the bottom 20 percent in terms of performance, then it's kinda guaranteed that you'll have a job in the auto industry forever.

People who have been let go from Google today can have an extremely lucrative job forever in the industry.

This is compounded when 75% of the team is made up of consultants.

I do agree though that its pretty awful but the thought of moving my family to a big city, doubling my cost of living and having to commute is also pretty bad. I live in a not tech city and would have to move to get a comparable salary at an in person job.

I have said that while other companies I have worked within would be sympathetic, they definitely would not have been empathetic; however, at my current company, EVERYONE from the CEO to interns have been so very empathetic, helpful, and thoughtful.

We are all remote and have been since the pandemic. These are people who are reaching out regularly, coming to visit, offering support in whatever way possible, and being genuinely good human beings. It's simply a work culture when you don't have this, but you CAN find it.

Don't lose hope. Good companies and great people within them are there, remote or not.

I’m not saying you have total control over it… but it depends on how people interact.

I've seen first-hand organizations shift from 100% employed teams to being majority consultants, and the majority of those consultants on 1-2 year contracts then leaving. Code quality goes to absolute shit. The name of the game is spending the first half of your contract not getting fired and the second half looking for the next contract. Zero documentation. Refusing to do turnover meetings. Not showing up for the last day/week of the contract because their next contract wanted them to start earlier so they didn't care if they got paid for this one or not. Most egregiously someone just brought in their next contract's laptop into our office with over a month left on their contract.

None of this happens with employees. Sure you'll occasionally have someone quit with minimal or no notice but that's the exception. We had to basically assume that any time we got in the last month of the contract was a bonus. Consultants work for their recruiting firm, not for your org, and they behave accordingly.

I will know if I am going to leave in a couple weeks, 2 things need to happen for me to stay; I get promoted this month and half the consultants leave. If both don't happen I think I am gone.

Whereas in an office environment, we'd naturally run into folks at the proverbial water cooler, and slowly develop more of a relationship with some folks — and similarly for camaraderie with the folks sitting around you — that just doesn't exist in remote.

In my experience, it is still possible to build these kinds of relationships, though. But it requires actively building them. It requires intentional effort, which doesn't come naturally to many of us, and especially so since many of us have not been used to having to do that, having come from office settings pretty recently. I was able to build meaningful friendships with remote colleagues, some of which have lasted beyond my time at the company, by intentionally making the time to ask and care about their lives outside of work, by setting up recurring 1:1s to just chat, etc. This can sometimes feel like it's "wasted time" that's taken away from your work, but I believe it's really important in order to feel better about where you're working and who you're working with, feel less like a cog in a machine, and as a result (at least for me) end up doing better work.

I wonder if, as the tech world becomes more accustomed to remote work, we'll eventually get better at this as an industry. My hope is that it'll get easier, or at least more natural as a result.

I think after a point, it is up to us to create the culture we want to see in a team. Someone has to start sharing more things, start talking about more things so others will feel like the same. Have a pizza session after every few successful sprints. Share puzzles and other things regularly so people have more things to talk about. It is easy to feel detached when everyone only uses a group channel, but a lot of meaningful connections happen when you do talk 1-1 in private.

I mean I have worked at places where no one even exchanged email ids when they are about to leave the company, and lurked in online places where people whom I have never even met employed me immediately when i mentioned that my day job company was going bankrupt.

Likewise, there is a huge bias in hiring against older developers. Getting laid off in your 40s is a death sentence. You’ll never make as much money again, and you’ll be lucky to find employment.

Be ready to retire by 50, because anything else is both risky and improbable.

Tech skewing young and being ageist is also partially an artefact of tech being a new hot growing rapidly changing field. That is waning over time.

Is low-level expertise going to continue to skew older? Or are things like Rust and embedded AI going to bring in a bunch of new blood?

AI product dev hat on for this comment. My take is AI will continue to give solid first drafts, and expertise, creativity, and curiosity are required to take it the rest of the way. Maybe, just maybe, we get beyond the GPT architecture and embed a reasonable state of the world for wider use cases similar to a CoPilot.

I don't think there is an inevitable general decline of cognitive abilities with age, or the effect isn't strong enough to matter. At least, I haven't really seen them.

What I have seen is older people who are just tired of the constant personal improvement that any career needs to continue to flourish. People often find their niche and just want to stay there. That's a different thing entirely, though.

I'm a very senior IC in a FAANG and almost my whole job is going around and sharing 30+ years of wisdom with people on everything from "dealing with people" to architecture to pull request reviews.

Also, while I'm at FAANG now, I'm there because I was previously at a startup that was acquired by said FAANG, and if anything, there is even MORE of a need for this sort of wisdom intelligence in a startup. :)

This is a real issue at say 85, not at 45. You almost certainly aren't quite as quick as you were when you were 25, but on the other hand you typically know a lot more and the experience probably means you actually make far fewer errors overall...

Going from 800K-1.2M down to 200K-300K total comp is not that devastating I'd say :)

If you've built up a 1.2M a year lifestyle, then going back to 250k a year lifestyle might feel like a "death sentence", at which point you will hear the world's smallest violin playing for you.

Hance why you shouldn't keep extending your lifestyle proportionally with your paycheck growth, and learn to stay humble and frugal and not spend to 'keep up with the Joneses'.

Unless you're in the same league with John Carmack or Andrej Karpathy where top companies are begging at your feet, you should treat jobs with very large TCs more like short therm lottery wins rather than cashflows guaranteed to last, since there's a high chance you're not that special as you think, and that there's probably others out there who can and are willing to do your work better and for cheaper when the crunch comes and the layoff axe starts to swing towards those non-exec workers responsible for company's biggest paycheck expenses. Those who've lived thorugh the 2008 days will know and remeber what I'm talking about.

If you're actually making $1.2 million a year, invest at least $500k/yr.

Then if you need to take a pay cut later, hopefully the dividends from your investment accounts brings your total income close to where it once was.

Also if you're reading this wondering if people actually make this amount of money coding... the answer is no, with the exception of an incredibly small percentage of people. Expecting $800k comp is not realistic for 98% of people.

So, mumble mumble, something about diversifying.

I'm sure the layoffs are likely to lead to a short-term bump because the markets will interpret it as Google adulting. But if they're signalling that they're afraid of AI eating their market share, then you probably want to be proactive about that.

I always chose option 1. This is like personal finance 101.

And for the company the purpose of RSUs instead of cash is to not deplete cash reserves.

You'd be surprised by people's poor spending habbits. Aquitances of mine when they got their first SV job out of college at Facebook, they immediately bought brand new Porsche 911's.

I think a token of "I've made it!" is fine. Maybe we all need that once in our life.

The problem is if it persists. (Worst, if somehow gambling, etc. becomes involved.)

You get a signing bonus for the US militrary? Damn that's pretty sweet.

If you're living this way, feel free to reach out. I have loads of advice you don't want to but need to hear.

Ideally, your standard of living should cost you a fraction of what your income is.

I got a job at Amazon and was making $x+$100K

I was Amazoned last year from a remote position. By then, I had paid off debt, downsized from my big house in the burbs to a condo one third the size in state tax free Florida and could easily live off of $x- $30K even though I’m making around $50K more than I was making 3 years ago.

Guess how much I stressed when Amazon started Amazoning?

My career went in to the toilet in my 40s, and it has never really recovered. However, I'm an introvert and on the spectrum, so I lack good networking skills and never moved up the career ladder.

Even so, among my circle of friends there is a consensus that many of us were struggling around age 50, and now I am 60. The only jobs I've had in the last 5 years have been contracts. My current gig, I haven't seen a raise in 3 years, despite 20% inflation. I've been told that the company I work for has a freeze on raises, so I will have to start job hunting...

Perhaps in some of the "trendy" "bro-culture" startups you'd have a more difficult time as an older developer but even in those places, the level of experience and skills older devs bring can be extremely valuable.

But say you were laid off in your 40's, now what? Well, there are so many bigger, less volatile companies out there with solid pay that are desperate for senior people with experience. There's also consulting for those who have spent a career building up a network of contacts. You can still leverage those old contacts for future opportunities as well.

Governmental work and such is also a place where age is not a concern. Here I agree you might not make as much money but employment is always available to developers who are skilled, experienced and flexible.

Why only single out government/public sector jobs as palces for all-age job stability?

Aerospace, defence, semiconductor, automotive, industrial, medical, healtchare, banking, insurance, manufacturing, naval, rail and freight, logistics and transportations, basically all legacy businesses, all are hiring SW engineers and are staffed by mostly older workers, but HN mostly snuffs at these fields because they're not in SV, are seen as un-cool, boring, old and crusty and don't pretend to change the world through innovation and paying millions in TC for 10h/week of pretending to work from home like Google does, but it's not like you will starve to death and be homeless if you work as a dev in those kinds of fields for a lot less than what Google pays, going from 1% top earners to 5% top earners.

This might sound harsh, but perhaps the last ~10+ years of hyper-growth in the VC funded SW sector has warped many devs perspective on their own value and what the rest of the real world is like.

Not where I live you can't build a house on a dev wage. Average dev wages is ~55k/year and average house price is 800k+.

Well I guess the idea is that all the "best" engineers would have already made millions by the time they hit 50 and so therefore those who are left are...

I must admit though that I've only seen one newly hired in their 60s, but probably the very few that find themselves involuntarily out of a job at that age can afford to and choose to retire a little bit earlier than planned.

The ones who are in it just for the money rarely become the best engineers.

To avoid being unemployable in your 50’s learn COBOL so you can work for a big stupid company or government.

Once out of the umbrella of the FAANGS, there are tons of jobs for SWE, just not at the eye watering salaries.

East Coast, tons of jobs at the 100K range.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/10/09/budget-breakdown-of-a-co...

And if you talk to the people who strongly identify with the MAGA movement, their main concerns are guns, illegal immigration, “persecution because of their Christian beliefs”, and for some strange reason - Disney.

People who know me and one of my friends calls us the “odd couple”. I’m a Black mostly agnostic bleeding heart libertarian capitalist pig who works in tech (including a stint in BigTech), my friend is a White former military high school dropout who is an evangelical Christian, gun loving and rural, who rails against those “illegals”.

But he attends a predominantly Black church and has been married to a deaf Vietnamese woman for two decades who he loves dearly.

I also use to live in a famous “sun down” town in Georgia made famous by Oprah. I’m often in conversations with modern “conservatives”. I don’t argue, I just listen.

To the contrary, this is the very finest distilled HN for you. I wouldn't expect less.

Must retire? No, of course not.

I worked through most of my 50's though and definitely saw "the writing on the wall". I don't want to scream "Ageism!" because I think people are often too quick to pigeon hole a thing that has much more complex roots.

For example, because of my white hair, beard, I'm probably not the guy you would go to and ask a Swift question to. And I don't blame anyone for having that ... instinct.

But it was a combination of things like that began to inform me that my better days in the industry were behind me.

Believe me, I tried to act as mentor when I knew I was probably within a year or two of heading out of the industry but I found the young'uns didn't want a mentor either. Oh well. I think I would have at their age but not everyone is the same.

I have talked to literally hundreds of people in my life who have suffered through illegal workplace discrimination and I've honestly never met a single one who prosecuted a discrimination case successfully. Things are only illegal if you can prove them, and most managers don't go around yelling "holy shit I hate old people".

These companies have a big influence on what is legal or what is a priority for governments.

This is literally RTO /s

This just isn't true as a broad statement, although I don't doubt it's true for some parts of the industry. Big picture, though, older engineers are no less employable than younger ones. In the right company, experienced engineers are valued more highly, even.

In the rest of the industry, not many software workers make enough to realistically retire by 50, anyway. Not without living like monks their entire lives. (recall: you need a lot more money to retire at 50 than at 65) And older workers mostly do OK in the rest of the industry, at least until age 60 or so.

I got my first job in BigTech at 46 - working at AWS in Professional Services

When I got Amazoned last year, I had three offers within three weeks.

One of those offers was from a former coworker who is now a director at a well known public company. It would have paid about $50K more in cash than I was making in cash + RSUs at AWS. I didn’t want the stress.

The other offer was for a “staff architect” position at the company that acquired the company I worked for before going to AWS.

The third and the offer I did take was a for a senior full time position at a consulting company that should lead to staff position as we grow the AWS specialty that I know inside out from working with the team.

Unless I’m completely misreading the market - and I seriously doubt I am - there is no reason that if I cared to I couldn’t increase my total compensation by 30-40% inflation adjusted over the next few years

That's just not true. In my mid (ugh, getting to be late) 50s and I've been laid off in most of the downturns since the dot-com bust, including this recent one. Getting a new job at comparable compensation has rarely been a big problem. I suppose if you let your skills get rusty or work on a VERY specialized tech stack and don't want to do something else, then sure, you'll have problems.

But in this market, I'd rather be a grizzled veteran with demonstrable skills in a variety of areas than a new grad.

There are for sure exceptions, but I think most people would be very surprised at how little control the decision makers at the top actually have. They have a duty to make the best decisions for the company, and most of the time that is not ambiguous. The real difference I believe comes in how they handle it. Companies that provide generous severance, for example, are deserving of gratitude.

No doubt, it can really hurt when you have busted your ass and put your blood and sweat into a company, and they discard you. Many people tend to identify themselves with their employment, which I think lent very well to the idea of it being a family, but it won't be helpful to swing the pendulum all the way to the other side. Many people get a lot of fulfillment from their identity with the company, and there is nothing wrong with that. It's very natural, in fact. Humans are group-based animals that look for group associations and identify with them. Yes, it is great for people to use families and friends for that, but the reality is not everyone has that option.

A much healthier approach in my opinion is to find a good balance. Understand how the system works. When you see the sausage being made, and try to empathize and put yourself in the decision makers position, it can help take the sting off and give you a more realistic outlook on life.

The worst thing you can do for your mental health and life satisfaction, is embrace bitterness. You don't need buy into a delusion that things are great, that you are loved for you, or that the company is a big family, but you also don't need to buy into a delusion that the company and upper management are just evil heartless people figuring out how best to use and abuse you before tossing you out the door when they are finished with you. As with most things, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Try to find that truth.

> The company is not your friend and not your enemy, I agree. However, people _do_ develop personal relationship with each other. Sometimes even across the different levels in the company hierarchy. Yes, as with any other relationship, circumstances and interests might override this, but relationships still do matter. People have emotions, and there are managers who're not psychopats and find it very hard to e.g. let people go.

> ...

> But please don't think that nobody cares about you in your workplace and you're a completely fungible cog. It's a horrible life to live. Let's not tell the already cynical young people that this is how the world works.

That's true, but the problem is the psychopathic organization exploits those relationships ruthlessly. It will use well-meaning people to lean on those relationships to get more out of employees, but then turn around and shit on them when it suits the org.

Corporations can be and (and usually are) psychopaths, even if they're made exclusively from well-adjusted, interpersonally-kind people. The whole is different from its parts.

I found this to be a very obvious reality in the companies in which I worked. And not in the sense of "poor me, nobody loves me": on the contrary, I found that I was more indifferent than expected even toward the departure of colleagues with whom I had a good relationship.

For example, in the current group of about 40 people in which I work, two directors who had moved up the ladder, were quite well-liked, and had a long tenure with the company, left to work for other companies. Their colleagues, including me, forgot about them within 2 weeks at most.

Another colleague was forced to retire after 40 years with the company: a month before his (forced and unexpected) retirement, he sat down with me to explain what he intended to do in the company over the next 3 years. But he was forced to retire and disappeared from people's minds within a few days.

Despite an excellent memory, I forget the names of most of my colleagues after a month's break. If I leave the company, they are never mentioned again. Apart from the usual exceptions, "standard" working relationships, especially in large companies, are tenuous, easily broken, and easily forgotten.

I think this is just normal human self-regulation. Extreme example, but people are mostly OK and functional a month after their mother passes away. If the best and most critical person in my team would leave today then I would focus on filling the gap, etc. and I would not think of them very much after a few days, but this doesn't mean that all that they're a fully fungible cog.

To me, it sounds like the definition of a fungible cog, where "fully" depends on whether a replacement with the same skills can be hired. One is expected to be functional at some point after losing their mother, but the mother's name and role in the org/family is unlikely to be forgotten, even after decades.

I feel like it would actually drive salaries up as people move to higher paying roles and companies scramble to keep people that they would have otherwise expected to remain for years.

For context, I once worked at company A for 2 years then got a new job offer for 20% more than I currently made. I accepted the offer and then told my VP that I got a new job and the offer was 35% more. He matched the 35% so I stayed for another year and then got a new job for 25% more than that. A little after that, Company A started doing layoffs. If I had been loyal I would have likely been laid off, instead I left with a much higher salary because I was loyal only to the money.

Companies used to be loyal but no longer are, your job is not safe.

Perhaps we actually are on the same page in principal as I agree with all of your other suggestions "diversifying your options, building an emergency fund, have a fulfilling life outside work" just a different take on the original comment.

For SWEs at Google and almost anywhere else, the wind has blown very favorably for you and that’s something to be celebrated.

The direction of the wind has shifted, but we can never expect it to stay blowing in one direction forever, even if others get lucky and catch one like that.

You will no doubt set your sail and take it to new and wonderful places.

Let’s take a minute and be grateful for how good SWEs have it - we are frequently so insanely disconnected from the realities and struggles of the normal working class and we should remember and express some gratitude for it regularly.

[0] well, probably not he alone, but he is the figurehead of a group that put him there and keeps him there, and at Alphabet that group shits the wind

All the "wind", "sails" and boat metaphors won't change the fact that loyalty is a virtue that fits very poorly on both sides of employment.

Why? The lay-offs are so broad, not selective at all. You're just as likely to get cut if you're working hard or not, if you're overpaid or underpaid. It's completely out of the employee's control, so why would it change the employee's behavior?

Employees don’t have visibility into their peers actual performance. They see a silver of it and infer. This makes layoffs look random. Then, we rely on publicly reported “I was given a great review and still let go!” posts — which are all self-interested. No one wants to hire or refer someone who was doing poorly so there’s an incentive to fib or have selective amnesia.

The whole cohort of folks let go are incentivized to keep up the fiction that it was random.

All things being equal, there is no reason to layoff someone high performing over their less capable peer. I’ve never seen it done randomly, and I’ve sat in these meetings.

This is not to say whole divisions or companies haven’t been let go, but that’s not the same situation here. We’re talking about selective cuts across the entire company where core, or advertising lost some folks, while others remained. That is not random.

Sometimes you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time--and maybe it's even the impetus to do something different.

> Your job is NOT safe.

in service of

> Take their fucking money, build a big emergency fund, save, invest, and focus on the rest of your life outside of work.

Overtime, long commutes, and thinking about the job at home can make it seem like all you do is work, but it’s possible to spend 40 hours a week having fun while you also have a full time job. Remember use your vacation and sick days, and say no to excessive unpaid overtime.

If you’re mentally exhausted from work then going for a walk through a park is relaxing enough to regain some energy. If you’re depressed then you would still be vegging out on the weekend.

Which isn’t to say vegging out sometimes is a bad sign. Watching TV is fun in moderation.

> People can always find a reason to rationalize why they’re not doing what they say they want to be doing.

Believing that's true can help you decide if you are responsible for not reaching your goals or if you truly are the victim of circumstance.

I understand that people can be legitimately held back by circumstances outside of their direct control. That is also true.

I believe that on average people tend to like to take credit for their accomplishments and find someone/something to blame for their lack of accomplishments.

Ask the people who would've gone pro if their high school coach hadn't been a dick. Or who got passed over for a promotion because of work politics.

Saying "The sun rises in the east" over and over doesn't make it true. It's true because it's true no matter how many times I say it.

Perhaps internally they are taking accountability but all the evidence I have says that many do not.

But if you’re not accomplishing the things you want to accomplish you should deeply consider the possibility that you’re lying to yourself before you accept that your circumstances are at fault.

> You can always find a reason to rationalize why you're not doing what you say you want to be doing.

I did say:

> People can always find a reason to rationalize why they’re not doing what they say they want to be doing.

That statement is true.

That's a good way of putting it. I've let it happen to me in the past, and I've seen it happen many times.

Your comment is solid advice.

How is that? If a job is less secure, typically commands more pay. If you know you will be out of work in 6-12 months, your pay better include some cushion to cover time between jobs.

> Your job is NOT safe.

Nothing would make me happier than to eradicate this line of thought, but laying the responsibility of that on the employee is poor management at best, malicious bullshit at worst.

We EMs do nothing to re-assure our employees that they are valued co-workers and not "resources" to be managed.

When one of my valued employees comes to me and says "I got another job offer and the increase in TC will change my life," most of the time they are a top-performer I want to keep, so I go to my manager asking to match their comp. But...they have to ask their manager, then their manager, so on and so forth. Even HR sometimes steps in with excuses why we cant. By the time a decision is made, if one is ever made, the employee I wanted to keep is already at their new employer.

So I would recommend my employees look out for themselves, bc I (and my management hierarchy) certainly won't (though they can, they just don't want to).

And if you are still looking to lay responsibility on to someone, look in the mirror.

This is so important.

It sucks and it's a symptom of risk management being a leading consideration to the process of a layoff, more so than performance optimization or culture change, but that's how it "makes sense"