A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work

>It’s worthwhile to “go above and beyond” for individuals who will help you, who may exist in a company… but never for the company itself.

That feels like the correct way to think about it. Everyone else seems to think it's one extreme or the other but really thinking about it on an individual level vs a company level seems more accurate to my own experience.

"Going above and beyond" at a big company, if done in a smart strategic way, is the best way to get promoted, and getting promoted results in significantly higher pay. I've gotten promoted twice at my current employer over the years, which has roughly doubled my total compensation, and none of that would have happened had I just did my previous level's responsibilities and nothing beyond.

I don't think this is true of all companies. My current company doesn't base bonuses on individual contributions, and even went so far as to reduce the number of "story points" that top contributors did in sprints so that the rest of the team wouldn't look bad.

I don't think it's just about who will repay you. Our responsibility to each other is not nearly that transactional.

For example, the individual who is most likely to live with the consequences of your decision is... future you.

Future-me isn't going to pay me back, but I am always grateful to past-me when I set future-me up for success.

that's true with publicly traded C-corporations

for private companies, it literally is the people you work with (and whatever legal enchantments they've decided on). some of those people will still fuck you over, but it's not a legally-conjured sentient pile of money the way a C-corp is

B-corps are an interesting attempt to avoid being a sentient pile of money. in theory, it's an egregore that is capable of valuing things other than money. (they haven't really been tested in court. and they might fuck you over in pursuit of some other value, even if they do work. or fucking you over for money might not conflict with its other values)

My experience has been that caring about your craft is a great way to get in trouble. As a previous co-worker once told me "it turns out that the less I care about this job the more happy my managers are with my performance."

Indeed. Although I find it increasingly hard to find work that aligns with my expectations about technical excellency (too many companies chasing big returns on half-finished products for example) or even methods of creating software. This is hard to manage from a personal perspective but I guess life goes on... I wholeheartedly agree with the author - life's too short to be wasted on work that may get you some good words in one quarter and not matter the next.

The question to ask yourself then is: why is it that the behaviour that brings you pleasure/meaning/satisfaction happens to align exactly with what the company wants?

I spent most of my career with a similar attitude to yours, and TBH it's still my default. The question I find myself asking more and more is: can I maintain/increase my level of satisfaction while giving less of myself to a company that simply doesn't care?

Perhaps. Pay attention to the time you spend "doing the task well" so that YOU are satisfied. You are now smarter (say) but is your hierarchy going to promote you for this? Or park you and make you do this indefinitely, or blame you for the rest that didn't get done? Is your network as a whole now more inclined to hire you out in their next venture?

The quicker we make peace with the fact that hard work alone will not get us ahead (in most cases) the better it is for our mental health. We can put as much effort into our jobs as long as we accept that the only guaranteed result is our own joy, pride in our work and nothing else (not even a thank you from suits) is guaranteed.

If we are not able to accept that, then just do the bare minimum like most people. OR find a better job, but there is still no guarantee the new job would actually be better than the old job. But hey, at least we might get more compensation in our new job, so there's that

That smells like something a person with very little choice would say. At least I was saying similar things to myself in times I had very little choice. It's a very good way of regaining illusion of agency.

Well said.

> I draw the line at doing work that I can be proud of.

That's important. I spend more awake time working/thinking about work than really else. I don't know that it's healthy, but at least I want to be proud of the outputs if I am going to spend this much time on something. I just can't really show up and mail it in, I'm just not wired that way, and suspect that a lot if us aren't.

Yeah this is super important IMO. Set your own standards for what that means. Makes it much easier to handle the slings and arrows of normal 9-5 headaches, and to understand when you're being pressed to do things you wouldn't be proud of.

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I’ve known many people like this throughout my career, and I have seen the absolute opposite that you observed. These people are perfect candidates for management positions and their focus on office politics pays off handsomely. It’s not for me; might not be for you; but in reality these machiavellian tactics work if you wanna move up and get promoted in most large corporations.

What sites do you use to find good contract work?

It's not about references. It's about building a network of colleagues who respect you and your work. Many years ago, when I started doing consulting/contracting work, literally all my of my jobs came through people I had previously worked for or with across a variety of companies. And if you play your cards right, as the years roll on, you won't even have to apply for jobs other than as a formality. Instead, people who's respect you've gained will try to bring you into where they work.

> This is completely false.

It's not completely false at all - but it does depend greatly depends on which country you're based in.

Where I am, in Spain, your network, and your reputation within it, are _everything_. Good jobs will sometimes not even be advertised, as the first thing a hirer will do is ask around their network for recommendations, and those recommendations count for _a lot_. On the other side, when you are looking for work, the first thing you do is ask your network for an intro - and again, that intro counts for a lot.

That's not to say that the traditional interview process will be skipped, but candidates coming from recommendations will have a massive head-start over others.

Their point wasn't reference checks it was the power of a network of people who want to work with you again because they know your work is more than just transactional.

Reference checks happen a lot. You just don't see them.

Most companies stopped asking for references because everyone just games the system. Managers are afraid of giving anything but glowing references because they want to keep their own network opportunities strong. Giving positive references is basically a networking game these days.

So that's not how people reference check. Now, they go on LinkedIn and look for mutual connections they trust. They check for people they know whose work history overlapped with the candidate's time at a different company. They go ask that person without the candidate ever knowing.

I get probably 10X as many backchannel reference requests as I do formal reference check requests.

The effect’s source is much more direct than that.

It’s not a reference check to see “is sam0x17 a good dev?” at the end of a hiring pipeline, but rather “I’ve got an open role and remember that sam0x17 is one of the best devs I’ve ever worked with; let’s get them into the company!”

I'm not sure which market you're in, but companies here absolutely do reference checks. They will even reach out people you didn't list if they're a shared connection.

My standing recommendation to everyone is to do good work and get better at advocating for yourself to make sure you're either getting the experience or the comp you need to achieve your goals. If you're not getting that, switch jobs. It's much much better to switch jobs every few years if that's what you need to stay motivated than to stay, do the minimum and collect a paycheck.

They're talking about referrals, not reference checks. Getting good referrals is hugely important, especially at smaller companies that don't the capacity to do a rigorous hiring process.

I spent the last few months interviewing at various bay area startups for senior SE roles. About half of them wanted references. This was my experience so YMMV

strong disagree. from extensive experience. it's a huge factor, and good referrals are really the only way to definitely get the job

I respectfully disagree. Parent comment is hardly over-indexing; it's a big factor. The world may be big but the communities are small.

When you are just starting, yes. But after a while, if you pay attention to cultivating it, you amass a significant network. Small factor initially, big one later if you work on it.

What ends up mattering more is your ability to form good relationships with co-workers at your last job and sell yourself on your resume.

Most of the people who end up getting high paying, high ranking jobs are not very skilled technically, but are skilled personally - even engineers.

So I'd say - do your job as well as you can (don't go too crazy with work), be friendly with people in your company, and phrase your achievements in terms of % value/speed/users added.

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There’s the whole capital expenditure vs operating expenses angle too, and depending on a company’s particular situation, one might look better on paper than the other. Without going into too much detail, contractors will be hired typically to contribute to capital expenditure and employees to the latter.

This distinction is even more relevant for earnings. So companies will optimize this for taxation and accounting to win shareholder brownie points.

Outside of the US this optionality does have some value to deserve at least some premium.

Hire an extra dev for the same money looks good on paper, but employment being the trapdoor function that it is in some jurisdictions does muddy the water.

(I do understand that there's a historical context to keep in mind, and that the relationship is often asymmetric in the other direction as well)

Management tend to get a bee in their bonnet about headcount, specifically full time employees, while they don't count consultants as being under the same kind of restrictions. It does often end up in the madness you describe, like that time there was a data entry consultant costing at my 0 company 100k, which a full timer would have been paid 35k max.

5+ years "consulting" would probably be reclassified as employment by most courts.

“A former employer decided to freeze pay for a few years and later later start laying off people”

Why would anyone stay at a company that had pay freezes for a few years. I would have been looking for another job the moment they announced them.

Think about a wider scale than your employer: if the costs of the consultants goes in fact in the pockets of the investors of your employer, that money is not lost.

In quite many places, hiring consultants has a very high corruption potential (e.g. the hiring manager favoring one of several suppliers). With employees they don't have this leverage.

Many companies have a policy like “freelancers, once kept on for 12 months, must be either hired full time, or fired” to deal with this

I don't see the theater as bad or good. If anything, it's slightly good.

It gives people an out; a soft landing. Being fired because you suck is going to destroy your confidence and tarnish your work reputation (because layoff is public).

Imagine getting fired because you wanted to respect the DMCA of all things. I'd be curious for details, though you probably shouldn't tell.

This happened to a friend of mine. Executive made far-fetched PowerPoint slides and tried to raise a budget, the board loved the powerpoint. They restructured, the company laid-off dozens, and hired new foreign contractors. Because past engineers got the blame, and the legacy code. They rewrite from scratch using X this time. Massive failure because of poor morale, brain drain and over-ambitious features. So what now? well let's do another round of layoffs, make new powerpoint slides and repeat the same process.

That is the problem with presentations of all sides - doesn't matter if it is power point, a blog post, a NYC article, government report, a documentary, or something else. Whoever writes it gets to choose what arguments and facts to bring out. However listens to it is generally primed to think it is correct and not ask hard questions - often they don't even know what the hard questions would be. And so garbage gets approved all the time because it looks good.

Oh, those hyperspecialized employees that can only work in one project and could never do the exact same thing if the thing's goal changed...

And yeah, those quick to materialize gains, where the manager can easily discover if a project worked within the same fiscal year...

Also dragons and unicorns, I guess... what a world those people live in!

Governments have lost many skills to do fuck all. The consultant justification is just hiding the fact that years if not investing in skilled people have resulted in a lot of clueless administrators that can't do much.

budget based economics may be the worst thing to happen to large organisations

This is what Palmer Luckey criticizes in how the DoD do procurement. The way contracts are signed makes it that contractors are only incentivized to provide solutions that maximize the budgets set by higher management in government focusing on filling out those reimbursements rather than delivering effective warfighters that the military needs.

It seems that all this layoff discussions should shed light to the blight of managerialism that permeated modern business culture. It’s this system that encourages managers to obfuscate accountability for their high-stakes decisions, and while the low-level employees shy away from suggesting solutions that solve problems or identify bottlenecks because at the end of the day they're just part of the budget in an excel sheet table. It feels like a betrayal to the promises of capitalism.

Conversely, budgets are based on estimates and forecast of resources needed. It's not like a manager gets a random number out of the blue and then needs to find ways to spend it. Budgets in engineering, especially software dev., are mostly based on number of people (aka 'resources') needed in the team, so a manager will want to fill their headcount otherwise it means they don't actually need this number of people.

Right, which is more indicative of how yearly budgets which don’t factor in continual employment of staff lead to the morale decline I mentioned. Perhaps the manager isn’t actually capable of doing much about it, and can only spend or not spend their budget. But that indicates a failure in the company as a whole; at least if keeping employee morale high is a goal (which it definitely isn’t at many companies.)

Even then, the mismanagement of funds just communicates a level of incompetence that is more demotivating than cuts from an actual lack of funds, IMO.

“Sorry, the market has shifted and we can’t afford this,” is at least somewhat understandable when you have trust in management’s ability. When you don’t, it comes unpredictable and chaotic - never a recipe for getting good work done.

Let's hope the budget includes success then...

Employee headcount is also evaluated less favorably when potential investors evaluate the company's health. They're implicitly seen as a promise to continue paying them in the future, whether that's materially different from what the company does with contractors or not.

And some of that is probably fair. As an employee, a layoff of a bunch of employees is a lot more troubling than a bunch of contractors not having their contracts renewed.

$40k is a tiny salary, too. Taxes, facilities, and benefits are going to be more than 2x that. A contractor paid $200k/year is likely cheaper in total cost than an employee paid $100k/year.

> the techniques to manage the headcount people are different

I would like to hear a little bit more about those techniques.

The only one I am aware of is to make sure that you have promotions under your belt: The arm's-length people who plan layoffs know very little about the individual's other than their job title and rank. But this advice is hardly useful: it is extremely rare for an individual to have a choice of whether to be promoted or something different.

What other techniques are you aware of?

If you're actually down to jump ship you can probably be upfront about it.

It's a negative point but the good managers I've had were usually realists so unless you have multiple questionable things or get overly defensive/weird when answering they'd just take it as "shit happens" with a small minus.

Edit: To me it feels like all of the talk outside of technical knowledge is essentially based on vibes. My CV is pretty bad since it took me way too long to graduate but after I stopped explaining it too much and just went with "shit happens, my bad" it stopped being much of an issue.

If you wanna lie you can also say that you took the job as filler until you find a position in/with CERTAIN CRITERIA and you made your employer aware of this. I don't know how common that is but my current situation is kinda this. I worked for my current fulltime employer as a student and when offered a fulltime contract past graduation I asked for a shorter notice period due to wanting to move to Switzerland and they agreed.

Of course be careful not to do it too often since you don't want multiple couple month gigs in your CV.

If you just started at your first job i would focus first on becoming an asset for your team.

Being well regarded by key technical folks will allow you to leverage them for introductions and recommendations if you need a new job. In general, find a good mentor, develop soft skills and maintain friendships.

There are no guarantees and with minimal experience you are for now more vulnerable, but this should minimize the risk better than always searching for the next job. My 2c.

There's no need. Just tell them that you're keeping tabs on the job market and would switch for a compelling offer. It's up to them whether they have one for you.

Whether or not you start actively looking for other jobs, you can take any opportunities you have to better develop your network. It's harder just starting out but post my first fairly extended role out of grad school, every one of my jobs was through someone I knew.

I read somewhere that 1 in 20 job postings is fake.

So you just explain to the fake job interviewer that you're the 1 in 20 fake job candidate.

There's a 5% chance they'll understand.

Well, you say just that. It even demonstrates a beginning of business acumen.

Everyone does it, recruiters aren’t naive. Once I became old enough to hire people, I understood it’s ok (depending on the audience, beware) to say “I can start on Monday but I’ll take two weeks of holidays during the same month, because it’s already planned.” Better have employees who are mature enough to take care of their worklife balance, than employees who burn out and end up grumpy. An employee was relocating and I told him during the first month he shouldn’t work more than 6hrs/day and use the rest to settle his private life (rental, bank, insurances, child care, etc.).

> through someone I knew

The best interview hack

I know this probably doesn't help you now, but I negotiated this as a requirement of my employment. I showed up day one, walked around & engaged about 20 or so people on the floor in what they did over the first few weeks I was there, picked up a few low hanging projects that seemed interesting & then just kept doing whatever the hell I felt like. Was I qualified to do this? No. But, honestly, I wasn't qualified to do anything at the place, anyways.

I mentor all of my junior engineers to do the same, and management really likes it. The rule of the game is you must finish what you start, and you must clearly communicate schedule.

>individuals are usually assigned the tasks

The higher you go, the more vaguely your "tasks" are defined, the more scope you have for interpretation and for choosing subproblems and related problems to dig into and run with.

Not sure why you got downvoted for this. My current role started very tech-heavy and morphed into almost completely documentation as my management found out I'm one of the only ones at the company who doesn't suck at grammar and photography. Now my day-to-day really wouldn't be useful for getting another job with a similar title (and pay) to my current one, and I need to devote extra time outside of work to keeping up with actual tech skills that I used to be able to develop on-the-job.

Come to think of it, this is what our management seems to be trying to do now. If true, that is mildly amusing given that we just managed to avoid major pain resulting from all those helping hands.

Nothings going to change until consequences for this behavior is established.

Reason #54298 why IBM deserves nothing.

That something like this can be legal shows how f*cked up the US is.

How many people are involved in scheming such strategies? There must be leaks of the planning, right?

Not a clinical psychologists, so something about grains of salt.

I use term 'highly functioning sociopaths', you can see them often in management since they are attracted to pay, power and percieved 'prestige'. You know the types - smart, hard working, ruthless, learned to fake genuine nice emotions and human interactions to almost perfection over years at least under normal, controlled, and previously experienced settings. Once some novel bad situation happens, cracks start to show.

Banks and anything re finance is probably the highest concentration. Another areas are those with real power, whatever that means. Its trait like every other, not binary but gradual. In my experience its more 1/3 of these in middle management, C suite most probably majority. Can't be a nice guy and get, survive and even thrive there.

Only one was obvious in the hindsight: management stopped caring and sometimes attending product demos, but really cared about India's part in the deliveries (justified as we want them to level up quickly).

Everything was subtle:

Managers distanced themselves from the team, had more meetings between themselves ("for efficiency - team grew so we cannot include so many people in the meetings anymore"), they were looking at each other often when making decisions (which to me looked as if they were trying to think how to handle requests knowing the team will be laid off soon).

In the final weeks management started suddenly taking/reassigning tasks out of US team's hands in ways that didn't make sense.

The purpose of the system is what it does

I've been part of two really good teams, one went away because the company closed, the other because it was managed into smithereens. It honestly seemed like it didn't sit right with any level of management to have a bunch of at best average teams and then one very good team in the same org chart, they seemed to prefer to just have every team scrape along.

>One thing that astonishes me, is that most people want to have a real team to be part of, contribute, give our best..

What astonishes me is that people fall for that BS.

Difficult to avoid when there's lots of culture encouraging it, and especially once your hours are long enough that the rest of your life gets eroded.

It happened to me, though I resigned when I hit burnout during covid. My whole identity was just being good at my job, and then I was no longer that. In part I think some blame is also to be placed on these companies who try to make the employees feel like a tribe or family. Since I've always been alone it was easy to slip into that false sense of belonging.

I agree with the bad idea to put all your persona in a job.

At the same time One will have issues if his persona doesn’t really match with his (min)8h/day 5days/week activity.

>I think one has some deeper issues to tackle if one is basing their whole persona around their job. This is not a healthy thing to do, regardless of layoffs.

True, I got to wonder if people who write these posts have any healthy relationships at all? Surely they would have had parents/relatives/friends etc. speak of layoffs?

You can't be aware of the toxicity when your parents, your teachers, your mentors, your bosses and your friends have all the same ethos (and actively put down any other opinion under slurs such as "socialism", "communism", "sloth", "failure of a human being", etc.)

At one extremum there's e.g. Brad Pitt, how could you tell him not to base his whole persona around its job ?

Someone should develop an LLM-therapist for this situation.

Nah, small companies are burnout mills. Early in my career, I had explicitly worked on small companies and 4/4 times screwed over. Immediately when the big work is done and investments(or major profits) are in, suddenly the management starts replacing everyone with expensive consultants or their best chums from some failed business somewhere and starts strategic push out by stagnating.

While my experience can be rare/unique, at least at Medium/BigCo, my soul burning gets compensated, small ones are just “we are like family right?” and then push out once technical/financial growth starts rearing its head.

I worked at mostly small companies and had one 3.5 year stint at BigTech.

“pay less” is an understatement. Top of band for most Big enterprise companies or smaller companies is about the same that a new college grad gets at BigTech.

While I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than go back to BigTech at 50, if I were young and unencumbered instead of a 50 year old empty nester, I would make the trade off in a heart beat

Small companies can have their own problems. They may only somewhat overlap with the problems at big companies--although both need to make money at the end of the day. But they're far from a panacea.

I also thought that small companies are better in that regard. But no, they often have their own toxic idiosyncrasies, like when a little power goes too much to the management’s heads. A small company that’s YOURS is better and actually needs you.

Big companies can double your compensation though, it's a tradeoff.

This is a very negative to look at employment in general:

Whatever the skill - pushing rocks up a hill or pushing code into a repo - someone with power over you is taking half your waking day to generate disproportionate compensation.

I personally see the alternative viewpoint which is I am able to provide for my entire family a life of non-work because I sacrifice 50% of what would be idle time without them.

Ultimately you need something to do during your waking hours. I give 50% to the company and 50% to my family.

Historically the slaves of the ultrawealthy often lived much better lives than common free people.

No it is not, just because one slave is paid more than another slave it does not make the former a less of a slave.

But it's good that you think that way. Keeps the system going. We need more of you guys.

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Doesnt it? It requires a $180,000~ minimum to get by as a family of 4 including 2 kids in San Francisco according to statistics. Before taxes and unexpected expenses and other things. And VERY few people get that $500k. The rest get shafted by the system like others.

500k/y jobs are not common and as such the vast majority of us are not making that much.

This. Without going into specifics, I attempted to internally transfer to another team for higher level/better pay position. My current boss said he doesn't have a problem with it. I pre-cleared everything with the possible new boss, but I got mysteriously blocked. Few months later, team member from the other team indicated that they were told not to let it happen ( and who said no ).

Needless to say, I am miffed. The market is what it is right now, but not only am I not 'allowed' to move around, but stuck with the same pay/benefits, because my raise was.. lets say not great.

There is not enough .. not hate.. not enough awareness of how corps fuck you over and HN can help with that a little.

It’s your manager and skip level’s job to make sure your VP knows the company is fucked if they lay your team off. I can guarantee you that no matter how evil Oracle is — the king of bean counters and mismanagement — they aren’t going to accidentally lay off the core Oracle cloud teams. Your job is to get onto those teams.

Every business has key teams, you just have to find them. For some businesses tge key teams are not in your domain (non-tech company) and you are just a cost center. The only option is to jump ship to a tech first company.

> I was once told that a lot of executive level management was based off gut instinct more than cold logical decision making. It would not surprise me if this also applied to deciding who is laid off.

It would surprise me if it didn't apply to deciding who is laid off.

Yeah, I got stung by that early in my career. So now all my personal software is licensed either CC0 or AGPL3.0. That is first thing I do. Secondly, I don't talk about it at work.

The key here is don't be stupid. Don't write the software on company time or on company equipment. My experience has further taught me:

1. Most employers don't want the software. They want the person writing the software.

2. Once your peers discover that its you writing the software they use there is a good chance they will immediately move on to something else. In JavaScript world "Invented Here" syndrome is extreme and developers do not trust quality software could ever come from people they know.

3. If the software was in use before you got to the organization then you are in the clear.

4. Have multiple lines of alignment, such as a part time job and/or contractual obligations elsewhere. Employers will not fight other employers to gain ownership of your pet project. In my case I have a part time job in the military and the military has the most liberal IP rules on the planet. Now I am a defense contractor on a project with multiple contract vendors, so who would really own my pet project: the contractor that pays my bills, the client that pays the contract, or the other contractor who manages the contract.

5. If its your personal project you are free to abandon it at any time and use your time to play video games. You are also free to abandon that job and go do something else.

I was hired as a developer of APIs on this big enterprise API management system, but then promoted to lead of operations on the project.

From this article by a German lawyer, "the question will always be whether one employee can replace the other in the event of illness or absence on leave.":

https://www.kuhlen-berlin.de/en/glossary/sozialauswahl

> Section 1 (3) sentence 1 KSchG provides four criteria that have to be taken into account in the selection decision: Length of service, age, statutory maintenance obligations and the employee's severe disability.

> The employer must first determine which employees work at the same level in the company and can therefore be replaced. The group of employees determined in this way is what is known as a horizontal comparability. Social selection is then carried out in this group on the basis of the legally prescribed criteria. The members of the respective group are then ranked according to their need for social protection.

> Older employees are more in need of protection than younger ones. A longer period of employment also increases the need for protection, as does the existence of statutory maintenance obligations and the presence of a severe disability.

> Section 1 (3) sentence 1 KSchG does not indicate how the social aspects mentioned are to be put in relation to each other, which is why each of the four criteria is to be given equal importance.

> When reducing staff, employers often make use of point schemes through which points are assigned to the individual social criteria. It also gives information through which the need for social protection of the employees in the comparison group can be assessed.

> All employees who are interchangeable must be included in the social selection. Criteria that can be used in this examination are the vocational training as well as the practical experience and knowledge that the respective employees have. If there is comparability, these workers are horizontally interchangeable. In practice, the question will always be whether one employee can replace the other in the event of illness or absence on leave.

You will have a hard time convincing me that at will employment and hire-fast-fire-fast mentality is not objectively better than whatever you might call the German-style system. (Notice I didn't say it's good, just better)

The German-style system seems to treat a job as something the employee is guaranteed, that it's their inherent right to have, rather than something the employer chooses to give them. It doesn't seem to line up with reality.

For me, coding outside of work becomes unsustainable as you age. It's not that you can't, it's because you realise there's more to life than staring at a computer screen. I love coding, but it's also good to go outside sometimes.