A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work

The young employees believe it entirely because they have never known any different.

The more experienced become more realistic about the way the entire system works.

Then one day out of nowhere "hey btw we're not going to renew your contract, we're nice so we give you an extra 10 days of vacation don't bother coming back tomorrow, oh and all your accesses have been revoked". At least I got the reality check right away, some people get that way down the line when their whole persona has already been built around their job

the real pro-level insight is understanding that the people left behind are often in a worse position - inertia keeps them locked into a dying company

But the thing is, I like what I'm working on, I like letting my passion dictate my actions. I want to go home at the end of the day and be proud of what I have accomplished.

But it's not worth putting in that effort for a company that treats you like any other resource. So I'm starting to become one of those soulless employees. You can call it quiet quitting or whatever. And it's slowly killing my spark.

I started working on my own projects to keep that spark alive. But 2h every day is not enough to build something that's worth it.

But yes, the first time you experience redundancies regardless of whether you're made redundant or survive is definitely an eye-opener. It's like those financial disclaimers "the value of your investment may go down as well as up". There may be very little warning. It may even happen at a time that's very bad for you personally. And it does break trust among the company.

Often some functions are moved or merged into another unit, and that’s the escape hatch for the few people someone really wants to save.

>the law enforces a social scoring system to determine who is affected, prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees

This is the reason OP got laid off, if all he says about his high performance is true. The good old positive discrimination making unintended victims. Germany just lost a 10x dev's productivity for this.

While I agree with the spirit of the law and don't have the details of this case, it is quite the sad situation for everyone involved.

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

It's a waste that so many individual contributors who, as the author said, had good performance and were close to the users went through a laid off. Now a new generation of previously high achievers work force will get back in the market and no longer use all their potential for their job. Like it wasn't the fault of the new company that hired me, that now I do the bare minimum, they won't see the full potential I gave before. And I, I cannot prevent it. My work ethics and motivation died after the lay off.

I know people who could easily retire or at least get a much chiller job but they stay in their high responsibility positions, complaining about it everyday, stressing them to the point of having physical consequences.

When they laid off the other team that was working in our office (on an entirely different product), they of course assured us that we were safe - they believed in our product, yadda yadda.

Then at some point, things started getting weird - a job position was cancelled right before we were going to offer the candidate the job. A trip to HQ was cancelled last minute. An external team was getting increasingly involved.

About a year after the other team had been fired, the second highest ranking executive was visiting our office, something he would do once in a while. When the visit was announced, we were joking that "if he brings Pattie from HR, they'll lay us off". I got the message from my coworker on my way to work: "Pattie is here."

The speech the executive gave us was the stupidest thing I've ever heard somebody say to me. He literally said: "In a couple of years, you will look at this as a big opportunity." We just rolled our eyes at each other. When he left the room, we picked up the remotes and started playing stickman against each other. It was the only thing that seemed appropriate.

We had a very nice office and so we were looking forward to be able to spend our notice period together, playing video games, making music and doing the bare minimum in terms of handover duties. Unfortunately, covid happened at right that time and our time together was dramatically cut short, which I still consider a tragedy.

One woman in our team was pregnant and fought the settlement they were offering us. As far as I know, they had to keep her on for longer and she eventually negotiated a better deal - pregnant people are especially protected under German labour law.

To this day, some in my former team doubt that what they did was really all that legal and think we should have fought back, because it later turned out that they lied to us about a bunch of things. But I doubt it would have been really worth it. They just wanted us out.

Good reminder, never mix work and personal. Or at the very least maybe use a cloud service or a thumb drive.

So I’ve replaced advent of code with various other stuff, music, woodworking, books, the great outdoors and while my life is less rich in technology it’s becoming much fuller in other ways.

I think I prefer it this way.

- You're only obliged to work your contract hours. If you do more then make sure that you, personally, are getting something out of it, whether that's "I look good to my boss" or "I take job satisfaction from this" or just "I get to play with Kotlin". Consider just not working overtime.

- Take initiative, but do so sustainably. Instead of trying to look good for promo, or alternately doing the bare minimum and just scraping by, take on impactful work at a pace that won't burn you out and then leave if it isn't rewarded.

- Keep an ear to the ground. Now you've got a job, you don't need another one, but this is a business relationship just like renting a house or paying for utilities. Be aware of the job market, and consider interviewing for roles that seriously interest you. Don't go crazy and waste the time of every company in your city lest it come back to bite you, but do interview for roles you might actually take.

The last two points are fine, however.

This, incidentally is good advice for both sides of an employment relationship: employers sometimes also mistakenly believe that employees are their friends and family and then get a rude awakening when employees suddenly leave with no warning, for a 10% increase in salary.

a) uncompetitive - taxes too high, too much protection for people who might not merit it;

b) less likely to start new businesses - in theory, you can have a great welfare system and a great atmosphere for enterpreneurship, but in practice, the former will usually stifle the latter, as the "eat the rich" types will dominate the discourse;

c) extremely vulnerable to the aging problem. Too many pensioners, not enough kids, not enough highly qualified migrants who have zero reason to subject themselves to lower compensation, higher taxation and, on the top of all, interaction with bureacracy that insists on the local language. OTOH hardly literate people from Afghanistan or Niger don't mind any of that; the German / Dutch / Swedish welfare system will take care of them even if they do nothing and/or immerse themselves in the black market.

IDK how to get out of this pickle, the local population is addicted to high welfare spending and other onerous protections like to crack and won't vote against it, even though it is becoming clear that as we fall more and more behind the US, we won't be able to afford a system like that.

Robust welfare states can be only carried by robust economies and a lot of young workers. Those conditions existed in the 1960s or 1970s, and our current systems are downstream from that, but the foundation is eroding with every passing year.

The final collapse will be pretty ugly, something like Argentina, but full of 70 y.o. paupers. Weaker spots in the EU already have a huge problem providing healthcare to the elderly, or even anyone. On paper, it is an universal right, but in reality, there simply aren't enough doctors to carry this obligation out.

The Czech Republic is somewhere in the middle, nowhere near as bad as rural Bulgaria, but try finding a dentist who accepts insurance patients outside the major cities like Brno and Prague. That will be an exercise in the impossible.

I really don’t think that this is true. Plenty of people work boring repetitive jobs such as assembly line workers. Pick up the pay check, commence actual living.

The dream is to work doing something that you love, but that’s not going to always pan out; and that’s ok.

I wholeheartedly endorse your adjustments - it is fine to go above and beyond but for heavens sake people please think about why beyond some vague competitive urge. Going above and beyond without a plan just means the effort will likely be wasted. Some cynicism should be used. Negotiate explicitly without assuming that the systems at play are fair, reasonable or looking out for you.

This kind of managerial behavior seriously kills employee motivation, because it both communicates that 1) no one has job security and 2) that management is apparently incapable of managing money responsibly.

“Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants and conferences that accomplished nothing, so now we have to cut an employee making $40k” really erodes morale in ways that merely firing people doesn’t.

It says that employees who have been longer at the firm, have disability, need to support family etc. should be let go last, compared to employees who have the same qualifcations, rank etc. So, in theory, what you're saying is wrong – the company would not lose their "10x devs" (whatever that means) because of this law.

Also, OP mentions the law, but does not say that he was affected by it.

Many EU countries have enough wealth, the problem is that it is unevenly distributed.

Go to small companies, yes they pay less but also yes: you will have real impact and they actually need you.

Staff is overworked and underpayed, waiy lines for crucial procedures can count to decades.

The workforce is aging because young people have stoped reproducing and fear of losing welfare money and the sight of brown faces prevents authoritiesfrom importing competent foreign non eutopean workforce.

This will collapse. There is no doubt this is not sustainable.

This is not an uneven distribution of wealth. Its a monster system that costs more than the national GDP can reasonably sustain in the long term.

Now I am no proponent of privatized healthcare, the current system does not work though.

Everyone suffers like this.

Note: My employer provides private healthcare insueance for us. I live in the richest part if the world. The Nordics. My private insurances gets me same day medical appointments.

The poor sods that cannot afford it have to wait weeks.

Tell me how this is fair and how wonderful the nordic welfare is??

Its americanized and terrible for almost twice the price

Typically if the company is really in financial trouble, they will also NOT use the pre-allocated budget which was not yet spent (=200k for company events, although the budget for such things was planned and approved last year).

I have seen companies actually taking care of finances (both firing people AND blocking useless events) and I have seen companies doing what you said, which creates pure hatred.

It's also easy to make the next year prediction be whatever you want since in a small company it's just you saying a number that the board doesn't think is too outrageous and in a large company involves you asking an analyst to increase the word of mouth factor of their model or whatever.

There is only one person who really can stop cycles hitting budgets and that is the CEO. IIRC Warren Buffett lamented the fact that the CEO is more of an investor than a manager and that spending budgets as a senior manager gives them almost no experience in setting those budgets.

This is probably the most heartbreaking aspect of modern HR policy.

It’s not just about layoffs. It’s about the way the company incentivizes (or doesn’t) worker loyalty and enthusiasm. You could have employees that spend their entire career at a company, and refuse to ever “go the extra mile,” because there’s obviously no motivation to do so.

Loyalty, engagement, and morale usually comes from things other than paychecks. Often, simple, basic Respect can have huge impact on the motivation and loyalty of employees.

It’s actually quite mystifying [to me], how modern HR practice seems to actively discourage things like treating employees with Respect.

I worked for a company that was (at the time I joined them) quite well-known for employee retention. I think the average length of stay was about 25 years, when I joined. They didn’t pay especially well, so their corporate work environment was responsible for that retention.

As the years went on, I watched the HR Department become much colder, and more impersonal. They became absolutely obsessive about constantly reminding employees, at every possible opportunity, that we were simply replaceable cogs in the machine, and that the company could get rid of us, at a whim. They never really improved their compensation, and gradually removed many incentives, so it became all stick, and no carrot.

Performance evaluations became insulting and predictable exercises in humiliation. I was often told to reduce the encouragement in my evaluations (I was a manager, for many years). I used to take pride in specific and eloquent praise in my evaluations. My employees really appreciated that.

HR definitely wanted to make sure that employees felt insecure in their employment. It was obviously a deliberate and calculated policy. Our HR was run by the corporate General Counsel, so, lawyers set the tone.

By the time I left (as a result of a much-anticipated layoff), the employee morale was completely in the shitter, and the company’s much-vaunted employee retention statistic was no more.

This what happens when country policy and businesses are driven by awful neoliberal economic theory and neoclassical/orthodox economic policy.

For the past 40 years, we have seen:

- wage stagnation for labor

- decreasing worker protections (in tech, this means forced NDAs, arbitration, non-compete clauses)

- significant decreases in social safety nets

- increasing wage disparity across the board

- decrease in investment of labor and company and emphasis on stock —manipulation— buy back programs and layoffs for short term gains

- decreasing participation in labor unions and thus decrease in collective bargaining power for labor

- non-transparent pay grades across the industry

- rampant wage theft in the form of: “instead of paying overtime, give you a title, a salary, and expect you to push more than 40 hrs a week” (or do a job that usually requires 3-4 people)

- decreasing worker loyalty to companies

- increasing consolidation of power and money through monopolies and monopsonies

In general, single payer healthcare + pay-as-you-go pension systems + relatively comfortable welfare systems + high taxation and regulation to support those systems.

Yes, there are meaningful differences across the continent. But visible outliers are scarce. One of the really nasty consequences is underfunded defense, which caught up with us once Russia started acting on its imperial dreams.

"Many EU countries have enough wealth, the problem is that it is unevenly distributed."

A typical EU government spends about 40 per cent of the GDP, with the heaviest part of the spending being pensions. The worst outlier, France, around 55 per cent. If this is not enough, it will never be enough, short of mass expropriations.

We already have a massive brain drain to the US. More punitive taxation = more brain drain.

People need to dream, I guess.

The US is a terrible place to live in if you are poor. But for a typical Hacker News denizen, moving anywhere to the high-taxation domiciles of Europe would mean a major loss of income and worsening of many services.

The people who do so have always seemed utterly insane to me. It’s a business transaction like buying a loaf of bread. Why do people act like it’s like getting married?

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.

I was part of a well performing team in a corporation in the US. Management told us that we've been making a real impact in the company's goals and they are going to increase our capacity to accomplish even more the next year by adding several more engineers in India to help us with tasks. The facade was well maintained - we got expanded goals for the next year, celebratory meeting for exceeding expectations etc. but you could clearly tell something was off in meetings with management. Little did we know that we ended up training our replacements.

Majority of my teammates got kicked out of the company by security, getting paperwork on their way out without a chance to even say goodbye. I was offered a role in another team, but the trust by that point was severed so much that I instead decided to take severance and leave as well.

The lesson for me has been to always act like an independent contractor or business owner, even when employed by a corporation or "family-like" startup. Based on mine and many of my friends' experiences there's no such thing as loyalty in the business setting anymore. You are on your own and you should only engage as much as it makes sense to you. Extra hours beyond what's required (e.g. beyond 40hrs) should directly and clearly benefit you.

I agree that defense was underfunded in many EU countries. But hindsight is 20-20. If you remember the 2000s, everybody was optimistic about eternal peace in Europe, and global trade without tariffs was at its heights. The lower investment into defense came not at the cost of higher social welfare.

The gap between poor and rich is still increasing, and we need ways to address that.

But one thing got me, I developed an original app for the company I work for, that is now one of the focus products. I wish I never, I feel like it was literally stolen from me, never ever go above and beyond for a company, your managers will get the credit.

1. Post Dot-com bubble dev naivete: most Post Dot-com devs (ie those who joined the work force sometime after the bubble burst) have only known the summer of tech (ML flourishing, everyone can code movements, nonsensical startups raising ridiculous amounts of money, companies hiring devs they don't need to keep competitors from having and BigHead kind of devs able to keep a job). These are the devs that used to go to r/cscareerquestions and tell everyone that they should get everyone to learn to code and program, the kind that believed in chasing aggressive salary growth at any cost. True summertime devs who have known nothing but joy and love in the tech world. These are the devs who OD'ed on the tech corpo koolaid

2. The super-meritocracy fallacy: following from point 1, these devs believed in the increasingly rare concept of promotion-only growth, the idea that if you worked really hard, your salary and your job title willl eventually reflect your hard work. While this is somewhat true, the extent to which your hard work is actually compensated seems to be overrated by most devs. This a rather peculiar thing as you would expect most devs to be data driven and to actually research whether this is true in general for most companies. Any veteran knows that career progression and salary increase by promotion has a very early point of diminished returns hence the job-hopping

3. The existential meaning of a job: this is another peculiar aspect of devs given that they see themselves as rational. An employeement relationship is a business relationship (like a partnership) where continuous work is exchanged for money. Yet these devs seem to have somehow assume some kind of existential meaning to this transactional relationship the terms of which they should have known. Placing the meaning of your life in a transaction is clearly misguided and it shouldn't take a layoff for someone to realise that. Yet here we are

4. The Saviour Dev Hero myth: this also follows from point 1. Devs being marketed as corpo heros is just that marketing. The supply and demand ratio is not a fixed thing. It changes. Devs were never going to be in demand forever. Business needs change. No one is irreplaceable. No matter how good. There is always someone good enough that will work for a similar salary (or less). During the summer of tech, the demand was higher than the supply so layoffs were rare. But summers don't last forever.

Ultimately, the lesson that devs, for all their self-described higher intellect and rationality, never seem to learn is that the goal of all companies is to increase their profits, everything else is secondary. Other goals exist only to help that. Layoffs while declaring record breaking profits is not surprising. Given the job market, new hires could be acquired at a lower salary and perhaps not as many are needed. As an employee, you are there to help increase profits and the company owes you a salary. This implied idea that efforts should be rewarded even when it makes no business sense, that the company should provide an existential meaning to your work or that it should always need you even when it makes no business sense is in my opinion delusional and a by-product of Post-Dot bubble conditions that no longer exist.

The market has changed (and it will change again) and all agents within must do so as well.

What's a "typical Hacker News denizen"? Not everyone is driven solely by monetary concerns. I visited the US in autumn, had a good time, but would I live there? No. I think "many services" are actually better in many parts of Europe (such as public transport).

Others may see it differently and that's fine, but please let's not act like the US isn't crumbling under a weight of 100 problems at least just as much as Europe.

But the line in the Excel sheet thing rings _incredibly_ true. It's actually surprisingly rare to be laid off by someone who knows you. Decision is nearly always made by people who've never met you and only have a cursory understanding of what your entire team does.

I live half the year in big cities in the US and half the year in Berlin, capital of the largest economy in the EU.

It’s crazy to me to hear how US people idealize the situation in Europe, or how Europeans talk about the US system. Each has pros and cons but neither can ignore economic reality. Single payer doesn’t mean that money isn’t flowing and negotiations don’t happen. No government can repeal supply and demand without enslaving doctors.

But I was doing some work for this startup ages ago and at some point out of the blue one of our full time contacts asked us if we've been paid because they haven't been. Must have been a lot less fun for them (I had other projects besides them) than for me. I only lost the pay for like 1/3 of a full time month.

Do we? For what?

We already have a serious problem in Europe that we totally missed the IT revolution. In the list of the biggest corporations in the world, US tech giants dominate. The first European entry is Louis Vuitton, a producer of luxury handbags.

Either we are going to have a robust economy that can support the levels of taxation which carry the welfare state, but that means that someone is inevitably going to become very rich. If someone succeeds in building European Amazon, they will be in the same category of rich as Jeff Bezos.

Or we will still have our legacy giants like Louis Vuitton and a more equitable distributon of poverty. But hey, no new digital parvenus up there.

You are concerned about the gap between the rich and the poor. What about the gap between the US and the EU economy? That is growing pretty fast.

Already we are small brothers to the big brother overseas. 20 or 30 more years of our current stagnation and we will be global nobodies; no one will bother to implement our strict regulations to gain access to our markets.

The comment starts with "let's face it", as if what it was claiming was a self-evident truth. It's not, and writing posts like that isn't really engendering productive debate.

The US is pretty big. Personally, I would avoid a lot of places, but, for example, the mix of American and Cuban culture in Florida is really refreshing to me.

Public transport is one of the few things in which the US is definitely behind the times. Not just behind Europe, but behind everyone-but-Africa. For example, the new Chinese-built metro in Dhaka, Bangladesh, is nice, safe and clean. IDK what is wrong with the Americans in this regard...

That said, read the Draghi report. There is absolutely no doubt that Europe needs massive reforms unless it wants to become irrelevant, but there is a lot of doubt if the political will is here.

By far the most important voting bloc are the pensioners, and they don't want any disturbances to the system that served their generation well.

People expect things to always work the same way and they get upset when they don't.

In a job market with more candidates than jobs, why would you need to an employee retention statistic? The reality is that in the current job market, regardless of your employment status or your work, your value has greatly diminished.

You'd be surprised.

I never said that the EU isn't in need of a reform, just that I wouldn't trade the American problems (opiod crisis, mostly non-walkable cities, gated communities, lack of public transport, lack of architecture older than a couple of hundred years, lack of proximity to other major linguistic centres except Mexico, insane tipping culture, rampant poverty, and let's not talk about the political system, ...) for the ones we have. Others may think differently, that's fine.

That's the majority of the population to be honest

They passed a bill that makes it a crime for doctors to "avoid work" in some conditions, and these conditions aren't just natural catastrophes etc., but any "emergency due to deficiencies of healthcare" that the government declares at will.

https://minutovezpravy.cz/clanek/slovensko-chce-prinutit-lek...

That made a lot of news. It is every bit as bad as it sounds.

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?

That reputation took a big hit, over the the time that I worked for them. I think they damn near went belly-up, after 100 years.

They seem to be (slowly) getting their act together, once again. I sincerely wish them luck.

I live in a part of the US with high average incomes and an absolutely excellent hospital system.

And it's breaking, too. If you go to the ER and you're not literally bleeding to death, it will be a 5 or 10 hour wait. I saw someone wait over 3 hours with a visibly and severely dislocated bone.

Non-emergency visits for anything more complicated than "put some ice on it and take some NSAIDs" can easily approach $1,000, and a routine childbirth is up to over $50,000, I think?

Departments are horribly understaffed, the administration pays themselves buckets of money and manages things from 30,000 feet with Excel, and at one point they employed 50 programmers to deal with constantly shifting medical coding rules for dozens of insurance companies.

Insurance for a family often runs $1,000 to $1,500 per month for the employee part, with the employer spending plenty more. And everything about insurance is a corrupt nightmare.

It all barely holds together somehow, at one of the highest costs in the world. And when our local system eventually gets around to it, they provide excellent care—but nothing dramatically better than a private hospital in Paris, and at a much higher price.

Do you always lurk for opportunities outside the current company (maybe some roles are more stable)? If so, how to explain in the interview that you're currently employed somewhere but concerned of their stability?

> [...] If a company decides to lay off, for instance, 40 employees, German law doesn’t prevent this. Instead, the law enforces a social scoring system to determine who is affected, prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees, such as those with children. In this sense, when it comes to layoffs, the difference between Germany and the US is minimal.

This is not true, and an over simplification.

Yes, you can always technically layoff in Germany, but it might not hold in court. Most people have legal insurance (mine is ~€300/y) which is tax deductible if it has employment protection. Mine will cover costs for an employment-related lawsuit.

If you feel that your layoff is not justified, you can always sue, the judge could decide that your work contract was unlawfully cancelled, leading to the company having to re-hire you and paying your salary for every month it didn't do so. The company posting record profits could weight in your favor in front of a judge. People, especially non-native like me, don't know better, they just move-on and go c'est la vie. If you sue, win and get re-hired, you can always ask to leave for a bigger package.

For companies above a certain amount of employee (50? 75?), if a small amount of employees (I think it's 3 or 4) request it, the company must run a works council election. For any layoff (individual or mass layoff), the work council must be consulted, and has co-determination, they can basically block the layoff, this was done by Volkswagen's work council recently. [1] For large mass layoffs, companies might also have to consult with the authorities.

Last thing, the social scoring is much more complicated than "those with children." If you have 4 kids and got hired 7 months ago, you might be fired, and I, single person, might keep my job with my 15 years of tenure. Tenure, disabilities, children, ... a lot of things take part into the social scoring.

All and all, I agree with a lot of the sentiments and points of the article. But saying that, outside of social scoring, layoffs between the US and Germany are the same is simply not true. There is a reasonable job security in Germany.

[1] https://www.volkswagen-group.com/en/press-releases/agreement...

This is not to say managers don't make stupid decisions, but they are more like bets. Somewhere between the fall of Nokia and the hit of iphone are thousands of decisions that lead to hiring or firing some 10-100 people.

It would be good to do a study on how tech workers feel in an era of such commonplace betrayal and dehumanisation. If anyone has stories they want to share please get in touch at UK Cybershow and let's see if there's an episode in it.

Doesn't account for all the tacit knowledge and morale effects of course. Some people just like running the Hunger Games.

& a good corporate reputation is just another asset like a rainforest: something you can burn to top up profits this quarter.

A former employer decided to freeze pay for a few years and later later start laying off people. During the pay freeze a colleague suggested that we might save a significant amount of money by hiring staff, rather than paying the large number of consultants we had hired. I think the ration was something like getting rid of two consultants would free enough money to hire three developers.

Managements take was that we should keep the consultants, because they where much easier to fire, two weeks notice, compared to four. So it was "better" to have consultants. My colleague pointed out that the majority of our consultants had been with us for 5+ years at that point and any cancelling of their contracts was probably more than 4 weeks out anyway. The subject was then promptly changed.

In fairness to management large scale layoffs did start 18 months later.

The proportion of psychopaths on the boards of most companies is off the scale:

"...Hare reports that about 1 percent of the general population meets the clinical criteria for psychopathy.[11] Hare further claims that the prevalence of psychopaths is higher in the business world than in the general population. Figures of around 3–4 percent have been cited for more senior positions in business.[6] A 2011 study of Australian white-collar managers found that 5.76 percent could be classed as psychopathic and another 10.42 percent dysfunctional with psychopathic characteristics..." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace

As it happens, almost everyone in the EU is trying to support unrealistic levels of welfare relative to their economy, but of course the weaker countries like Slovakia will feel the bite of reality first, while the richest part of the continent can continue kicking the can down the road for a decade or so if they really wish to close their eyes.

Though lately, the Germans are starting to have some really somber conversations. A sick man of Europe all again, and dragging down 10 other economically-intertwined countries with it.

What signs were there? Or was it simply some subconscious feeling?

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.

That happens more at traditional companies than tech companies, but it immediately signals that it's a crappy company steeped in "rules for thee but not for me" culture.

It is hard to deny that we have a serious brain drain and a serious investition drain, too. European money regularly looks for investments in the US, to the tune of billions. The other way round? Not so much.

But people really don't want to admit that our welfare/bureaucratic systems can't be sustained with aging populations and stagnant economies.

Most product teams are organised around the idea that someone tells them what to build, then they build it. That means they never talk to anyone who cares about profit. Short-circuiting that and being in people's ear about "is this going to secure income?" can be good for everyone.

Is that sort of thing guaranteed to work? No, sometimes the hammer is too big and heavy to divert. But a lot of the time software people show no interest in whether the plans they are signing off on are going to be viewed as leading to more money.

Eg, in the original article I see things like "Occasionally, the VP of Product would message me directly to ask if a feature was feasible to implement". Cool. The VP of product isn't politically aligned [0] to put old mate on profitable features. He is going to potentially put old mate on features that are hard to implement, moonshots or potentially get someone to stop bothering him. So old mate build up a reputation for technical excellence (aka on track to Staff Developer), but not a reputation for being essential to making the accountants happy. Eventually parts of the business that aren't under VP Product's control sack him.

If an accountant thinks you are responsible for 1% of a companies revenue and your salary is less than that, your job is secure. Iron clad. Really have to screw up to get fired. So proactively talking to them and associating with things that push revenue up is a strategy. Negotiate to make it so.

[0] If he's a good VP he will be, but that isn't something that can be assumed.

You hear this a lot but it's the result of developers from sectors that did well during this time period whistling past the graveyard as rolling layoffs hit more mature sectors and firms, such as networking (Cisco) and storage. It's surprising to me that people who are paid to try to imagine how systems perform in different scenarios, and are presumably good at what they are paid to do, fail to apply the same thought processes to the systems that provide them their salaries.

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.

I recall commenting few days back that, the job market is so screwed now that even senior engineers with decades of experience are not trusted these days if they are missing minor experience in some minor tool.

In 2021, I remember everyone with ability to type some code(regardless of quality) land great jobs, remote contracts etc. Everyone I know currently looking to change or were laid off since mid last year are suffering(real bad) and all of these are highly qualified people whom I’d really trust with most critical work.

Mismanagement of funds is one of the worst things. Is it pure incompetence?

Or is that they don't give a damn and that "let's get together 500+ people for a fully paid weekend" is too cool to cancel?

...like better an egg today than a hen tomorrow. I mean, they don't get affected anyways, they do get the egg and hen...!

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)

Germany is just a strange country IMO. Lots of "nice" stuff like this that sounds great but really only works for the older generation and doesn't really work for young people, who are already hugely disadvantage by the German boomerocracy (probably one of the worst boomerocracys in the world).

Because when the gap gets too large, you get an oligarchy. Like here in the US. And I don't think you want a homegrown Elon Musk to run your country.

Also it makes the economy a sham held up by billionaires. I literally cannot start a company here in the US because even my engineering salary is not enough to bootstrap a company without licking VC boots. I'm currently looking to instead get a visa in another country for starting up a business.

Everything can bring you burnout if the management is toxic. It’s independent on the size of the company. I’m now working for a small company that feels like a family even if they don’t say it.

Maybe this is one of the unspoken goals of bringing people back to the office.

After that, I held onto, in fact, excelled at every job and was often one of the top software engineers wherever I worked. I also launched some popular open source projects since then. I experienced some success in crypto (after facing a lot of adversity). I led significant improvements in the crypto project I worked on and things were looking up, the blockchain became highly stable and supported some unique features which would allow it to scale and meet its original vision; but after a couple of years, founders decided they wanted to go in a different direction which I did not agree with and so I had to quit. I made such an impact on that project that I managed to earn income from it for about 3 years after quitting the company; the biggest crypto voting cartel in that ecosystem broke up and re-formed just to include me as a member. Then after 3 years of horrible decisions, the founders essentially ran the project into the ground (no surprise to me); they did such a bad job that they then had to migrate their token to a competitor's platform. I lost my passive income... Though I must have earned like 200K EUR from it over the years. Best years of my life; no job, earning passive income while working voluntarily on open source project I cared about. I was not beholden to anyone and had no responsibilities besides just keeping my node running.

After that, I had to go back to working 9-to-5 doing the most tedious jobs, for lower pay. I was forced to accept work for a company in the mainstream finance sector which was the antithesis of everything I knew and believed in, literally going to work every day believing 100% that I was making the world a worse place. I struggled to find motivation; I did my best to hide it but I got fired after almost 1 year (coincidentally, just a few months before my shares would vest). Talent cannot make up for lack of enthusiasm it turns out... It was an unsettling experience hearing the CTO tell me how smart I was and that I won't have trouble finding other work... while firing me... Like 2 weeks after giving me access to their Stripe control panel where I could see all company finances! At that point, I had full access to everything, all user data, all services, all infrastructure. They'd literally put me in a position of ultimate trust, before pulling the rug from under me. I left in a very classy manner and on decent terms, as I always did before. In retrospect, the whole experience working there was very strange.

Anyway it's been a struggle to find motivation since then. I don't take my career too seriously now; having seen both the lows and the highs and seeing how talent and determination doesn't doesn't actually make a difference in the face of political machinations (which are pervasive in the industry). I don't think I would even care much if I got fired again. I'm now more political myself; I do the bare minimum. In effect, I've become like the people I used to hate, but I don't hate them anymore because I now understand why they might have been that way.

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.

Absolutely, I should have clarified, this was in Denmark. Laying off someone is pretty easy, unless they happen to be pregnant, a union representative or work-place-safety representative.

And I should know, I was laid off from a job after two months because they decided that they didn't have the budget anyway.

You can drive them out of your particular tax domicile, but you won't squash them globally, and the result will be that you will be dependent on them anyway. As Europeans, we have to deal with Musk from a position of weakness. European Musk would be easier to control than American one, but hey, we did our best to redirect all the future Musks, European or South African, to the US...

"I literally cannot start a company here in the US because even my engineering salary is not enough to bootstrap a company without licking VC boots."

You have to realize that a lot depends on your level of ambition. You can start a small local company anytime, tech or non-tech, plenty of people do that every day, but your market reach will be naturally limited to one city or so.

But if you want to start a globally relevant technological startup, hey, that was NEVER in the power of a random median engineer. At least you now have options, including those VCs. There aren't any such options in other places.

But you touched on something that I struggled with for years; a sense of belonging. Humans are, by nature, fairly tribal. That's both a good and bad thing. However, we as individuals have to be mindful about how much we are acting on our sense of belonging. At the extreme end, when we let our desire to belong to something larger than ourselves call the shots, we tend to get radicalized or fall into religious zealotry. On a more day-to-day experience, our sense of belonging can drive us to seek external validation from people who simply will not offer it, which spawns things like discontent and resentment that cause more irrational behavior and damage your self-worth. It's a slippery slope.

What I have found is that being mindful about self-validation helps mitigate that. Reminding myself that I am good enough despite my flaws, I was not born to toil/be busy/make someone else rich, and my experiences and perspectives are valuable to me have become tools that help me make decisions about work/tasks that strategically avoid burnout. I never offer too much, and I know my limits very well, at this point. The result is most people see and respect that about me, where the ones that do not will quickly lose interest and move on to find someone they can successfully abuse.

From what I have seen in the past, the set of people with children and a mortgage can be difficult. Some really do not want to be there, but stay for job security.

I'm also not entirely sold on prioritising those lay-offs based on social elements, such as children. I can see incentives being good to have more children in a society, but you shouldn't be punished for not having them. Ultimately from the company's perspective, you want to maximise your company's future success.

I would amend some points:

> Stick to your contract hours.

Do additional hours where required and you are able, but make sure they are visible, and compensate yourself them back. It increases your perceived value.

> Avoid going above and beyond with initiatives.

For your own sake, take pride in your work. Don't become stale.

> Always keep interviewing.

Many stop doing this because it's a pain and stressful. I think it is enough to keep your toes in, try to figure out what salaries are being offered, what kinds of jobs are available and how desirable you are. Try to learn those things with as minimal effort from yourself as possible.

This seems as exhausting as working more than 40 hours a week routinely. I would rather keep a financial reserve to cover the time to get a new job.

That's true, but it makes it all the more reason that you want to get that squared off ASAP while you have infinite access to HR/a manager to help you rather than scrambling to try and do it while the clock is ticking on access to your machine/the building etc.

Which will probably soon encompass a large amount of Devs. large productivity increases usually mean job losses.

They said if my business was running for 2 years or more then they'd accept that as low enough risk.

A bit understandable in this economical situation, but man, it's hard. Even for the guarantor, they need to own a house and have at least 40x the monthly rent as proven (PAYE or business with 2+ years) yearly income.

I knew only one person who could be a guarantor that fits the requirements.

Alternative was AirBnb or other monthly accommodation which was of course more expensive.

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.

However I would encourage that the "don't give a shit about the company and colleagues" is not quite as simplistic.

Yes, fuck the company, they don't care. You should always assume this. But you _should_ care about your colleagues. They are your network, and greatest asset at the next company. If you are shit to them, they will not recommend you.

So my conclusions, and or advice to younger people is this:

o Learn what the business wants, it'll help you make better decisions/products, and often gives you fair warning about being laid off.

o Be suspicious of the company.

o if there a clash between business priorities and you, you will always come off worse.

o Go over and beyond for your colleagues, not your company.

o fight for your colleagues not the company

o your colleagues are your CV.

"3. Lack of Vision from Leadership" comes in different flavors.

One scenario is exactly as described: leadership genuinely lacks vision, which inevitably leads to layoffs. Another, is when management is already aware of impending layoffs but cannot talk about it yet. While this may seem nefarious, it often has legal implications that restrict transparency. I've been in the difficult position to continue to manage teams while the companys closure was already known to management. Not allowed to inform people is one thing but trying to emotionally prepare them for whats coming is a different, so the drop may not be as high.

Forcefully reducing server costs by 50% and cutting of contractors is hardly considered a vision. 'A lack of vision' could be the actual message. By the time I knew what is going on and costs got reduced I encouraged the best kind of development within the team: CV-driven-development with vague sprint goals!

You want to make use of the new fancy LLM APIs and play around with it? Sure! Introducing a new tech stack? I can not think of a better idea!

While its far from an ideal scenario, its often better than wasting energy on dead features. My idea was to giving people the opportunity to work on something they find personally meaningful and is driven by self motivation. I hope it helped, at least after speaking to every one personally after the bomb dropped, no one was really surprised.

I would also advise you to include defamation, in case somebody sue you for defaming them. Usually many legal insurance exclude "internet" from the protection, this means that if you post on hackernews "Hans is an idiot", and Hans sues you, you might have to pay the lawsuit yourself. These insurances usually have an "internet" options for usually ~20€/y which would protect you in this case. You can still deduct the entire amount from your taxes, as it's still technically a labour-law legal insurance.

- 3 month severance, free money

- 1 year unemployment support, more free money

- fat tax return, since I falled into lower income bracket, even more free money

- moving out out expensive city to countryside, less expenses (and yes more money)

I took one year off, finished my opensource project and started consulting. Layoff tripled my disposable income and vastly improved quality of my life.

* If you can do the job but nobody else can and it’s a critical role you are probably immune from layoffs even with a horrible annual evaluation. It’s not you that’s critical, it’s the job you fill that’s critical.

* if you take deliberate actions to make yourself critical, such as the only person who knows the code base, it’s only a matter of time before the mega corp dumps you. Self-appointed critical people are too expensive and viewed as toxic by management, but you can probably get away with this at a mom and pops shop.

* once incompetence becomes the universally accepted norm it doesn’t matter that you can do what others cannot. Everybody is a replaceable beginner irrespective of their titles and years of experience and treated exactly as such. The survivors are the people that don’t rock the boat.

* if you have years of experience operating, managing, and authoring both people and technology in side projects you are probably far further along into your career than you are getting paid for. If your career is stagnant trying doing something wildly different and see what happens. I achieved rapid promotion after changing careers.

* don’t ever work more than you have to unless it’s something you want to do knowing you won’t get paid for it. I liked writing personal software outside of work because at work it could do my job for me or it frees me from the restrictions of shitty commercial software.

* the best way to impress management is to 1. do less work and 2. solve tough problems and share your solutions. Don’t be special. Demonstrate value.

That's usually accompanied by some mealy mouthed communication from the CEO that "the decision rests with me" or some other poor faith mea culpa while you end up scrambling to get health cover for your wife and kids and figure it how far and severance will get you

Of course this doesn't work if you have a work council, usually the work-council negotiate a severance package algorithm (= fix_amount + tenure * amount), and this is usually un-negotiable. This makes sense, thanks to collective bargaining, it's most likely one the best deal you could have gotten. (Even though libertarians will flock-in and start going "How do I know, that I, as a highly performing individual couldn't have negotiate better!?! This seems unfair!")

But why do you think that Gen X will be better ?

Isn't this self-contradictory ?

I was laid off over 5 years ago, and, as these things usually go, it was a complete shock to me. The company had been acquired, and my services were no longer needed. It ended up being a very positive change for my career, but to this day, if I ever get a moment of déjà vu, my immediate thought is to check my phone and see if I've been fired.

The idea is that working at a company "squeezes juice out of you", so you should not be so easily fired after a long tenure, because the company got all the rewards from your juice, but you don't have much left. You can agree or disagree, but I have to admit that there is a logic.

1. The company-wide 5% layoff. Avoid this by making sure you're not in the bottom 5% of performers, and the people above you know it.

2. The shift-the-legacy-products-to-cheap-countries layoff. Avoid this by making sure you're working on products where you're fixing bugs and making improvements, not just keeping things ticking over.

3. The lay-off-the-entire-department layoff. Avoid this by working in departments that bring in more revenue than they cost, or at least have a good chance of commercial success; and in an area where the company's strategy calls for growth.

4. The lay-off-the-entire-office layoff. Not much you can do about this, except working at the head office, or a very large branch office where important projects are based.

5. The there's-just-no-money / entire-company-goes-out-of-business layoff. Not much you can do about this - but if things are heading in this direction, it's a good time to start sending out resumes and maybe getting the unemployment insurance on your car loan.

Of course these are very risk-averse strategies. I've heard of some people having great success with the opposite strategies - some people say maintaining ancient legacy mainframes for banks is highly profitable. Others have told me the fastest way to get a senior title is a failing organisation, where senior people keep leaving. So none of these are hard-and-fast rules.

Crushing tickets gives you localized visibility and job security but doesn't help when your managers managers manager has to make cuts.

But if you get name dropped for launching a big feature at the monthly all-hands, are getting added to higher level calls, or even chat up your managers manager at the off-site, that's the difference between being an Excel row and being a person.

6) Senior management is mysteriously missing and impossible to get ahold of. (They're not allowed to say anything to anyone.)

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.

I can't say I was surprised when it happened. I knew things weren't going well and I wasn't really bringing in business. Was actually happy to move on except for the fact that the job market was really tough at the moment.

But, yeah. Under most circumstances knocking yourself out isn't worth it most of the time. I have had some product launches and on-job site projects where I sort of did for a while and that was OK. But don't make a practice of it in most cases.

And tell you what, the posts on linkedin and the blogs like this, where the take away is 'I got fired and next time I'll work LESS'. Really?

Errr, might want to reconsider that strategy, unless you think that you are going to get binned no matter what, and just cruising until that happens is the solution. Just seems like a massively negative outcome.

That, or they are going for the spiteful 'hopefully I convince everyone else to lower the standard, so others get sacked, or so I look good again'.

And no they are not on the way out, they are still here and will be here for a long time. To the extent that Gen Xers will be better or worse, it is only because the demographic pyramid won't look quite as crazy or distorted.

And I agree there is logic to all of these things we are discussing. The problem is rather that everything is falling apart in other ways so young people get the raw end both times. Many of these older folk will be on rent controlled flats that are not available to young people, for example.

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

You have to be careful on this one.

Often (it varies by jurisdiction), blanket rules by companies that all software you write in your spare time are their property can be safely ignored as invalid. But if it is heavily related to your current job then (again depends on jurisdiction) then they probably do own the copyright, possibly even if they don't have an explicit contractual provision for it.

If you're using your own spare-time software at work and benefiting from it there, it would be hard to argue it's not related.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big proponent of high quality public education; it's a necessity. But the reason we have it is because businesses and corporations need workers.

But their office lease was up sooner and getting rid of that magnified the savings.

I’ve done many layoffs and been laid off many times, and the advice I’d tell people is don’t think it’s a reflection on you if you get laid off _or dont_.

Most of the time it’s just macro factors out of your control.

[1] is a PDF that tax advisers and lawyers distribute to employers to check if freelancers are only ostensibly self-employed. The checklist at the end of the PDF is all you need if you are an employer. If you are a freelancer you must also check if you are employee-like and possibly file an application to be exempt. The PDF tells you when. Watch the 5/6 distribution of income (not law, but established judicature)!

[1] https://www.sup-kanzlei.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Scheinselbs...

> to the company, I was just a row in an Excel sheet.

But then writes:

> [German] law enforces a social scoring system to determine who is affected, prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees, such as those with children.

It sounds like under German law he had to be treated as a row in a spreadsheet. Cynically, it might have been wiser to spend time having a child rather than hustling for the company.

From politicians to corporation managers to civil servants, it's everywhere. That's it.

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.).

At hiring time, they are willing to pay market rate (or some percentage of market rate) to get people in the door. Once you are employed, they don't care anymore and will let excellent people slowly fall behind market compensation with 1% to 2% raises.

When those employees get frustrated and leave for 20% bump in comp, the companies seem fine replacing them with a new hire at market rate. So now, they have a new employee making market rate, they have to train the new employee for months before they are productive and they've taken on the risk of an unknown vs. just giving the existing employee a raise to market rate. It doesn't make sense unless you want to telegraph the message that employees are fungible and you don't really care about people.

It's not necessarily up to them.

Recent years (40's) I've been on a building spree of sorts for my own projects[0]

I'm my 30's, a lot of energy went into home improvement projects, establishing a garden, and young kids. Now I find a lot of time and energy left for my own passion projects.

[0] https://turas.app and https://coderev.app

The article makes it very clear that they're talking about large, 100+ staff companies; when you're just another interchangeable cog in the machine. Today it's seldom that the person doing the layoffs is also part of the day to day operations, hence the you're "just another row in an excel spreadsheet" call out. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves by thinking at the boots-on-the-ground level (known individual/quantity, appreciated) instead of the macro COO/CFO costs tracking level (unknown individual/quantity, interchangeable.)

If you create metrics, they will be gamed. The people that succeed, then, are not necessarily those with the most merit, but those who are best at manipulating their metrics.

According to anti-discrimination law, a ground for layoff(or not hiring) can not be tied to parenthood.

I had the incredible luck of starting my career as the first hire and thus lead developer right out of college. The startup which hired me eventually ran out of steam, but the experience I got is priceless.

Now big corporations on the other hand are a shit show, and from what I can tell have always been a shit show. Have laid me off 3 times. And none of it has affected me much. Always quickly found another good position, and that's with being absolutely terrible at live coding challenges.

I'd say try to find work you're interested in. If you can, also try to keep your commute as short as possible. And live in a place you like.

And good luck.

ie annual cull rather than oh no financial results are weak.

Last round did spook me a bit too. Decided to up the emergency reserves as a result

"We spent 1B in one-off costs for increased future growth" is a much happier story to investors than "we have recurring costs of 1B", put simply, even if the actual recurring cost number is worse.

(There's also some complexities in some industries around money from, say, grants, which you can only spend on certain types of expenditures...)

I made a correction. Also I really hate the tendency of tech workers doing everything to stay away from unionizing or collective bargaining or establishing work councils. There is this bizarre tendency that it is just somekind if conspiracy and they are able to bargain better deals. This in collective hurts the entire tech crew everywhere.

Everyone is reporting 100 % which means they're probably doing three days worth of work in one work week to keep the number up.

One product owner showed 12 tasks out of 57 being completed and still gave out a 100 per cent completion rate because he retroactively rated those 12 as critical and the rest as unimportant.

This strategy cannot work long term unless there is growth happening elsewhere in the company to make up for the excess money burned on contractors and reduced number of employees. But it can definitely work short term if the growth numbers for the quarter are going to look bad, and it has the benefit of giving management someone else to blame when the project work doesn’t get done.

If your company starts replacing employees with contractors, that’s a bad sign.

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.

You know, operational expenses are the ones that get an immediate tax break, and capital expenditure the ones with a depreciation period.

Changing the expenses that way can only increase the company's tax payments. The only reason one could possibly want to make that change is if they want to fraudulently show the money paid for the contractors as earnings.

That’s frequently the fundamental issue really.

Measuring a developer’s productivity as an IC is fairly easy. Measuring quality of manager’s decisions is tricky

Same thing happened to me. Work was the first place where I felt I actually belonged and knew my own worth. It can be very intoxicating.

This is so discriminatory, I don't even know where to start. Also, employees with children are more likely to need urgent time off, and have more stringent time constraints than the ones who don't.

“Always keep your running shoes around your neck”.

After staying at my second job too long and becoming an “expert beginner” in 2008 and being stuck, I said “never again”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39629190

1. I keep enough savings in a liquid account to pay my expenses between 9-12 months.

2. I keep my skills up to date.

3. Don’t be a “ticket taker”. This link I posted to HN describes my thoughts perfectly (It isn’t my blog)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42818169

4. Keep your network strong.

My first layoff was in 2011 when the company was sold for scraps and they let everyone go. We all knew it was coming. Management was up front with us about the difficulties the companies was facing and that kept us apprised of the companies that our investors were looking to for acquisitions. Our investors also promised us that we would get paid for every hour we worked.

Most of us stuck around to the bitter end, when the time came, they gave us our notice, we all went to lunch together and came back to the office and just joked around for awhile.

The CTO had a couple of recruiter friends reach out to us. From looking at LinkedIn, everyone got a better job within a month. Our major customer arranged for me to finish my work as a contractor for them after making an agreement with the acquirer to let me keep the code while working for the customer.

The second time was the year before last and it was Amazon. I commented here about four months after it happened.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963988

I honestly didn’t think about the layoff three weeks after it happened. It was then my 8th job since 1996, I got my severance and moved on to my ninth job three weeks later.

The next job after that one ended up being mote shitty than I could imagine. I got laid off from there last year. I replied to an internal recruiter from my current company and again had a job three weeks later.

AFAIK in Germany the model of using temporary agency staff (AÜG or "staff leasing") is now tightly regulated. It works for a limited time period and tries to guarantee some equitable conditions for temporary workers like fair treatment, equitable wages, and benefits, aligning with the protections afforded to permanent employees.

Consultancy has no such protections.

I have never heard of any laws that prohibit internal employees from socializing with the externals (consultants or AÜG), or eat together. Bonding can happen equally at the desk or the lunch table. And I haven't heard of any company or institution enforcing this. Legislating who one is allowed to eat with sounds crazy.

What many companies probably enforce is "no internal benefits for consultants", so the free company coffee, parking, canteen, or maybe even a desk/office are not available for the externals, and they have to look elsewhere. Or maybe some unwritten internal rules to discourage bonding.

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.

My hope is that after a layoff I would be able to bounce back and find a new company where I can keep on doing fun work.

Life has ups and downs. I don't think shielding yourself from emotions is a healthy path. Just like you don't have to shield yourself from others forever after a breakup. A key ingredient is to have other part of your life to support you (family, couple, friends, ...) when one is failing.

Turned out that this "runway" factored in dumping all the American devs and replacing us with workers overseas who made ~35-40% of what they paid us.

My recent experience in the "data" world taught me that many companies in the US actually want contractors, but our employment laws make it make being "full-time" not that different than a contractor.

Another thing I learned was to never jump on R&D type projects unless you are in a very close communication loop with the leadership. If they are going to see you as a consultant on retainer, you have to always be delivering and improving on stuff that affects the business. I was put on some sort of "special projects" role in three fast-growing startups and those are always the first on the chopping block when things tighten up (and they almost always do at some point, especially in a startup).

These aren't actually that rare.

When the times were good, the messaging was we were all one big family. When the crash came, there were weekly layoffs. Co-workers that thought they were friends turned on each other to keep their jobs.

I learned to keep a fat emergency fund. I learned to work as a mercenary. I get in, I get out, I get paid. Then I live my life, which is not work. I keep no personal effects, and can be out the door in a second. Coworkers are acquaintances, not friends.

Then at the stoke of 5pm, as we permies were discussing which pub to move on to, the contractor stood up, mumbled his thanks, and left. Billable hours over for the day.

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!

I was told by a coworker, when I was over 50 or so, that they could not fire me because I could turn around and make it about age discrimination at that point. I don't know if my coworker was correct — there is, as was mentioned in the blog post, a weaselly way where they lay off whole teams to avoid the blowback. (And then may cherry-pick a few of the laid-off engineers and make them a quick offer on another team.)

Earlier though in my career I had a very cool manager (hi, Steve!) that made it clear to me that The Corporation doesn't give a fuck about me. That, to that end, I needed to chart my own career path and not rely on might bright-eyed "beamishness" to get me anywhere.

In the end I did stay with Apple for the whole ride but was quicker to switch teams when I thought I was being either overworked or under-compensated. Seeing the company as the cold entity it is was in fact a liberating concept for me. Fortunately I didn't need to be personally impacted by a layoff to find that out.

The key differences being that in one case there's well defined constraints on resources but open ended results, and in the other the resource constraints are poorly defined but the end result is much more fixed.

Does anyone know when this came into favor? What was used before? What are the alternatives?

Calling out internal mobility (and normalized support for taking advantage of it!) as a key corporate culture value.

I've worked for companies that make this hard/toxic/impossible and companies that make this easier/normal.

The latter are always better, healthier companies.

I am still surprised by this. They didn't get laid off. Just me.

I'm not angry at them, just very confused about their reasons not to leave me a good review to help me get a new job.

So this could be a debate about something completely other than the social model and it's so complicated that it's hard to have any sensible argument about it.

From my experience, that’s exactly what is going on.

HR was obsessed (and that’s not hyperbole) with constantly telling us that we could be ejected, at any time.

I suspect that it had something to do with legal stuff. Our HR was run by lawyers.

A company may make more in revenue than strictly expenses but stock-based compensation is often not considered an expense so if you add those into the expense side it could change profitability.

- a contractor provides a "service" that improves your money-machine output.

(or so it's said).

We're used to think that in difficult situations you cut the useless "fun" expenses.

When that doesn't happen in a company, people blame it on management that already "moved on".

It has to do with how people perceive a company and with all that culture that has been pushed down our throats for years, with "We're a family" and things like that. It has also to do somehow with showing some respect...

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.

In general I don't think that the style of work that leads to burnout is desirable at any stage unless if it's for your own startup and perhaps not even then.

One day I woke up and grey haired and not rich. I felt that my youth had disappeared, I had various minor health problems. Why did I work till 2am for a fortnight to solve problem X? The project was cancelled after I left or never made any money or whatever - it was for no great achievements. I got laid off anyhow.

I encountered plenty of people that generated fear in others pushing towards excessive work but I noticed every one of them going home at 5pm. Do you have to take note of these bullies? Maybe not - I didn't notice them being any worse to the people who ignored their pressure.

Don't encourage other people to overwork either - be part of the solution.

It's the people that you work with who will be grateful sometimes, in small ways and overcoming problems with them creates friendships. So you must obviously try to pull your weight - I'm not advocating cynicism.

The machines worked fine. They worked just as well the day after Webvan went bankrupt as they did the day before. The business was cashflow positive, not some crazy gamble.

But suddenly the chipmakers realised they had more capacity than they knew what to do with, and put growth plans on hold. At the same time, understandably, a lot of investors decided to get out of tech stocks.

Even the largest boats rise and fall with the tides.

I have seen investors not invest even $10K into a project and then line up to invest far more for the SAME amount of shares.

When you apply for jobs, you see recruiters (who get commission from placements) tell you that your background isnt a fit when it is a perfect fit, and prefer to not show candidates.

I have even explained to recruiters that there is an opportunity to represent the candidates, like a Hollywood agent or like a seller agent i Real Estate. That the candidates would also pay a commission out of their salary, if placed in a job they actually like. And that all they have to do is call their counterpart recruiter and vouch for the candidate, which usually a quick call. But most are stuck in their ways and don’t want to tap new opportunities, no matter how easy. To their credit, some are not.

And so, it is no surprise to me that businesses waste money and then cut their task force. Many of them don’t care about you, but expect you to care about them. They’ll even expect you to stay late and demonstrate commitment, but they won’t pay you overtime.

You fire someone because they are hurting the company? That feels like a company that cares about doing well. Event seems more okay, and there's no reason to question the financial cost if the org seems to be doing well. You layoff someone off because you're tight on cash? Tell everyone you only hire top performers but had to let a top performer go because of budgetary reasons? Feels gross to throw more money away when you're already making "hard" decisions about letting quality people go.

I understand the contractual and financial logic but from the human perspective excluding the people who are otherwise just as much part of the team as anyone else is definitely eyebrow raising.

How does one do it freelance? I also would prefer contract work or consulting work, I like that no feelings are hurt when I leave having done a good job, leave em better than you found ‘em.

(Yeah, no one at PM level or above does, there's nothing relevant in them. Until one day there is.)

Newsletters, meanwhile, continue coming and announcing even greater growth due to digital transformation in the age of blockchain or AI or stuff.

Lesson learned: the first impression was correct - it's all internal marketing, and it's about as truthful and helpful to the recipient as regular marketing, i.e. not at all.

I didn't get laid off, but I project I put years of my life into was shut down (in a "row on a spreadsheet" type of way), and it effected me surprisingly deeply. I'm still dealing with the after effects, and reading this thread is making me realize it was cognitively really similar to a layoff.

I wish it didn't bother me as much as it did, but that doesn't change the impact.

The European social democratic model introduced after war relied a lot on having a lot of working age people supporting relatively small cohorts of the elderly. It was a working assumption - before birth control, few could imagine how deeply would fertility collapse.

The German chancellor Adenauer assured the Bundestag that "Leute haben Kinder immer" = people will always have children.

No, not always, no.

that said i'm curious if there are cities or groups who reduce the importance of material economy / business and promote real deep and beautiful learning

I’m going through this now, just resigned due to burnout while being a “rockstar developer” with no life recently.

Haha this is what my current company is trying to do now. Bet we are dragging our feet helping the team in India. If they chop our heads off now, you bet they’re gonna be left with ruins. Fuck them.

That said, when the no raise hit I made my boss aware of my displeasure in that (As a senior engineer at the top of the pay scale I expect my raises should just match inflation, but no raise is a clear pay cut). I did find a transfer position in the company that resulted in a nice level promotion and thus raise, which is sometimes the best option.

Though your mileage will vary.

I have worked for third party consulting companies for 5 years. Companies hire my company to do a job or issue guidance and then leave. If I am on the bench, I still get paid. I report status to the client company and they are ultimately responsible for signing off on work. But they don’t manage my work.

I’m not embedded into their team, we might embed them into our team. But at the end of the day, we are leading the projects.

Then you have staff augmentation “consultants” like you are referring to.

I saw both sides a few years ago when I was the dev lead for a company. We hired both staff augmentation “consultants” where we paid the contracting agency $90/hour and the end consultant got $60-$65 and we also paid the AWS consulting companies $160/hour and I have no idea what they got paid. But it was a lot more.

That’s what made me work on pivoting to cloud consulting in 2018. I didn’t know AWS when we hired the consultants.

I think at a big enough company the people making layoff decisions don't know or care what job is critical. In some cases that means your job wasn't as critical as you thought. But I've also seen layoffs that seem just downright stupid. Literally saw someone laid off then re-hired to a different team a couple weeks later with a substantial bump to their pay.

At a certain level of abstraction nothing will save you. Critical job? Bean counters don't know the specifics of each team or project. High level? Cost too much, not contributing enough to short term goals.

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.

If I was a manager of that team, I'd worry about the effect of treating part of my team differently.

If I was an employee on a team like that, I'd feel really bad about my team mates not being allowed to participate.

I'm afraid we haven't hit rock bottom yet, they won't change until no one applies anymore.

Huge opportunity for companies willing to do the right thing!

But for the unwritten interview rule: Don't be negative.

Even if the interviewer knows you're in a dumpster fire, you have more to lose.

Many times you cannot get called as a 1099 as some places won't work with you. however most of the big consulting companies have others working for them on a 1099 and will be happy to deal with you. However the amount they pay you doesn't change so you have to really understand how to make tax law work for you to make it worth out. (perhaps you can give yourself a 401k with a match - check with the lawyers/accountants above to see if that is legal and if so what the rules are. If not there are other loopholes that work similar)

If the client company owns the project and you are just coming in as a warm body, that’s staff augmentation.

But if the client company is putting out Requests for Comments to different companies and they sign a Statement of Work and your consulting company comes in and does the work, that’s “consulting”. In the latter case, you don’t usually get let go as soon as there is no work for you - ie when you are “on the bench”.

Even if you are a more junior employee at the latter company where you are more hands on keyboard than flying out to meet customers and sometimes you might even be doing staff augmentation for the client, it still feels differently.

My consulting company has internal employee events, is responsible for my pay, performance, etc - not the client.

If they cut more than five $40k employees, they've made their $200k back.

In what industry does a new hire just not have someone telling them what to do?

But when you calculate the the present value of the pension (ie discounted future cash flows), is the difference between staying and going and making more money elsewhere worth it? (serious question, not trying to be combative)

This comes off as rather reductionist and absolute to me; tech is a massive industry, do you know every sector within and adjacent to tech to have reached this conclusion?

Trying to ostracize one model to favor the other is the recipe for a collapse

Perhaps that's what the USA is, a disposable Empire