A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work

There are several types of layoffs:

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.

I generally agree with all that. You can absolutely be in the wrong place at the wrong time sometimes and there's not much you can do about it.

There is a halfway between 1 and 3 where the manager is told to drop 5% and rather than picking one dev per team the manager just squashes one “nice-to-have” application and drops that team.

Yes. When the first dot-com bubble burst, my father was working on semiconductor manufacturing machines.

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.

There is one other thing you can sometimes pull off: tell your boss you could work for a different division. Often (but not always, perhaps not even the majority of times) when layoffs happen there are also moves to a different division that is hiring people. So you want to make sure you are on the list of people to recommend to the other division. (this sometimes means getting skills the other wants before the layoffs)

> Others have told me the fastest way to get a senior title is a failing organisation, where senior people keep leaving.

I actually thought about doing this early in my career and know folks who intentionally did this to cut a few years off their path to being able to (ethically, without lying) put "Senior" on their resume.

It works, and surprisingly well, however if you are considering this I would also suggest you do it in a market/business area that you don't particularly care about. I've been in more than one interview where a senior executive who was very tied in on the business side (knew all the big players, had the cell phone numbers for all the major company's CEOs, etc) immediately saw this on someone's resume and raised it as a red flag.

The odds of that happening are honestly pretty slim, but it's something to consider.

There's also the shifting over-correction from "stack ranking is problematic and risks lawsuits about bias in performance counting" (because no one trusts performance metrics anymore) and 1 becomes "layoff a 'random' 5%" because "random" is the new "fair".

Good points.

The key point is that people need to face today's economic/political realities which is that it is all "Realpolitik" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik). You either learn how to play the game based on circumstances or suffer.

S.Jaishankar, the External Affairs Minister of India said this recently which i think is highly applicable here (https://www.news18.com/india/eam-jaishankar-advice-stress-ma...);

Jaishankar stressed that no one should feel dejected after a setback and constantly strive for self-improvement. “When I look at my own particular responsibilities now but even earlier as diplomat, I had to aspire to reach the 3Cs of success. CONTACT – the more people you know, the greater your reach. CHEMISTRY – If you get along with people, they are more likely to do things for you. CREDIBILITY – if you are known to be good on words, people take you seriously," he said.

“My most honest answer (to manage chronic stress), you normalize the abnormal. You build your life around it, you de-stress it by making it a part of your life. If your phone rings in at 2 in the night, you answer it and go back to sleep and get up at 6 or 7 and try to remember and hope what you said was right."

So make sure you have good contact with Management/Marketing/Sales/HR, good chemistry with your Manager/Peers/Team, good credibility on your Knowledge/Work and finally, de-stress by normalizing the abnormal (with caveats).

Or 5% and someone identifies a certain level that is costly and cuts that horizontally across the org to backfill with cheaper lower level employees.

Thank you for this.

In the article, the author says that he was fired alongside most of his team. Then makes a lot of statements about how great of a job he was doing. To me it looks like the firing was thus based on option 3, yet the author did not make a single comment about the profitability of the product he was working on, or the team performance of the group he was working on.

As an example, he made "features that helped power users", without articulating how much additional revenue these feature contributed for. How many of those power users were there ? Were they at risk of churning, or were they locked with the product anyway ? If they were, those hours were fully wasted as no additional revenue could be associated to those features. It's all fine if your product is bringing in a lot of money - with the current headcount - and the vision of your company is that you need to need to prevent competition from catching up. But otherwise it's not exactly the feature an exec will look at and be that happy to spend money on.

I read once: "Here is to discern a junior form a senior: If you are a junior, and deliver quality code for a feature that ultimately did not reach it's audience; well you still did a good job. If you are a senior and deliver quality code for a feature that ultimately did not reach its audience; well you failed". In our industry, seniority is about looking beyond just writing code, especially with AI coding agent coming up and taking away that part of the job.