A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work

The thing that bothers me most about layoffs due to “financial difficulties” is when you observe management wasting absurd amounts of money on something in one year, then announcing the following year that they have to make cuts to baseline, “low level” employees that don’t cost much at all.

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.

> Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants

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.

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

In this case a consulting company was hired, so these where employees, just with a different company. They just opted to station the same people at the same client for all those years.

In Germany now there are laws in place for this, you get ridiculous stuff like as consultant you are not allowed to eat together with team mates from the employer because that is seen as bounding activities (you may "accidently" bump into each other in the cantine, but not go together), or share the same office equipment for coffee, having to go down the stree to get coffee while employees get theirs from the kitchen, and so on.