A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work

After being laid off more than once, I think I'd adjust the advice a little:

- 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.

Indeed. The real discovery in the article is that the people who manage performance and the people who manage headcount were completely different people. The article writer had (common mistake) assumed that impressing the former would take care of the latter. It doesn't; the techniques to manage the headcount people are different.

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.

> the techniques to manage the headcount people are different

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

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

What other techniques are you aware of?

I think it comes down to a previous discussion on HN, "don't just crush tickets".

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.

It might be. But I’ve been in the room when a very high performing team was given the ax. This was a team that had all kinds of kudos and objective measures showing they were better than their peers.

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.

Even if that’s the case, when it’s time to interview for your next job, would you rather be able to say “I led this major feature” or “I pulled a lot of tickets off the board and my team did $x”

You can couch the tickets as major work as well. Learning how to describe your work to people well is advantageous, it’s just not a panacea to avoid layoff (or get hired).

You're not wrong but a decent amount of my manager's time interviewing potential employees is trying to suss out what is the work they personally did and what are just the thing their team accomplished while they were there. If you can't describe off the top of your head, in pretty great detail, the implementation work required for these big initiatives, lots of interviewers will assume you're trying to pass your team's work off as yours.

It doesn't help that most folks' resumes, especially for that mid-hoping-for-senior cohort, is about 50-60% stuff other people did that they're somewhat aware of.

> trying to suss out what is the work they personally did and what are just the thing their team accomplished while they were there.

This is the single biggest reason i detest 1/2 page resumes and always ask for detailed CV. The "summary"+"qualifications" paragraphs in the beginning of the CV is the resume after which one can decide to read or not the rest of the details. For example, my CV is 8 pages long (i am old and have hopped between companies :-) since i give an overview and then the details of my specific responsibilities for each job.

IMHO, everybody should present their CV like this and leave overviews to LinkedIn profiles.

I’m probably as old as you are and my resume is two pages. I’ve worked ten jobs and I don’t have anything going back further than 10 years. No one cares that I wrote C and Fortran on main frames, VB6 and C++/MFC/DCOM or that I worked on ruggedized Windows CE devices. This was all pre-2012.

No one is going to read an 8 page CV. But honestly, I never depend on my resume to get a job. It’s a requirement. But I don’t blindly submit my resume to an ATS. By the time I’m sending my resume, I’m already 99% sure I’m going to get an interview because I’ve already talked to someone.

When I was looking for a job before, I had one of the managers describe one of the products that I would be over. The problem was, that if they had taken an even cursory look at my resume, they would have seen that I had worked at one of their acquisitions that the product was based on and I designed the architecture of the product.

I had worked at the company until 2020 and I was referred by my former manager to be a staff architect over all of the companies acquisitions.

The point was to make explicit one's specific work achievements. In your case, it seems you do it via contacts/word-of-mouth which works for you. Reading a long CV is generally not that much of a chore since a lot will be boilerplate (eg. company name, duration etc.) which can all be skipped as you pick out technical/other details relevant to the job. I also disagree that older experience beyond 10 years (some even use just 5 years) can be skipped. The reason i like to see everything is that it gives me many clues as to the nature of the person i am to interview viz. whether they have a breadth of thought to understand different concepts, the experience to have done it in reality, whether they are adaptable/self-driven etc. Without this information in hand i literally have to spend the first half of the interview asking them what they actually did before i can move on to the interview proper.

But no one to a first approximation is going to do it. Statistics show that on average, people only look at your resume for 6 seconds.

And I’m not asking questions about what you did 30 years ago. If I ask you the standard question as an interviewer “tell me about yourself”. I expect you to succinctly walk me through the parts of your career that are relevant to the job.

I am then going to ask behavioral questions to assess whether you have the traits I need, the “tell me about a time when…” questions to see if you can work at the needed level of scope and ambiguity.

I then ask them what they were most proud of to work on a dig into their technology choices and tradeoffs