Ask HN: Should I tell my colleagues there's a plan to make them redundant?

Hi HN,

I recently found documents on a shared drive for a bid to offshore our team and make everyone redundant. (We're a small team supporting a legacy system). From the documents it looks like our team's (only) client has indicated there will be very little work for us after this year, and there would likely be redundancies whatever happens, but the plan appears to be to offshore the roles to our parent company's Indian offices as soon as possible.

I don't know if the bid has been accepted by our client, but if it happens it would start in April with 2 Indian developers visiting our office.

Some context:

* We're a team of 9 in a small office some hours drive from head office where the rest of the ~1000 people in the company work.

* Our UK company was bought by a large Indian tech company. Their MO seems to be to acquire companies to prop-up their profits and offshore roles back to India. There have already been redundancies for technical roles at head office.

* I'm over 40, wife and 2 kids.

Questions:

* When / how should I tell my colleagues?

My wife doesn't want me to tell them yet, and (although I feel terrible about it and know this sounds callous) I'm thinking it's probably in my best interests not to say anything until I've found another job. If the others knew I think they would be able to find work easier than I can (I've been trying for 4 years!) and I could find myself out of work sooner.

* Is there any advantage to telling them now?

If the client accepts the bid I think there's very little we could do to change their mind. We're perceived as being very expensive by the client. Both my employer and our client stand to save several hundred £K by doing this.

* Should I ever tell them? How would you feel if you found out someone knew about something like this ahead of time and didn't tell you?

Any advice on how to handle this, or stories of similar situations would be greatly appreciated.

- Scared in the Cotswolds