Losing My Perfect Job

https://medium.com/@iamzackwebb/losing-my-perfect-job-d9b618e934b4

by throwaway042019 • 7 years ago

60 66 7 years ago

zihotki• 7 years ago

TLDR: a few screens of rumblings about how a person was informed that he/she was laid off as part of big (25%) company laid off

m0llusk• 7 years ago

You got distracted by the emphasis on details in recollection of this poignant experience.

We’ve spent the last few months tweaking the product I work on, running tests and trying to come up with ways of increasing engagement, because not enough customers are renewing their subscriptions.

So serious problems were visible to everyone, but somehow the possibility of job loss was not made clear. This is partly management, but to some extent a full blown sector wide social problem where we distract each other with stories and beliefs that are false until it is too late to react with a realistic assessment of the potential down sides.

That was nearly two years ago now, back in the middle of 2017. It had been the perfect job for me. ... I spent the next couple of months job hunting. ... world had become a lot bigger and more complicated while I was working in that company, and we hadn’t kept up

And moving on was difficult, involved a lot of rejection, and didn't even properly start until after a major career course correction.

Looking back now, my old job wasn’t nearly as perfect as I thought it was at the time. ... I had stopped growing.

There is the lesson, and it is a pretty robust one that applies to many readers here.

"If...you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." --Catherine Aird

shaklee32• 7 years ago

I read the whole thing. It seemed like an article with zero content. That all sounded perfectly normal, and happens to lots of people. I'm not sure it really needed an entire article.

stronglikedan• 7 years ago

To me, it read like more like a veiled rant than a lesson. I just hope it was cathartic for the author, at least. I know it is for me when I put my frustrations into words. Although, I usually just delete those words when I'm done.

JackFr• 7 years ago

No.

TLDR: Don't confuse a comfortable job with the perfect job.

codebeaker• 7 years ago

Posted by an hour old throwaway account referring to a pseudonymous Medium writer discussing an anonymous company's two year old laying off procedure.

I wonder how this made it to the front page, and what we are supposed to take from it other than "company lays people off after assuring them it wouldn't, employee wasn't given much notice and online accounts were locked out during the dismissal call" all of which, in my experience on both sides of the table is completely normal.

It is standard corporate hedging and damage control, and it doesn't make it right, but it is pervasive.

dev1n• 7 years ago

The point of the article was if the person didn't lose their "perfect job" they would never have forced themselves to look for other, better, and more enjoyable opportunities.

derekp7• 7 years ago

I think that happens to a large number of people who have lost a job and found something else. Specifically, if you are laid off, and assuming the entire company / division didn't fold (i.e., they cut 15% from all departments), then chances are that you and the company weren't a good fit for each other. And it is during the job search process that you start to re-evaluate your skill set, what you can do, and what you want to do. Often that will then lead to a better opportunity in which you have improved (if from nothing else than a change of scenery).

strunz• 7 years ago

Are you sure you read the whole thing? You completely missed the point. They writer has turned getting fired from their "perfect dev job" into realizing their skills had grown out of date and they had simply gotten complacent. Now they are trying a new role, and finding it more fulfilling. I thought i was interesting, and understandably anonymous.

jakobegger• 7 years ago

It's a well written blog post. People like reading well written stuff. So it gets upvoted. It speaks for HN that anonymous articles get upvoted as well, not just PR pieces from well known folks.

emaginniss• 7 years ago

The story wasn't about "Company A laid people off." It was about "I got laid off and here's what I learned from it." The intention of the story is not to shame the company, but to put into perspective how the writer felt at the time and what they discovered during their job search and as part of their new team.

tomp• 7 years ago

I liked it. Refreshing.

OneFamousGrouse2• 7 years ago

I'm so glad I'm in a country where you can't be laid off at a moment's notice like that, and I very much hope this is not going to change, despite our disruptive leader™'s wishes.

jimmy14• 7 years ago

On the flip side, imagine being a business owner, and having absolutely no options left but to make this decision and salvage what you can left of your business. Should the business risk bankruptcy and cause 100% of the workforce to be jobless, or is it better if just 25% lose it? The company could rebound, and hire an additional 50% on top of the original 100%. It's the circle of business life.

zrail• 7 years ago

As a person running a business it is your job to ensure that such a thing doesn’t happen. If you have to do sudden immediate layoffs or face bankruptcy that means somebody (probably you) massively messed up.

OneFamousGrouse2• 7 years ago

I'm not arguing against layoffs at all, when they are justified.

Twirrim4• 7 years ago

If your business cannot figure out its finances well enough to provide a month notice to employees being laid off, you've got some serious incompetency issues.

The US is possibly the only developed nation in the world that believes in "at will" employment, and yet all of those other developed countries (including pretty much the entire G8+) have thriving business market, lots of businesses able to start up, take a shot, go bust, and/or thrive.

elicash• 7 years ago

I know here in the United States we have the WARN Act to require notification about layoffs, but I have no knowledge of how that ends up working out in the real world and whether it would apply in these circumstances. Anybody at Hacker News know?

Edit: You can see an example of WARN Act filings in California here, for example (PDF): https://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/warn/WARN_Report_fo...

On there you'll find Instacart, Tesla, Apple, Boeing, PayPal, and others (mostly non-tech, of course).

Twirrim4• 7 years ago

There are a bunch of gotchas on the WARN act, and companies in America are really good at fudging around to avoid having to make notifications.

The WARN Act is not activated when a covered employer:
* closes a temporary facility or completes a temporary project, and the employees working in the facility or temporary project were hired with the clear understanding that their employment would end with the closing of the work facility or the completion of the project; or
* closes a facility or operating unit because of a strike or a worker lock-out, and the closing is not intended to evade the purposes of the WARN Act.
* If a plant closing or a mass layoff results in fewer than 50 workers losing their jobs at a single employment site;
* If 50 to 499 workers lose their jobs and that number is less than 33 percent of the employer's total, active workforce at a single employment site;
* If a layoff is for 6 months or less; or
* If work hours are not reduced 50 percent in each month of any 6-month period

golergka• 7 years ago

That's why I wouldn't hire a team in a country like that in the first place.

OJFord2• 7 years ago

I'm not aware of any country that disallows cutting off your access and ejecting you from the building immediately, and I didn't see anything in the article saying the author's pay ended at a moment's notice?

zimpenfish2• 7 years ago

I don't think you can be kicked out like that (bar committing an egregious breach of company rules / the law) in the UK with zero notice (although I'm not a lawyer, obvs.) (unless the company goes into immediate liquidation? But can that even happen?) You need a consultation period for redundancies and I'm reasonably sure you have to have HR escalation for most other things, IIRC.

C1sc0cat• 7 years ago

Which country? If your company goes bust the hard way you can.

There are cases of Supposedly worker friendly European companies deliberately making UK subsidiaries bankrupt to avoid statutory redundancy payments and consultation.

Of course the Uk taxpayers picked up the tab for that one its not just FANG's that avoid tax :-)

bshipp• 7 years ago

I've seen this with companies and non-profits in countries like France as well. Instead of attempting to navigate the complex dismissal laws and regulations, they simply close the shop completely and reopen it elsewhere under a different name.

ido3• 7 years ago

I believe in most EU countries that implement such protection companies can still fire people, they just need to continue paying them for some minimum amount of time.

E.g. in Germany a company has to give at least 4 weeks notice & that time (slowly) increases the longer the employee has been at the company[0]. In practice it often means they are asked not to show up and still get paid for the remainder of their notice period.

Assuming you probably have some unused vacation days if you were fired without warning it's likely you're basically guaranteed an equivalent to a couple months' severance. Generous - but far from "un-fireable".

[0] look at the 2nd table under https://www.finanztip.de/arbeitsrecht-kuendigungsfrist/#c776... "Monate" means months & "Jahre" means years, so e.g. someone with 20 years tenure gets a minimum 7-months notice.

mcv2• 7 years ago

Locking people out of company chat and other documents during the talk is weird. Wouldn't it make more sense to use the next two weeks or month (whatever the standard period is) to wrap things up and hand them over to other people? This looks like a needless destruction of knowledge.

ebiester• 7 years ago

It seems to be a standard practice: people are afraid of sabotage.

IloveHN84• 7 years ago

But then lose access to personal knowledge, making them burning more money when hiring new people.

At my company we have 3 months notice and you can't easily be locked out and set to leave. Some people is also strategically there: if they leave/die, none can replace them as they are the only ones to know some 'secrets'

onlyrealcuzzo• 7 years ago

I think a company should be afraid of sabotage if it's actively sabotaging it's employees.

If you're holding monthly all-hands meetings and telling everyone that things are going swimmingly, and all your employees are asking their managers -- is it really? Should I be looking for other jobs just in case? And the script you give to your managers is -- oh, no, you don't need a back up. Everything is fine.

If you know you're about to go out of business in a month unless you secure another round of funding, and you know talks are going terribly, and you're constantly lying to your employees about everything -- yeah, I think it'd be crazy not to expect some retaliation.

toss12• 7 years ago

It may seem weird, but it is standard operating procedure at many, if not most shops with computer networks.

The tradeoff looks like this: the knowledge potentially preserved & transferred in 2-4 weeks of continued access for everyone is worth far less than the same access used by a disgruntled now-ex-employee to steal IP or do damage.

Even minutes of access to the wrong person is a significant risk.

Plus, if there is a really important or tangled question that only you'll know, they can hire you as a consultant later to sort it out, if needed.

So, wherever you work, be sure to plan and structure your information as if your access can be cut off by surprise at any minute.

Expect only zero notice, and to be marched to the door by security, with somebody else packing your personal stuff into a box and delivering it later. If you get more, consider it a bonus.

Remember, none of this is personal, any more than being required to walk through metal detectors at so many places is personal. It is all about risk management.

sureaboutthis• 7 years ago

I feel sorry for him. I’m not sure he’s ever been in this position before, and I think I’m the first person today he has to give this news to. He looks a bit overwhelmed, grey-faced, perhaps a bit nervous. He is speaking slowly and carefully. It’s got to be tough to be the one who has to deliver this news to people. It must really suck for him to tell somebody they’re suddenly unemployed.

Long ago, I was let go, with others, by the VP of a company I worked for as the company was faltering. He was a nice guy and I wasn't aware how much it had affected him to do this. I stopped by to visit, some months later, and found out he was in a mental health facility and had to be restrained from trying to climb out a window to get out. Worse--there was no window.

When I started my business, I found it difficult to let people go who were just not capable of doing the job. Those with attitude problems and "cancers" within the company were easier but not really easy. As time passed, I was able to steel myself up against these things. I wouldn't tell them they were fired but, instead, being "let go" cause they couldn't get the job.

I admit to having some pleasure in cutting out the cancererous ones, though.

ido3• 7 years ago

In my (thankfully small set-size) experience even with attitude problems it's not easy to fire people.

It's really seldom that you have to fire someone who is just a right asshole with no redeeming qualities - quite often they are toxic because they have some mental health issues, or have really bad social skills, or are just for one reason or another really frustrated and taking it out in the wrong way (none of these are excuses to keep them employed mind you).

You can be relieved after the fact that they are gone while still not enjoying having to actually fire them.

iandanforth• 7 years ago

I've heard tell that there was a time when it made sense to expect to be in the same job next year that you're in today.

The author seems to have slipped naturally into that mindset. I don't think we live in that time anymore.

While HN repeatedly warns (employee) devs to maintain a mercenary mindset the instinct toward company loyalty seems to have far outlived the loyalty of companies toward their employees.

tbyehl2• 7 years ago

Sales and marketing might be at risk, maybe. But firing developers would be completely illogical.

LOL. Sales and marketing bring in the money. Everyone else is just an expense.

peterlk• 7 years ago

This is a naive way of looking at things. Your product isn't a thing that robotic ATMs spit out cash for, because they've been told to buy it. Though this perspective is true at some places, it creates a race to the bottom, and will put you out of business. For example, you can sign up contracts for vaporware and then deliver. This may make some money in up-front contract payments, but how long is this business going to last?

IshKebab• 7 years ago

It's a short term way of looking at things, but if you're firing 25% of your staff you probably can't afford to think long-term.

Also sales people are much cheaper than developers.

syn0byte• 7 years ago

Long enough to be someone else's problem. System working as designed.

tbyehl2• 7 years ago

Once upon a time, a few employers back, I took a couple year detour into our internal IT department... One day our manager had the misfortune of being asked to help the head of sales with their commission calculation spreadsheet. The IT manager, bless their heart, decided they needed to share a glimpse of that information with someone, and for whatever reason that landed on me.

Every salesperson on that spreadsheet who wasn't on the cusp of being let go was earning more in commission than the cash compensation of any executive listed in our public filings. Our couple of SEs were above Director title comp.

It was a minor shock seeing those numbers, but they reflect a pretty basic economic reality: Acquiring $1 of ARR can be worth quite a bit.

Sure, it's naive to say that Sales Trumps Everyone, Always. But most of the time, for a business with a high enough CLTV to justify having a salesforce, it would be an exceptionally bad sign to see general lay-offs impacting Sales as much as the rest of a company.

norswap• 7 years ago

As long as you're selling the emperor's new clothes, I suppose you're right.

MangezBien2• 7 years ago

That just didn’t seem like the kind of thing the company I imagined I was working for would do.

In case anyone was wondering why you need a union even when you like your job and your boss, this piece is a pretty good example. Let's organize, y'all!

RHSeeger2• 7 years ago

I'm not sure I follow your statement. If the company had a choice between laying people off and failing, a union coming in and preventing them from laying people off doesn't sound like it would help the situation.

MangezBien2• 7 years ago

It is usually a false choice. Unions don't stop layoffs but they can help to negotiate the terms of the layoffs and ensure that everyone is respected during the process.

world32• 7 years ago

I was working for a well-established startup with a mission I really believed in, and which felt like it had the potential to be a massive success and shake up the industries it was doing business in.

There is your problem. You naively fell for the BS coming out of some many startups these days..

I didn’t accept it straight away. To be honest, I was still holding out, hoping that some trendier startup would come along and offer me a job

Seriously? Get real.. If you want to exclusively work for startups that have bean bags in their offices and tell everybody that they are changing the world with whatever silly laundry/food-delivery/ironing-on-demand app they have then thats fine but don't put out a sob story when you realise that these startups are no different than any other business and don't give a damn about changing the world or helping their employees they are just there to make money.

angarg12• 7 years ago

The article was actually better than I expected.

In my short career experience, there is no dream or perfect job. As one gains experience, you can find better and better opportunities, but instead of a single dream job, you end up moving along a pareto optimal border of tradeoffs.

Balgair• 7 years ago

The issue I see is : How do you pay for a mortgage? How do you stay in the same school district without a 2 hour commute?

Job hopping is fine when you're young and can apartment hop every year. But when you get hitched, have a family, want a dog and a yard for the kiddos to play in, job hopping gets a LOT harder. Trying to pay off that mortgage between the two of you ain't easy when your schedule is changing so often (commuting really gets in the way of picking the kids up) and you may be out of work for 6 months or more. Sure, maybe the Bay is job-rich, but then the houses are $3k/mo. for the next 30 years.

Yeah, maybe the job ain't peaches then, you take the stability for the joy. But there ain't any stability either now.

Losing My Perfect Job

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