
Where are you in your company's layoff list? - pietrofmaggi
http://blog.kdgregory.com/2016/03/layoffs.html
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js2
I've been a sys admin and/or coder professionally since 1996. I've been a
manager and an individual contributor. I've worked for big companies (HP,
Yahoo), and small (in the first dozen employees). I've been through a company
growing from 100 employees to nearly 1000 and back down to 100 again. I've
been through two acquisitions, and probably a dozen layoffs.

I've never been let go. No doubt I've been lucky. But there's a saying: luck
favors the prepared. I consistently get shit done, and have a reputation for
doing so.

Do your job. Do your job well. Make sure you're not invisible. The rest is out
of your control, but it's worked for me.

Knock on wood.

~~~
sjtgraham
The way I've seen it play out time and time again is the most expensive staff
are let go first when money starts to run low. If you've _never_ been let go,
have you considered you simply might be undercharging?

~~~
ChuckMcM
Which is to say, if you use the layoff list as a measure of "value received"
and you the company gets some value from keeping you employed, and you get
some value by being employed. Then being at the top of the layoff list means
you are getting way more value out of being employed than the company is, and
being at the bottom of the list means the company is getting way more value
out of you being employed. So if you are aggressive shoot for the top, if you
are defensive shoot for the bottom :-)

~~~
tryitnow
This comment pretty much nails it. I've definitely seen a pattern of highly
compensated people getting sacked.

If someone does play the aggressive pattern I'd highly recommend saving up a
lot of cash so you can weather longer spells of unemployment. This is
especially true if you intend to be selective in who you work for after
getting laid off.

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justin_vanw
Keep your resume always up to date? That is the kind of risk free but
pointless advice you see here and there, but what is the point?

Are you going to forget the highlights of the work you have done? Not really.

Does it take a lot of work to update a resume, such that upon being laid off
you have to delay your job search for a significant amount of time because you
have to go into full time 'resume updating' mode for a month? Not at all.

Updating a resume takes like 4 hours. If you've been at the same job for 20
years, it might take 8 hours. There is just no reason to 'always keep your
resume up to date'. Not a real reason not to do it, but no reason to do it
either.

It's like advising people to always wash the bottoms of their running shoes
with an old toothbrush after every run. Will it hurt? Not really. Will it
help? Nope. Should you do it? If you feel like it or enjoy it, shit, go for
it, but it's also a waste of time.

~~~
cheez
> Are you going to forget the highlights of the work you have done? Not
> really.

I do.

I implemented a specific kind of distributed calculation in the financial
industry before it was a thing. We (I didn't design the calculation) literally
invented something that hadn't been done.

Totally forgot about it. It just got patented 15 years later. It's not on my
resume.

Right now, I'm applying machine learning to a domain that hasn't yet had it
applied and it feels similar: it's going to be awesome, going to do great
things, and I probably won't remember it when I need to update my resume.

If I were to start all over, I would write down every single thing I ever did
in the resume and when it came time to send that resume out, I'd whittle it
down to the things that apply just for that job.

Here's to hoping I never need to send out a resume again, otherwise I'm
screwed.

~~~
justin_vanw
I refuse to have a resume that is more than the front of one piece of paper. I
generally get complimented on it. When I add something new, it means something
else comes off. I can update it in about 5 minutes if I need to, which is
rare, because who uses resumes anymore? They are ridiculous.

The jobs that ask for a resume are the same ones I don't ever want to have
again.

~~~
quicklyfrozen
Out of curiosity, does this mean you drop older positions completely off the
resume? Doesn't this make employers question the time periods not accounted
for?

BTW, I've needed a resume a few times even when not looking for a job -- e.g.
a potential investor or acquirer wants to see resumes of all key personnel.

~~~
jldugger
> Doesn't this make employers question the time periods not accounted for?

At a certain point, you take the date of your degree off the resume, and if
they want a full history, they can ask for it.

The best plan is to have two documents: a career tracking document that covers
everything you did, _and how well you did it_ , and then your resume is simply
a summary of the most important parts of that career document.

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mooreds
I have a friend who works for a big aerospace conpany, and he keeps an eye on
his team members. One in particular is "the buffer". This person is apparently
not that good at tasks.

If "the buffer" ever gets laid off, my friend has to be concerned. Until then,
"the buffer" is a source of comfort to my friend.

~~~
CapitalistCartr
More likely, they'll lay off the whole team.

~~~
mooreds
Or the whole location. But having someone of questionable competence helps my
friend's peace of mind. Don't know how much it slows down the team, though.

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thedevil
I loved this article, but I do have to disagree on one point: your
productivity matters.

Lots of teams have someone who is not pulling their weight but the boss
doesn't want to have to fire them.

~~~
p4wnc6
I agree. I've been part of teams in which the person who was clearly most
productive and most critical to the team's short-term and medium-term success
was laid off. The organization was going through a "restructuring" which just
meant that anyone making over a certain threshold in salary was fired and
"replaced" with someone half as expensive but a thousand times less capable.

The bosses probably didn't enjoy doing this (the ones who had to actually
break the news) but they also didn't care too much either. If firing the most
experienced people really had an impact on productivity, then the team would
just be reassigned to do different work, clients would be cut, budgets would
shrink, whatever it required to ensure that whichever personnel you happened
to have were acceptable for whatever work your team did.

I think a lot of people don't realize this. The company exists solely to
service and enhance the lifestyle of executives. If the executives see a way
to maintain the same lifestyle for less business cost, even if it means
terminating an entire business line and upsetting many happy customers &
laying people off who are doing great at their jobs, so be it.

They utterly don't care. It has literally nothing to do with productivity
except as a totally unintended side effect of how to service the lifestyle of
some executive.

As companies succeed and grow, they start investing in wargaming scenarios for
effectively having total bargaining power over their staff. When HR types meet
with executives in these kinds of firms to talk about strategies for hiring, a
high priority is how to structure the business so that it is never "dependent"
on employees.

If it means ending an otherwise profitable business line, so be it. It just
depends on whether ending that business line is going to have any serious
impact on the lifestyles of executives or not.

You see a lot of job advice that advocates working really hard to "become
necessary" to your employer. It's just wishful thinking, though. Rule number
one is: no employee is necessary. If we ever discover that an employee is
necessary, then we simply restructure the business, changing as much as is
needed, to make sure that property is no longer true.

The best you can hope for is to be "necessary" for a short period of time as
the business recognizes that this is the case and immediately begins plotting
about how to restructure so as to ensure no one in your position can possibly
be necessary.

~~~
Havoc
It comes down to a question of degrees I think. No employee can be allowed to
be so necessary as to become a single point of failure. However I think it's
all possible for an employee to be reasonable "necessary" without the employer
actively trying to make that position replaceable.

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urda
While the article is a nice run down, honestly there's not a whole lot you can
do when "your number is up".

You may be told that you are low on the list or think you have a "buffer", but
honestly if push comes to shove you _will_ be laid off. It doesn't matter
where you may be positioned.

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bjourne
While we're doling out life pro tips, mine wold be to "never make it so your
value of self is dependent on your job." E.g. you can believe that you never
having been laid off is a testament to your great skill and awesomeness, but
that will only make the fall much harder when you _are_ laid off. I mean that
in a positive way.

------
phn
This way of thinking feels a bit toxic. I don't do my job with the objective
of not being laid off.

A business relationship such as employment works as long as it works for both
parties. Pretty much like other relationships, when it stops working for one
party, it's time to move on.

------
sudeepj
I can relate to this article. While in UK, back in 2008/9, I was a senior
developer (C/C++). The favourite topic during lunch times was who will be gone
or who will be retained. One guy, who everyone thought would be safe was a
Team Lead (of a system written in COBOL). This guy had been awarded topmost
grade in recent appraisal cycle.

He was layed-off and I got the charge of handling his system, in addition to
mine, with no promotion. Apparently the only thing mattered was how much
"value-for-money" an employee is bringing to the table. I came to know later
that almost all team leads were layed-off because the systems in question were
in existence for last 10 yrs and were stable.

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Havoc
Pretty far down - got key knowledge and experience on a key project.
Definitely replaceable but would be painful for the company so I'm betting
they'd rather not. My employer doesn't really do layoffs anyway or rather
something pretty cataclysmic would have to happen to trigger it.

Its also not a big deal for me - employers are replaceable too. ;)

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an4rchy
M&A is also another interesting case for layoffs, in this case it might not
follow this traditional format as it could be redundancies that are eliminated
because of political reasons and not necessarily performance/salary.

It feels like the reasons for layoffs boil down to:

\- Money (Run rate/market/shareholders)

\- Strategy (Company decides to go in a new/different direction)

\- Politics (Internal to the company/executives/board)

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ja27
I'd like to think I'm safe, since I'm sleeping with the CEO - my wife, but
since I'm the only other employee I guess I'm the first to go.

But my last job...

All of my product code, even stuff I'd inherited, had been stabilized,
documented, and had decent test coverage. Strike one.

I was given a manager title but had no direct reports. Strike two.

I was moved to an architect role on a struggling cross-product effort. Strike
three.

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phamilton
As a Yahoo employee, I can say with certainty that I'm not in the bottom 15%.

