[deleted]
Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off
41–50 of 79 posts
Re: Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off
#42When a consultant comes in and interviews you about "what exactly you do," nodding generously and saying, "oh wow, yeah" every few sentences.
When management seems to continually allow ridiculous overreaches in employee behavior, especially when such behavior is critical of management.
Re: Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or Conference room A Conference room B
Being a casualty in room A must be devastating. I've been a survivor in room B 3 times and each time I resented the turmoil of being happy for me and sad for them.
Did you look for a way out after that or just satisfied that you made it... This time?
Re: Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off
#44There was this one time that I suggested cross-training to reduce the bus factor, and management went with it. I was being sincere, but I have to admit that it was amusing watching everyone think they were going to be laid off when we implemented it.
Re: Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or Conference room A Conference room B
Being a casualty in room A must be devastating. I've been a survivor in room B 3 times and each time I resented the turmoil of being happy for me and sad for them.
Company wide meeting called. Survivors were warned beforehand and told to sneak off to lunch. While in the meeting they locked us out of our computers.
For bonus points, do it on the 31st of the month so nobody has health care the next day.
Re: Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off
#46Your manager wants to add an admin account to the laptop you have been using for over a year.
Re: Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off
#47[deleted]
I had a similar experience in 2010.
At that company, the passes were only for use after hours and on weekends; the doors were unlocked during business hours on weekdays. About a month before I was laid off, there were a couple of high-profile firings (first the VP of Engineering, then the Director of QA/IT/the India office a week later), and the CEO put in a new policy that whenever someone is let go, the doors are to be locked for a week or two so we'll actually need to use our passes to get in. This was to prevent the fired employees from coming back in and stealing or vandalizing or what have you, especially since they knew where the bodies were buried.
Well, the day I got laid off, the doors were locked. I wasn't even a high-level employee! I kinda knew where some of the bodies were buried though... I was one of the few people outside IT with admin access to certain servers. I didn't even think anything of it until my boss called me into his office... where the CFO was waiting with a paper that had "CERTIFICATE OF TERMINATION" in big letters at the top.
Re: Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off
#48I'd say watch out for a meeting that's so important that it's split into two groups, and you're in the first group.
I had the unusual experience of having everyone else in the office being summoned to an HR meeting and me left at my desk as I'd already resigned...
I once got called at home the Monday after I'd left a company to hear that I'd been "laid off". The previous Friday had been my official last day (planned exit, I was going off to college), but I had banked a bunch of unused vacation days, and they were calling to let me know that they wouldn't be able to pay out the remainder of my vacation pay.
Much later, when I got into the workforce for real, I learned that I could've collected unemployment checks for this, and that if I'd played my cards right, I could've been drawing unemployment for my first year at college. Ah well - one of my coworkers told me "If you'd done that, I might have to hate you. Unemployment is for workers who need it, not college students who take a gap year at a dot-com."
Re: Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off
#49When you try to enter office's multi-level parking but your access key doesn't work. When the Director/VP/Head says "even though the market has turned, we have _no_ plans to lay people off" When you receive a notification that your privileges have been revoked. When you see a voicemail (or tweet in case of Twitter) from HR around Friday afternoon/evening or early Monday morning. When you apply for vacation but the re…
>> When you see a voicemail (or tweet in case of Twitter) from HR around Friday afternoon/evening or early Monday morning.
Not quite - layoffs usually happen on Thursdays (so that any problems/issues can be sorted out on Friday), last week of the second to last month before the end of the fiscal year (so that severance pay is booked in this fiscal year), but never on a payday week (too much work for payroll).
Re: Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off
#50I got hit by II, back in 2010. They hired an intern, asked me to train her... a month later, I was laid off. Also, I knew a number of people who worked for a local video game company who got the axe after their paychecks had been late for a while. They were all complaining that they haven't been paid in about two months, and then one day the CEO calls people into his office one at a time... 11 people were let go that…
Sounds very similar to Crytek.
It wasn't. The company I'm talking about was based in a suburb of Dallas and only had the one office. In fact, I believe that after the layoffs they actually got rid of their office for a while and worked out of the CEO's house for a bit before they could afford to rent space again.
Much smaller and lower-profile than Crytek, though they still have their own Wikipedia article.
By the way, even before the layoffs, the CEO was notorious for firing anyone he felt had a "bad attitude", including a world-renowned living legend of a developer who was suffering from severe depression and had been previously hospitalized for a suicide attempt.
He was known for working his employees to the bone, developers regularly slept at the office, and the company was a caricature of every overtime-happy game developer. One of my friends took up smoking and was addicted for a few years because the only way she was allowed to leave her desk was to go on a smoke break and sitting in one place for so long was getting physically painful. They also had a policy where no matter how late you stayed the previous night, even if you were there until 3am, you had to be in by 10am the next day or they'd dock you a vacation day.