Cancelling the company Christmas party has been the sign of a death spiral for two companies that I worked at.
Interesting. Once we were laid off and invited to the Xmas party. ;)
Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off
51–60 of 79 posts
Re: Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off
#52When you're a contractor and a project you were working on gets cancelled internally, the only other developer leaves for greener pastures, and suddenly your boss takes an added interest in everything related to your work, and makes sure to get the passwords for various things. ... you might get a call as your driving home from work that day to tell you not to come in to work the next day because your contract has be…
Or you get that call telling you not to come in the next day. Then a day later they call you telling you need to bring the computer back in right now.
What follows is a back and forth exchange of "I'll bring it in when I feel like." "That's unprofessional." "You mean unprofessional like having someone do something for you when you're not paying them or laying someone off by email unprofessional?"
Re: Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off
#53Personal experience: when you are working late and you hear suspicious noises in the executive quarter. After arming yourself with a nice long bar of metal you come across the CFO who is hurriedly packing all the expensive computers into the back of his car. When confronted he offers to pay you your outstanding invoice cash in return for your silence...
Re: Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off
#54When somebody needs to say "let's get all outstanding code checked-in ASAP!"
That one's in the article.
My contribution: when we have a new CEO and she starts asking how much revenue cost centers generate.
Re: Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off
#55Cancelling the company Christmas party has been the sign of a death spiral for two companies that I worked at.
A similar anecdote from one previous employer: at that company, we had a lot of remote B2B sales people all over the country and even one overseas. On rare occasions, there would be a sales meeting where all the sales people come in to meet with the top executives personally and discuss strategy.
Well, my first couple of years at the company, there was a sales meeting to coincide with the Christmas party. Basically, all of the sales people were flown in to attend the Christmas party and they justified it as a business expense by having a strategy meeting sometime that week. One year, that didn't happen. I mentioned offhand to somebody "too bad the sales guys couldn't make it", and I was outright told that they skipped out on the sales meeting to save money. So we had a Christmas party, but we cut back the invitations.
That was no surprise, given the events of the previous few months. They had been actively trying to shrink the company by attrition; i.e., letting employees quit and declining to hire a replacement. I also don't know anyone who got a raise that year. We ended up losing a lot of people just from that alone. They also fired a bunch of sales guys for underperforming and hired a bunch more who were almost exclusively paid on commission... and I'd heard that the CEO specifically intended to flood the company with commission-only sales hires because he didn't have to pay them more than peanuts unless they brought in money.
The next few months were brutal. January opened up with two executives being fired -- while the actual reasons for the firings were because of a power struggle, they weren't really replaced. One of them had his power distributed among the people who reported to him, and another was replaced by "promoting" multiple existing employees while still making them do their previous jobs. One of those was fired only a few days after being promoted, too. The next month, I was laid off. I heard through the grapevine that shortly after I was laid off, they laid off another guy and closed the entire India office, letting everyone go except one or two employees who were transferred to the home office.
Re: Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off
#56Here's another one:
Executives leave the company, and their replacements have lesser titles and are existing employees who have to continue to do their existing jobs in addition to whatever function they absorbed. Bonus points if the executive's function gets divided up among multiple employees.
Re: Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off
#57When the Director of HR and VP of Legal send a meeting request to you.
Just literally had this happen to me with our HR/Accounting Department, with a subtitle of "We want to understand what you do around here." Visons of Office Space are dancing in my head.
Re: Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off
#58Any announcements on a Friday especially before a long weekend.
Re: Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off
#59When you are told to stay in your cube and NOT MOVE.
Then people walk by and pat you and the back to come to another room.
Source: http://www.ihatedell.net/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=17...
(search for "day in 2001")
Re: Warning Signs You're About to Be Laid-Off
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
It depends on the layoff I suppose.
I mean each time, the survivors all do the "wow this sucks, but at least we made it" motions. Then a portion of them go grab a beer and inevitably talk about what a mistake it was to lose person X and the disbelief that useless person Y is still around. Then a portion of them talk about finding work at a better company.
The one time I did leave, I think the entire survivor group went through the above ritual. There was a lot of anecdotes revealed by various people that pretty much convinced everyone to leave before the next round.
I have a sample size of 3 so now idea how normal my experiences are.