161–170 of 174 posts
I mostly work at small startups, so I get laid off every few years. First time was a huge traumatic shock, but the 4-5 times after that, I was prepared and mostly saw it as unplanned vacation. My trick to being cool about it is to always have 1+ years of saving in the bank.
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The way you said it - "join a union" - made me think that unions may be a good idea in software if anyone can join and leave any time. This would be like insurance that funds a big nonprofit with very motivated (and well paid) lawyers. 250 usd / month shouldn't bankrupt a software dev and 100k such devs (a large corp) would bring 250 M/year. There's definitely a room for a few unions in the US with 200-500 m/year bud…
In the UK I'm free to join and leave a union any time I want. My monthly cost is £20. That's about US$25. If you're on a lower income, you pay less.
How do you find the service/them generally?
During the .com boom I was with a start-up with a good idea but the realities of the internet at the time where just not there, and they whole concept relied on the start-up getting enough capital to burn and build until broadband had saturated the market.
At one point they are trying to sell another round to investors, and it's not looking good, so the CEO walks in with another gentlemen that none of us know, he was from another company who needed development talent and the CEO basically told us, that as of today we need to reduce our burn by 20%. That leadership had went over, and over who they could cut but really could not put together a plan, so he invited other tech leaders from the area to pitch their companies and what they where doing to recruit from his.
So this guys pitches his company and says I know what you guys are doing here, and I know you are all good developers, you can walk out the door with me today and into a new job. Some of you have to go, so I am offering you a path out. A handful took the deal, I stuck around and got to see first hand a company die for the first time.
When we where about to shutter the doors the CEO did the same thing, brought in another exec to recruit us, I left and took that deal that time.
Each time the CEO said to us, that he did not want to loose us but he also wanted to be remember as the CEO that you would quit your job and come work for him again, if he ever called. That us landing on our feet was important to him and therefor he wants what is best for us and him. He said companies come and go, but honor and integrity are very hard to get back once you loose them. It may have helped that he was former special forces Delta Force. To this day I would work for that gentlemen in a heart beat if the phone rang.
-Just as I was finishing college, my father, who only had a high school education, worked for GTE Sylvania for 25+ years. The company was sold, then closed the small plant he worked at. The best he could find after that was stockroom work at a department store. That triggered depression in him and a big rift in my parent's marriage.
-20 years ago my brother worked for Xerox, and was laid off/downsized. He and his wife had a third child on the way, had just built a house. It took him a year to find a job as IT support for a law firm. That traumatized him so much he's overworked for the company ever since.
-I worked for Kodak for many years. The last 2 years I worked there in the early 2000's, my department was under constant layoff threat. At that point, I'd decided I was moving out of NY, and wanted the severance package (but didn't get it)
-After moving to WI, 9 months into my new job there, our department had a round of layoffs. I was terrified since I was the last hired, and now was hundreds of miles from my support network. I survived, and went on to work there for 10 more years.
-My partner, after working for a financial services company for 26 years, got a boss who didn't like him, and frankly I think did not like LGBTQ folks, and maneuvered him into being a "displaced worker". He got let go, 5 years before his pension and years of service would have put him in a place to be able to comfortably retire.
So I haven't ever been laid off, but I have seen how much damage it can do to people I care about and their futures.
I worry about this every day, especially seeing what happened to my dad and my partner. I have been saving for retirement, but I really need the next 5-10 years to let that build to be able to comfortably retire.
It was ok, got decent severance and ultimately I'm quite happy to have moved on to greener pastures
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removing what? the entire CTO position? or just the bullet point that said it was due to downsizing?
both things. cto is great, but you'll have to spend a lot of effort to explain your side of it and that you weren't removed by cause. if someone ever brings it up, then you explain, and say that you weren't hiding it, you were wanting to avoid wasting time on a confusing situation and you are happy to discuss it.
If there is a discrepancy between a personal resume and LinkedIn, then that ends up being a "red flag" in the eyes of recruiters and HR.
Yup. Happened to me. Big corporate decided most of our floor were surplus to requirements. Got an email on Sunday telling us to be in early on Monday for an off-site meeting. Got handed my redundancy / compromise agreement and told not to return to the office. And, the kicker, told my non-compete meant I couldn't work for a competitor during the redundancy process. It was devastating and emotionally wrecking. It was…
I'm now an employer of one, in Europe, and I can tell you I passed up on many candidates where the screening error bars should have been acceptable, but the error multipled by cost of firing were not.
I suspect this actually a negative pressure on diversity as well, since any unconscious uncertainty is multiplied by the risk, regardless of how hard we try to control for our internal biases.
A pooled legal team is probably a good idea to take care of the truely illegal stuff and provide advice based on industry standards.
For knowledge workers at least, I believe union style employee protections are going to reduce the opportunity of average and below workforce and not benefit the top either.
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In the UK I'm free to join and leave a union any time I want. My monthly cost is £20. That's about US$25. If you're on a lower income, you pay less.
Which union if you don't me asking? How do you find the service/them generally?
I've been with them for about 15 years and very happy with their service, training, etc.
I lost my job in January because the company closed the office in my country, haven't written a single line of code since then, looking for motivation to start again but I feel like an absolute failure and don't know what to do now. The fact that I stopped coding 10 months ago and wasn't even a good developer, to begin with, isn't helping. I guess I need therapy.
When I am having a problem getting up the gumption to tackle something, programming-wise, I tell myself that I'm not going to do the actual code yet, just comments (TODOs and such) about what I will do eventually. Some of those comments, are just sentences, but then sometimes it's easier to just put the code in the comment, than to describe it in any other way. Still commented out, though. I'm not coding this now, ju…
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Why the constant layoffs?
They were all early to mid-stage silicon valley startups. For whatever reason, funding runways typically ran out between October and December. If you can't close your next round of funding by then, you run out of money and the whole company minus the founders gets laid off. As for why so many startup duds that all failed in under one year? I was young and didn't know what the hell I was doing. I chose my jobs based o…