The Lay Off Experience

[Bullgrit]

My company (that I work at, not that I own) is going through lay offs right now. I've been through this experience before, but differently -- privately-owned company vs. publicly-owned corporation. So I'm writing about the contrast in experiences on my blog. If you've never been through a round of lay offs, or if you have but are curious about other experiences, I invite you to check out my site: Total Bullgrit

Also, I'd be interested to read about other experiences. In case you don't really know what a lay off is (especially compared to firings):

A lay off is when some workforce is let go from a company because of company reorganization, business slowdown, or other big activity. Usually, those individuals laid off are chosen for dismissal according to their position being removed or reduced rather than any good or bad performance on their parts. Not that it makes the "victims" feel any better at the moment, but it's all usually a very impersonal decision unlike a firing which is usually based on individual performance (or lack thereof).

Bullgrit
Total Bullgrit

 

[Merkuri]

I was laid off from the first job I had after college. I worked for a government contractor, and was hired to be a software developer for the Comanche project. This helicopter had been in development for something like twenty years. The company was very vested in this project, and when I got there they had just built a whole new plant to start cranking out Comanches in large numbers.

About six months into my career I was at work when somebody pointed out to me a news story on the front page of CNN.com about how the Comanche contract had been canceled by the government. After twenty years when we were nearly done they were scrapping the project, and nobody told us. We were informed by the national news. That was one of the longest drives home in my life. I had been just about to rent my first apartment, and all of a sudden I felt really lucky that I was still living with my parents.

They officially announced the contract cancellation to the company a day or two later and claimed that they were going to keep as many people as they could because they said the folks on the Comanche project were their best, but us in the software development department knew that the company had always outsourced its software development in the past. We were the only software development project actually being developed in house, aside from some tiny projects that didn't need nearly as many people as had been working on Comanche.

I miraculously survived the first round of layoffs when somebody who had been hired just a week before me was let go. I have no idea why they kept me. I literally had nothing to do for about four months. The remaining developers were told to tie up all the loose ends of the project and wrap it up neatly so that it could possibly be re-used for other things, but I hadn't been there long enough to be useful in that context, and at that point teaching me about the project so that I could be useful was just not worth it. At one point my boss had me clean up the desks of the people who had been laid off or moved to other projects. THAT was depressing. The rest of those months I spent playing solitaire or surfing the web.

At one point they moved us from our big spacious cube farm to a basement room with cement walls, no windows, and just several lines of desks (no cubes). They needed the space upstairs for another project and we had only been using a small fraction of it after the layoffs. That was almost as depressing as cleaning up the empty cubes. I felt like they were trying to hide us away.

Finally, they found me a little project to work on. I was helping to creating a database to catalog a lot of the pieces and parts needed for the helicopter. And just when I was beginning to feel useful they had another round of layoffs and I was let go. I knew it was coming when one of my coworkers who had been hired the same exact day as me came over to say goodbye. We were so close in our abilities and experience that I knew there was no way they'd keep one but not both of us.

They did it on a Friday morning. They took me upstairs to somebody's office and told me that I was being laid off, then they brought me to the room of a counselor who I think was supposed to make me feel better about being laid off, but it really didn't help. Even though I had known it was coming for a while and I wasn't in any real financial danger (I had been saving almost all of my wages because I was still living with my parents and though they had charged me rent it was nothing compared to a real place) I still took it hard, and nothing the counselor said could stop me from crying. Once I had composed myself a little they took me back down to my desk and watched me pack up my stuff and say goodbye. Packing up was easy since nearly all of my possessions were already in a box from when we moved into the basement. I wasn't allowed to touch my computer after the man had come to get me to tell me I was being let go.

It turned out to be for the best because I ended up getting a better job at a company where I wasn't helping to create a weapon (honestly, that did bother me a little though I told people at the time that I didn't care). I was only a mediocre employee at my first company, but a spectacular one at the second, if my reviews have anything to say about it.

That was longer than I was planning, but that's my layoff story. Thanks for reading.

 

[Bullgrit]

Thanks for sharing Merkuri. Has no one else been through this experience? Or are feelings still raw?

Bullgrit

 

[EricNoah]

Interesting (if depressing) reads from both of you -- thanks for sharing.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

I have been laid off (or close enough to it) three times, and I work as a game programmer. I will not mention the companies I work for due to it being a 'small' industry, and having no desire to burn bridges.

The first I was laid off, time my boss had called me at home on a Saturday, but I was away visiting a friend. I asked him what it was about and he said it was not important. I was then called the next weekend, went into the office, and was informed that I was being laid off. There had been a pretty heavy round of layoffs a few months before hand, but I had thought I was well clear of it. They kept me just until the project I was working on was in late beta. They told me the reasons were purely economic. I later found out that they had told my former co-workers that it was work performance related (which none of them found plausible). The way in which this was handled by my boss left me with no respect for him, and a desire that lingers to this day to set him on fire or something.

I spent the next 15 months out of work trying to find a new job.

I then got hired by a new company. Great work environment, and a boss I got along with great. However, due to factors that happened at the company level, the project we were working on slipped past its deadline, and then past the next most likley release date. The last 6 months of that project was a 6 day a week, 11 hours a day death march. We finally had a release candidate accepted, but the publisher opted to not send it to manufacturing. This left the company in no position to secure new development work. At that point, more or less everyone was 'laid off', since the company had to go out of business. This was not really anyone at my companies fault, given the situation with the scope of the game we were trying to get done, and the time / budget we were given. My boss could have either made it a full 2 and a half years of very hard crunch, and finished it and had everyone quit, or he could have let everyone keep things as normal as possible, hoping that we would finish and keep most of our employees for the next game. I still get along with that boss reasonably well.

I spent the next 12 months trying to find a job, and got one that sucked. It lasted only 2 months. I then spent the next 3 months after that looking for yet another job. At some point during this process, I came to the conclusion I really sucked at job interviews.

I was then hired by a very large company. I worked there for 18 months, and enjoyed the work environment. Due to some goofiness in their project cycle, I ended up between projects for a few weeks. A bunch of large projects had ended, but nothing was going to gear up any time soon, and there were no good fits with anything in production. I was then laid off in May. The reasons for that chain of events fall somewhere between mystifying and retarded. This was primarily an impersonal decision made by a large company. While I would probably consider working for them again, I do not have a very good opinion of their HR practices.

I spent the next 5 months looking for work.

I just started a new job with 'very large companies even bigger competitor' this past tuesday and happily, I have a 39% pay bump over what I was making at the 'very large company'.

Anyway, I can say that being out of work for very long periods of time sucks a great deal. After 6 months, its hard to have an honest answer for 'what have you been doing since you left your previous job' that does not sound bad. The time you spend waiting to hear back from your latest job lead is also increasingly frustrating.

My general advice to anyone would be to live well within your means and make sure you have a damn good cushion of cash to land on in the event the rug is pulled out from under you. Ideally you should not have to live only off that cushion for very long before your unemployment benefits kick in. In addition, not having to panic about your next rent payment the moment your current job ends does a great deal to defray the immediate stress of losing a job.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[Bullgrit]

Happily, I just got a job offer -- at considerably better pay than my previous job -- and I start Monday. So I've only been two weeks without a job.

Just goes to show, don't wait around to start looking for another opportunity after a lay off.

Bullgrit
Total Bullgrit

 

[Wycen]

Hopefully my last layoff experience will be useful for people.

Not 2 months ago I left a job because I hated my boss. But that isn't the story I'm going to tell, just that that was the place I ended up sort of as a result, (mostly it was me being lazy).

I used to work for an ISP. I think it was ASN 2041 for those curious and in the know. I could be wrong, 6 years or so have passed. When I joined it was privately owned and was there for maybe 4 months when it was purchased by another company.

Time passed and at some point our manager, (I worked in the network operations center, which was different than the fancy "data center" our now parent company built), said that the sales people had request we all update our resumes, to show customers to help generate sales.

I thought, "that's weird, but whatever". About the same time he also asked myself and the other NOC operator who was hired the same week I was if we would like to do this exchange training idea somebody had thought up. Every Wednesday we would work at the data center instead of the NOC. My first thought was "no", but I didn't say that, I gave it some thought. I had been pissed off that somebody junior to me had been given a promotion and had mentioned this to my manager, who said, "give it some time". So I remembered that and didn't want to be thought of as being difficult, so I said, "sure"! He said "that's exactly what I wanted to hear".

The day approached when we first show up at the fancy new data center and my coworker "Big Pete" intercepts me first thing in the morning and drags me over to a computer he had been shown to and was checking email. (The data center was operating and had its own staff but I really had barely communicated with any of them. I had more contact with the east coast people than their California facility).

The NOC operator on the zombie shift had sent an email to ALL and basically told us he (and everyone else) had been layed off and he didn't think the company had big gray walls with big gray feelings and so and and so forth.

You can imagine our apprehension. Shortly later our manager shows up and that's when we discover that the two of us had been saved, the rest of the NOC and some other admin personel were layed off.

We settled into our new environment, spending 1 week working in the data center while the other spent a week at the NOC, switching back and forth.

A year passed. During that time I remember reading emails about the company acquiring more companies and thinking "STOP! That's more mouths to feed!" Eventually we got a request from the sales department.

They wanted us to update our resume "to help boost sales". IT'S A TRAP!

I informed my coworkers that this is exactly what they did before. Sure enough Wednesday became the favored day for the axe to fall. "Big Pete" and I survived many of the purges.

Then September 11, 2001 came. We survived this, but unfortunately, this did hasten the end of things. We lost some equipment in a building next to the towers, no personel, but it was the dot.bomb and it was only a matter of time.

However, we didn't quite expect the final outcome. I'm pretty sure it was a Wednesday, when we see the director or vp of networking unexpectedly pull up in the parking lot, (he flew out from New York). He goes in to talk to the Data Center "manager" (I have to use that term loosely at this point).

The death and dismemberment finally caught up with us. Except that it was total carnage. All operations in California were being ended. Both the data center and NOC got wiped out! "Big Pete" stayed on for a few extra months to help dismantle things (why do you think he was Big Pete)? Turned out everything not in New York was gone and 6? months later their assets were split between 2 different companies. Bankrupt! I can't even remember the name of one of them, but I doubt they exist either anymore.

At the time I was actually sort of relieved. Didn't have to worry anymore and conditions toward the end got kinda draconian, tech reports had to have nit picky formatting and having just finished formatting every single BGP session my next task was labelling the web of cat 5 cable that litterred the rear of our racks. I was happy I hadn't put much effort into that