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It's the holidays and many people are feeling cheerful, but if you're feeling Grinch-like instead this one's for you:
If you've been around for a while, the time will eventually come when a company you work for is in unfortunate shape and will need to "downsize." Having witnessed this at a client of mine this week, I've noticed a pattern and a few warning signs you may find useful...
Here are several warning signs you're about to be laid-off. If you've noticed more than perhaps one of these, your Spidey-Sense should be tingling—it's time to start polishing that resume/CV!
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I. Backups
"Have you backed-up all your work to XYZ?"
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II. Training
"Please train your co-worker on X, we need everyone up to speed on these components."
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III. Important Project or Person MIA
Just like the old Christmas movie, It's a Wonderful Life, where the very existence of the main character is erased from history, a similar fate will happen to $BIG_PROJECT or important people.
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IV. Mandatory Meeting
Subject: Moving Forward in $YEAR+1Content-free meeting invitations or email focused on date periods, especially late-in the year (a nod to tax purposes). "Let's discuss our plan for 2016." **gulp**
That's my list for now, please chime in with any others you can think of.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 23 2015, @12:29PM
I had accepted a "permanent" position with a start-up that was developing a Futures trading application. The team had been working ridiculous hours for months to get the system up and running.
Finally, one Sunday afternoon, the software successfully completed the entire regression test suite. I went home feeling good about the accomplishment.
Arriving at work the next morning, I found the CFO standing in the lobby, handing out "pink slips" to every developer as they arrived. There was a stack of banker boxes containing the personal belongings of each developer. I was given my box and a one-week severance package and sent away.
The only warning sign was that they had gone from a very frugal operation (folding tables and mish-mash of used chairs in a windowless room) to a very spendthrift one (most expensive office in one of the most expensive buildings in Chicago) shortly after I started. One of the major reasons I took the job was because of their "frugal" operation. Since they were months away from generating their first dollar, I thought this indicated that the bosses knew what they were doing. I was wrong.
The amazing part is that they issued a press release boasting of the fact that they (a software company) had shrewdly gotten rid of their development team and replaced them with sales people (sitting in our old cubes), ready to take orders.
They went bankrupt a couple of months later.
The one consequence was years later when I got a call from a recruiter who was trying to fill a position with another company run by one of the same people who ran the old company. He was hunting down anyone who used to work at the original company. I told him that I would rather work as a clerk at a convenience store than to trust my former boss. The recruiter sighed and admitted that everyone he had found said the same thing.