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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 23 2015, @12:58PM
I had a crazy boss once go around the office, almost in a panic, demanding everyone's updated resume right now! I didn't have a copy of my resume handy (either machine readable or hard-copy, and this was long before things like "the cloud" or thumb drives made it easy to carry around a digital copy), and I wasn't about to try to rewrite the entire thing from memory, so I ignored him.
Apparently, he had received a request from H/R, and he badly misinterpreted the urgency. (It's worth noting that it was a common belief among my coworkers that he was a major-league coke head, which might have been a factor).
My feeling, and the feeling of most of my coworkers, was that if we had to update our resumes anyway, we might as well send them out and see what else was available. Ultimately, several of the best employees found jobs with less-crazy bosses. I don't know if that had much impact on the company failing, but it certainly caused the loss of the "cream of the crop" among the developers.