> But I was also immediately ripped away from my calendar, docs, code, and more.
Layoffs are never easy. I've been through a few myself and it really takes the wind out of your sails. That being said, this sentence made me pause a bit. None of these things mentioned are actually yours. They are the property of Google.
One thing that helped me immensely in my career is understanding that my relationship with a company is a business relationship. They pay me for my time and skills and nothing more. Today I can have a job and tomorrow maybe not. I recommended learning how to separate your value from your employer. It's not easy but it's necessary. I'm not saying you can't enjoy what you do or be excited by it but don't fully tether yourself and your well-being to a company.
Godspeed!
I think their point was that they were told they could look for another internal role, but at the same time had their access revoked, which sends a very mixed message.
It's because the message isn't for OP, it's for the people who are left.
With the way it was written it wasn't clear to me whether the other role was offered as a replacement for the layoff or more of a good luck I'm sure you'll land on your feet. Agreed it's a mixed message if it was the former.
Companies will always remind you it's "just business" when it suits them - so it's healthy to keep that same energy in return
Ah yes. I got to do that once after a layoff. The manager tried to guilt me or something into working after I was layed off. "Because they were given me severance so I should be ok with doing the work"
I told them. No you are wrong. I was given severance to sign an NDA and non-disparagement agreement. That is what the severance bought the company, but I'll be glad to discuss a consultant role on an hourly basis.
Companies love to frame severance as some kind of favor when really it’s a transaction. You handled it exactly how more people should!
yup. embrace being a cog. enjoy your cog work as much as you can, but recognize it for what it is. don't tie your identity to it.
Exactly. There's freedom in that mindset too
> I recommended learning how to separate your value from your employer.
This is a very recent development. Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life, which means it was very much worth it to cultivate that relationship, it's only now that we change jobs every two years. A friend of mine has a company in a very small town, and was complaining about an employee being lazy. I suggested "just fire him if he doesn't do his job", to which I heard "and then what? I'll have a jobless bum walking around my town. Thanks but no". This really shifted my perspective: the situation where employer and employee have no moral obligations towards one another and it's "business only" is not how the society at large should function.
> Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life
Hardly. This type of arrangement was short-lived and anomalous. It was roughly true in rich economies during a few decades of the post-war era. Never before, and not for most people around the world.
Relationships are worth cultivating any time, of course, but one shouldn't mistake a job for a life. The idea that a job is for life and your employer is your family was a mind hack that worked for a short while and is now unraveling.
In the days of yore, didn't a decent chunk of people literally have their name come from a family profession? I.e. John Smith, Jan Schmidt, Carl Maria von Weber.
As in it wouldn't be just your worth tied to the profession, but N generations of your parents, etc.
It used to be sort of true in the Soviet sphere. By sort of, it was more like an employer for life rather than the exact job. Unless rhe company went under which was rare.
> Never before, and not for most people around the world.
Please tell me more about the gig economy of medieval peasants.
The english wikipedia is lacking on the historical side, but you can find out more with the French one : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalier
Google trad of a couple paragraphs :
> Most of the modest peasants, men or women, very often still small artisans, small weavers or textile workers, peddlers, boatmen or carriers in bad seasons, could become day laborers on nearby farms and estates, if they had the build and stamina, once their own work was done. Some were even regular day laborers, familiar to a domain steward or a village ploughman, present all year round or usually required for a certain number of tasks. Certain harvest tasks were sometimes carried out if possible part of the night, or continuously by successive teams[5].
> Day laborers, brewers or laborers, represented a significant part of the population and sometimes lived, in the absence of family support or a solidarity house, on the edge of begging[8]. In rural areas, they subsisted thanks to additional agricultural work with ploughmen or farm merchants but also thanks to wool spinning, crafts or transport. They also served as additional labor in construction, helped the lumberjacks, made bundles, etc. Women did laundry or took children in as wet nurses[9].
Medieval peasants cannot be said to have had a job. They are mostly either tied to the land (and its ownders), or indeed gigging from season to season.
> Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life
Just looking at the Western world that breaks down during industrialization and falls apart if you go further back then that, journeymen (i.e. tradesmen who had completed their apprenticeship) would often literally travel from town to town for several years to work under different masters before submitting their work to a guild for evaluation and becoming masters themselves. I guess you could say serfs worked "for the same employer" because their feudal lords owned them as part of the territory but that seems like a stretch.
It's not so much that employees used to "keep working for the same employer for their entire lives", it's more that the people running and operating businesses used to be part of a local community and there used to be an understanding of a shared responsibility beyond private property claims.
This isn't something employees can change, either. Even employers aren't really able to change this because they too have to operate in the same economic system that contributes to this effect. It's probably more extreme in the US (and some places in the US more than others) but the economic system does not care for such sentimentalities and a business that does will put itself at an economic disadvantage, especially where the social fabric has already been sufficiently eroded to avoid bad optics (e.g. WalMart arguably failed in Germany because its attitude to employees felt extremely off-putting both to workers and consumers at the time but that resistance may have been eroded by the behavior of other companies since to the point where it would no longer make them stand out the same way if they tried to re-enter the market now - economic changes making this unfeasible notwithstanding).
For most of human history we were hunter-gatherers. Even assuming you mean post-industrial history this isn't true though.
The person you're replying to is correct in a technical sense I think? The hunter-gatherer phase would be considered prehistory since it pre-dates the development of writing, which is what enabled humans to record history.
"Human history" includes prehistory.
Do people really have to make up stuff like that? If you said large parts of history, maybe.
"For entirety" definitely not. What you describe was a thing in some periods, typically periods where some group got too much power and they tended to end with huge disfunctions and breakdowns.
> Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life
This is... not true. It's so not true I don't even know where to start rebutting it. But for a start, most of human history you were either hunting and gathering for yourself, keeping a flock for yourself, or farming land for yourself. "Employment" even as a concept is a pretty new concept on the scale of human history.
Heck even farming is a tiny sliver of time. Vast majority has been pre-agriculture.
> I recommended learning how to separate your value from your employer. It's not easy but it's necessary.
Agreed, it is necessary to make deprogramming oneself easier — less painful — to the extent that one has come to identify with the work and/or culture and/or employer.
But it is also exhausting to maintain a façade of allegiance to a harshly indifferent power structure.
To me my employer is my customer. We don't require each other's allegiance, just an ongoing mutually beneficial transaction and good will. When either fails for either party it's time to move along. Devotion isn't part of the arrangement.
Similarly:
I got badly burnt in a relationship once.
After that I promised myself not to get hurt again. If you don't love each other any more, accept that, and walk away.
Worked for me, and I stayed friends with almost all my ex-es after that.
>I recommended learning how to separate your value from your employer.
Not just that: separate it from your career. Ensure that you and others would still value yourself even if you weren't receiving top decile income for an easy job. A misanthropic software developer is begrudgingly useful; a plain misanthrope isn't even mediocre.
Good clarification. I know this separation is difficult especially when the career funds the other parts of life and the employer or title you hold is seen as prestigious.
"One thing that helped me immensely in my career is understanding that my relationship with a company is a business relationship"
That is just a culture thing. Most prominently in the US. In many cultures there is no clear boundary between personal relationships and business relationships. And why would there be? I would like to live in a world where kindness, dependability, punctuality, warmness, openness and forgiveness are values upheld both by natural and legal persons. And I have worked with many companies that have! As you can read in the comments, for every bad example you can find companies lead by empathic people that treat their employees humanely.
Google always pretended to be that company. And maybe they were for a long time. Now they've shifted. They really didn't have to but they did. The excuse of "it's just a business relationship" really is just that: an excuse. The symptom of a culture with values so bankrupt that it accepts citizens being treated poorly and then blames the victims for expecting to be treated humanely.
And yes, it saves you a lot of personal pain if you expect the worst from your employer from the outset. But is the world really better off if we all expect to treat each other like criminals?
My comment is not meant to encourage removing kindness and humanity from the relationship. It's meant as a reminder that the other party in the relationship (the company) does not necessarily bring those values to the table.
I would also like to live in a world where humane values are reflected in personal and business relationships to the point where the line between personal and business relationships blurs.
Exactly.. Many see it as some sort of marriage in an age where even marriages are contractual relations
I hope you're not suggesting that you approach your marriage the way you approach your relationship with a corporate partner.
I am subjected to periodic performance reviews, you know.