I experienced something similar at Nokia around the time things were starting to go bad (due to competition from Google and Apple). I got caught up in one of the earlier layoff rounds. As I've been able to reconstruct since then what happened was roughly that:
- I got a excellent performance review and a small raise. All good, keep on doing what you are doing! I was pretty happy.
- Nokia started to prepare for layoffs and gave units targets for numbers of people to lay off and amounts of money to save. They tried to spread the pain.
- Because of my team's multi site setup the choice came down to cutting at one of two sites. They picked my site. Management was concentrated at the other site.
- Because I was at the higher end of the spectrum in terms of salary, I was one of the natural choices for laying off. This was just done based on the numbers and had nothing to do with performance.
So, my bosses boss flew over to give us the news and that was it. Nokia was pretty nice about it. I was put on immediate gardening leave, I got the usual severance payment based on time served, and a decent amount of start up funding in the form of a grant.
Since things were chaotic, other teams in the same site were still hiring new people with roughly the same qualifications. I was actually bucketed in with a project I wasn't even a part of. That whole project got shut down and apparently it was convenient to pretend I was working on that just so they could avoid firing other people in different parts of the organization. Somebody had to solve a big puzzle and I was a piece that fit in the right place. It wasn't personal.
In retrospect, one of the best things Nokia could do for me was firing me. I was coasting and the whole thing forced me to rethink what I was doing. If you are late thirties and a bit comfortable in your job, you might want to make a move. Or at least think about what you would do if you were forced to suddenly.
Lesson learned: job security is an illusion and employment relations are business relations. Don't take it personal. These things happen. Part of a high salary is insuring yourself against this kind of stuff and dealing with it when it happens. Part of the job.
>job security is an illusion
It really is. Even government and blue chips aren't safe. In fact, those are where you'll find it's the most disconnected from your own agency.
Government jobs are safe because rarely if ever people get fired.
This comment is hilarious. Like someone was placed in a time machine and missed the last few months.
There are a lot of us that live in countries where government jobs are still extremely stable. You’d have to break the law in a very big way to get fired.
Except for like the last 3 months!
Until whole departments get gutted on the whims of a new executive or their political appointee department head.
And I'm not just talking about Trump. Every mayor, governor, what have you. They all appoint their friends to high places.
My job is extra permanent. If they shut us down they'd just have to find me a desk somewhere. Its a rut, but its my rut...
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> decent amount of start up funding in the form of a grant
This is fascinating? What was it in absolute terms, or relative to your base salary?
Did you have to have a viable startup idea and it was paid to the incorporated company? Or was it just extra cash in your personal bank account?
Did you do that, or did you just get another job?
> job security is an illusion
Depends a bit on your country. My CEO can fire me but there is a longer notice period depending on how long I have been with the company.
- 2 years: 1 month
- 5 years: 2 months
- 8 years: 3 months
...
- 20 years: 7 months
Germany btw.
That's pretty wild. Is that a German employment law or something specific to your company?
It's probably an employment law. My wife's from Tunisia and over there all employment is basically contractual. If your employer lets you go they owe you some kind of fee, and I actually believe the amount might be the remainder of the contact, I'm not sure.
It's employment law.
Germans are so expensive to hire and maintain that companies have offshored German manufacturing to the United States.
(... And God bless Germany for it. Trickle-down theory doesn't work in general in capitalism but it does work in labor negotiations: every right Germans secure for themselves is a right an American company employing Germans and other countries has to abide by when doing business, and it incentivizes the company to minimize their paperwork by treating everyone to the German standard).
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