Layoffs at the end of the year
 

Companies tell employees how they value them all year but at year's end, they layoff a few, if not more. It's just a lot of lip service to squeeze out more production from their people knowing full well they're going to be handing out pink slips later. Corporate only cares about the bottom line no matter how much they say they care about their people. Effing sucks.

My SIL just got laid off. She worked some really long hours as a middle manager. She travelled to several times zones many times a year. I guess she should be happy to have been well compensated while it lasted. She said it just sucked that she fell for the BS about how much they valued her contribution throughout the year and so she was completely blindsided. The holidays are going to have a different meaning for her from here on out.

I got laid off back in February. The best advice I can give your sister in law is not to dwell on it and get out there ASAP.

Basically I was laid off to make room for a manager who was friends of a senior manager.
(Long story but these two managers live together and they also go on holidays together. ;))

Thing is a local customer account has gone South in a big way because this incompetent idiot that replaced me.
He pushed back on the customer and wouldn't budge. He just worked to the contract and he kept muttering about transparency.
(The IT community in my state is small and I was told about it from the customers point of view)

The customer expected more for their money & they didn't get it. They're now going through a dispute process and it's looking ugly.

Honestly I'm glad I got out when I did.

Very true, the corporate environment is a tough one and you have to be prepared to not financially overextend yourself just in case you find yourself in this situation. Hard work and dedication doesn't guarantee anything anymore.

I did the corporate rodeo gig for a few...it wasn't pretty almost every Dec for a LOT of folks along the way. The stories I could tell :(.

Handing out "pink slips" at the annual Christmas party....'cause everyone would be there....

Ho, ho, ho....

Buncha ho's ;)

.....it'll work out though!

^^^^ This....same as it's been for the past few decades however....jmho.

You owe a corporation nothing..you do your job they pay you.

If a cprporation will give half a days pay to the employees to go to my funeral and lower the corporate flag to half mast is the day i give any corporation any loyalty.

You essentially are working to further your own self by working for a corporation and not their's. You had better keep these ^^ realities straight in your head or get run over..

First off sorry for your sister. I managed to go 29 years in the work place before I finally got downsized at the end of March. It took me 3 1/2 month to find a new gig. Honestly as many people will tell you, it's the best thing that's happened too me. I'm in a job with better benefits and better money and I'm much happier. After so many years working I gave myself two weeks off to decompress then got down to searching hard. I treated searching for a job as a job in itself and went at it hard. I was also amazed at how useful LinkedIn was in reaching out to old contacts and amazed and the feedback I got. I've heard that 85% of professional jobs come through your network rather than job postings and eventually that was true for me as well. Good luck to her and anyone else in this situation.

While getting laid off before the holidays may seem suckey, in some ways I think it's better than doing it in January after the average family has over spent at Christmas. Hopefully while the holidays will be tough, they can avoid a lot of the typical expenses and not be saddled with extra debt.

My sister has been with Hewlitt Packard for 19 years and they just did a big layoff right before Thanksgiving. Happy Hollidays from HP

Hewlitt Packard is just about done and most of the large IT providers are in trouble.
They're borrowing money to stay afloat but big changes are on the horizon. (Including the India based ones)
The bigger ones are already at three times the dept to income ratio. Low interest loans and fiddling the books makes this normal.
We're talking many billions in debt. They better hope the economy doesn't tank anytime soon.

CSC merged with HPE to form DXC... 2 years after the merger DXC just recently announced that they will spin off 3 of their 5 businesses.
What that essentially means is that the merger failed. FYI: About 80% or large scale mergers fail.

https://www.channele2e.com/news/dxc-seeks-to-sell-three-businesses/

They ****ered themselves when the large scale IT service providers started to off shore work.
Anybody with half a brain knew what would happen but the executives pushed it anyway.
It seems the long term interest of a company isn't their number one priority. :rolleyes:

What does this mean for the people that work for them?
Virtually no job security and poor workplace moral & it's only going to get worse.

Disruption isn't always a bad thing. If you're talented and have a good reputation you should land on your feet.

^^^ or ya do a monkey roll :)

IBM, two mega-banks, then RJR/Nabisco as it was broken up....I had had enough :(.

I retired rather than transfer to HP (same salary/benefits ;)) back as HPE was just forming....best thing I ever did ;).

Greed is Good .....naw...but it sure is for just for a few....jmho.

Sadly the days of loyalty to your company being reciprocated are largely done, at least at the large corporate level. Textron is a local aerospace company, they had a large event over the summer to hire interns and new grads, then offered early retirement to a number of more experienced employees, and then just had a large layoff last week. Nice way to reward guys with 20+ years of company loyalty.

A few years ago when the economy around here got really tight, the local and largest Engineering and Surveying Firm held their annual Christmas party on a Friday afternoon before Christmas. Gave the field hands the first half of the day off with pay IF they would show up for the party that afternoon. Of course they all did because they needed to pick up their payroll checks.

Unfortunately, a significant portion of the field hands started partying a little too early and at the Christmas party everyone that was an employee had to submit to a "random drug test". Needless to say, they downsized considerably. It was epic!

I had been at HP almost 18 years when I got the axe a couple of years ago. We were given 6 months to find another position within the company. I managed to land another job with about a month and half before the end date, so I went on "vacation" and started the new job, ran out the clock, and collected my severance. It was awesome getting 2 paychecks for a while.

Shades of '92 when I got l let go. Out of work for 18 months. Tough times but we made it.

I once got laid off 2 days before christmas.


Call me old school as far as being a "part of the Boeing Family"


I did my 25 years, wife has 33 years.


Boeing used to be a Family. You said you worked there with PRIDE.


sigh. Follow the Money, and large corporations are simply about increasing $$$ in quarterly returns.

Exactly. Boeing was poisoned by the McDonnell Douglas culture of short term stock price thinking after the merger, and lost its key discriminator: engineering and production excellence.

I was there for 12 years and went through three layoff cycles. Managed to avoid it myself, but was forced to give out a fair number of WARN notices righty before the holidays.

Sorry, I was going to delete Mad's double post and I hit the wrong button and deleted the one in between and I can't get it back. To the poster, please add back your thoughts.

Again, my apologies. —Zeke

Large corporate America is a crazy ride ! My wife and I started our careers with GE in their defense business . GE decided to get out of DOD business so we were sold to Martin Marietta man they were 30 years behind GE :( Didn't stay MM that long then along comes Lockheed and a mega merger of cultures ......... what a friggen mess ! Saw lots of good co-workers get hacked while lazy a$$ kissing SOB's were kept . Somehow my wife lasted 30 years and I made it 26 before retiring , they paid well but what a pressure cooker then add in a healthy dose of incompetence and it's amazing I still have a liver :D

My dad worked for IBM for many years before retiring , I still remember IBM's slogan of " we never layoff " ............ my my how times have changed .

Sorry to hear.

Luckily I learned early on that no one was irreplaceable, go laid off in the 80's due to O&G down turn, then when the company I was at was bought I decided to start my own company, going on 24 years this year!


The latest (sad) trend I have seen is companies laying off veteran older workers replacing them with much younger ones. Not sure if it's due to age/thinking or money, probably both...

Waiting for my turn. My company is being parceled off to other companies within the corporate umbrella. Hopefully I can last until next December when my army pension kicks in. That might be a stretch though as they are planning on giving the landlord the keys in March 2021. Time will tell...

Been-there done-that as well. Sitting under the lion's head. Doing twenty times the work. Didn't play office politics or give heed to titles of nobility. I was there to do my job. Did not accept off-clock demands for changing my sexuality or becoming a cult member. Tip of the iceberg. But I still tried. Lost a career and health in my prime. It got worse.

There is no remaining connection to pay-for-performance, imo.

My bitter take is:
Currently the most important (perceived) ingredient to business these days are the shareholders.
I fear this frequently is trading long term for short term.
Middle Management is very exposed.
Upper management wants to cut cost quickly.
Hmm, I bet the (cheaper) people two levels down can be just as effective as the (more expensive) one level below ME. Off with their heads!

I suspect that this is going to do two things long term:
1) Create more entrepreneurs (as my brother told me when he started his own business: "I work for an *********, but at least I know I can trust him")
2) Start a change of mentality. If someone accepts a new job, screw tradition and that two weeks notice noise, I can start tomorrow! (Giving the current employer the same lead time that the employer (frequently) gives employees it does not need).

I know this is an emotional subject, and works best only if there is a reasonably good balance, but....
I am a bit surprised that unions have not made a bigger comeback.

I knew a woman who worked at GE's Nela Park facility who worked with me at BP after she left.

Smart as a whip, scary smart and fast. Often referenced GE as best in class when comparing "stuff" to BP's processes.

BP did not have annual layoffs. They had big ones though. I remember talk of Exxon "bottom slicing" annually. Surely this is not abnormal.

You get into the wrong job at the wrong time and pop goes the weasel.

It's really not the corporation's fault. Through the 80's, 90's, and 2000's, large institutional investors (hedge funds, pensions, mutual funds, CALPERS in particular) took large stakes in corporations. They voted their shares to put their people on the boards, and their people wanted short term gains at all costs. The will fire uncooperative CEOs. Now we are essentially in a cycle where a CEO lasts 2-5 years, and the fact that they sacrificed long-term gains for short-term profit will eventually be the reason for their dismissal. Then a "turnaorund expert" CEO is brought in to fix the messes that were made to appease institutional investors. Rinse and repeat. This is the world we are in.

I took a job with a nonpublic company to avoid this mess. And it worked...for awhile. The long time CEO retired and the company man who replaced him wanted to do what everyone else was doing. He cleaned out management, initiated mass layoffs, and now everything is a short term decision and we all feel disposable. We used to be a 9-5 company in recognition that employees have families and lives, but now I'm expected to be available 24x7. No extra compensation is given, but you get a lower rating (raise) for not giving the company first crack at your time. I find myself working long hours and having to take vacation time to sleep. (Work a full day, work overnight, and find myself needing to sleep the next morning, but I have to "miss" work the next day to do so.) The big conflict I have now is that I can't take vacation time to miss uncompensated overtime work so that I can attend my kid's events. I'm just expected to be there and there's nothing I can do about it. The thing is, most of this after hours work is very unproductive. We generally end up chasing our tails until we can get a hold of some person the next day.

One of the most succinct and true things that Tabs has said.

I think the problem is often one of loyalty to your manager or colleagues. "I busted my hump for my manager and the team." I think often times, the manager has little to no say over who is let go or if folks are let go. So that's exactly it. When working for on a team, do right by your coworkers, but don't go out of your way for the company or assume that because you're trying to be a team player that the whole company cares.

Who do you work for? You work for you, to feed, clothe and house yourself and maybe your family.

I suspect it's 99% about the money.

Old timer that's been doing the job 20+ years, $100k. New kid fresh out of college, $50k.

Of course, just like you might hire 5 young kids and find that only 1 or 2 are really good and another 1 or 2 are decent and the rest might suck, you can also have an old guy that's been doing the job forever but hasn't really kept up and is tired and bored and doesn't care any more, so they may cease to be worth the money that their years got them.

I'm 39 years with the same employer..

Why?

They pay me well

I'll tell them when I want to leave..

Oh yea, one of the big players in the Consulting Engineering/ Construction Management firms around NYC

Two years to go..finish line in sight

Sounds like you need to get a new job. That sucks.

Being in residential construction all my life, I knew the bubble was going to pop before the Great Recession. Too many people buying homes with no docs and people flipping homes the same day they closed on it.

Anyway, after 18 years at one company, it went from 1,600 to 300 employees. Took several years to get back where I was.

I tell my kids to look out for number 1 and that isn’t your employer.

1) The definition of job security is your ability to find your next job.
2) You're worth exactly what your next job will pay you.
3) Companies only value employees when they need them to come into work the next day.

I got laid off last Jan., completely unexpectedly, after closing a mammoth deal. It was a huge kick in the balls. Now I work for myself and make the same or more $$, but will kill it in year two. When I need a confidence booster, I call a former co-worker and let him rant about the BS I'm missing out on. It's schadenfreude writ large.

Textron is evil... I know a few pilots that had been there over 20 years and just got notified.. They dissolved my old company a few years ago but at least we had several months notice.. sucks..

Schadenfreude! Oh I do love that term. The idiot that replaced me has zero talent and people skills.

Meanwhile for real he has cost the company more than $300,000,000.
The customer account was the state government and partly because of his behaviour & attitude they missed out on a huge chunk of additional business. Other things happened as well but this guy was the last straw. This additional business was written into the contract but they are now in dispute.

I'd expect at some point this manager will be "let go" quietly and probably his buddy as well.

It's been a bloodbath since I left back in February. All of the contractors have been laid off and other management/leadership positions have evaporated. More than 30 people have been directly affected by this.

Isn't it funny how thing work out?

I remember that Rick, glad to hear you are doing well. So what exactly are you doing now?

Yup, I hear pilots were hit hard. Poor management, they didn’t have the balls to forecast that 2019 would be a step down from 2018 and over hired. I also suspect this was a play to get rid of experienced (expensive) professional employees and backfill with more new grads. Also no big shock that all of their new programs have been late or suspended. Aerospace is hard.

I was actually laid off by them in 2014 when they acquired Beechcraft. My entire organization, they didn’t even bother interviewing to see what talent was present on our team. After 8 years of sacrifice for that company, that taught me some valuable lessons.

Lots of real world, btdt wisdom in this thread....

Good luck with yer "next page" Chris ;)

Turn it...

Thanks. I'm now doing final expense life insurance sales. I had never heard of this business a month before I got into it. My first appt. on my first day in the field got me two deals and a $1400 commission. It has been a crazy wild ride since then, but I'm cash flowing now and have an idea what I'm doing. Never going back to work for the man.

You always work for the man Rick!

You da man :)

My former company down-sized an assistant that was only 6 months from retiring. Forty-two years at the company. It was Betty's first and only job, as she started right out of school. She did everything expected of her, and was very pleasant to work with. The real eye-opener (to everyone too) was how people on the executive team, those she considered her friends, didn't lift a finger to protect her. She was tossed out with the temps and part timers on the first round of layoffs. ...

Lee

Over the years I have watched friends get great paying jobs at big companies, big checks, Benefits and nice fancy offices. Then laid off.

Since I was in high school I have had several jobs, all in photography, and always worked at family owned businesses. I have never once had to deal with managers or corporate structure. Just h
Go to all to the owner. Now I am the owner and my boss can be a real jerk, but I drink his beer and sleep with his wife.

^^^^ when that pic of yer azzhole boss is a selfie....well...that's niiiiiice too ;).

Layoffs at the end of the year
 

That greedy bastage made me work most of the weekend on a big project.