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After a tough quarter, the expected layoff happened at the office. I'm glad that I was fortunate to survive this downsizing.
I've never actually been downsized in high tech. That is something of a rarity in this business. I've managed to survive quite a few though. Here they are that I can remember.
Date Company
======== =======
Jul 2000 xwave
Jul 2001 xwave
Oct 2001 Core Networks
Mar 2002 Core Networks - huge one
Sep 2002 Core Networks
Apr 2003 Core Networks
Aug 2004 Core Networks
Oct 2005 present job
Aug 2006 present job
Oct 2007 present job
I've been pretty fortunate to survive that many. For some reason I've wondered what it's like to be fired. What does the manager actually say to you. Then what happens? Still, I don't really want to find out first hand.
In my career when it happens it's been kind of like with Syme in 1984. People just kind of disappear during the day and are never seen again. They are generally spoken of little afterward, however they don't become full unpersons.
It was expected that this action was going to happen. We've preannounced twice in the last year, so something had to give.
When a layoff is imminent or has just happened, it makes me think of a story I heard about a guy who was a programmer for Corel. I lived in Ottawa around 1994, and at that time Corel was high flying. It seemed they could do wrong.
Well fortunes can change quickly in high tech. Corel made some strange forays into WordPerfect and Linux. Add in an aging main product line and tough competition from Microsoft. By the early 2000s Corel was struggling.
After another tough quarter, it was known that there was going to be a big layoff in the Spring for the company to survive. Now "Bill" was a programmer at Corel. He'd been there through the high flying times and was still around as the company struggled. For Bill, he'd had just about enough of life at Corel. The struggling, the abrupt changes in direction, the increasingly dysfunctional environment took their toll.
So with the big layoff coming Bill realized that he wanted to be fired. He figured he'd be better off after it happened.
- If he was sacked he'd get severance. Severance cash in hand today was better to him than underwater stock options which might never get into the black in the future.
- It was Springtime in Ottawa. Ottawa is nice in the Spring. After he got laid off, Bill could go on unemployment insurance (called UI in Canada) . That meant Bill would get to have a "UI Summer". In Canada the UI summer is an unusual and coveted thing. Most people get to do this never, or at most just once.
- Bill picked up A list tech skills working at Corel. Plus he was a good worker and would have good references. He knew some people at other companies who would be willing to help him out. He wasn't concerned about being able to find another job after Corel.
Yup, Bill was looking forward to getting laid off. Severance, followed by a UI summer. Plus he wouldn't have to work at Corel any more. He was going to relax, hit the beach, not even think about going back to work until the NFL kicked off in September.
In the last three weeks Bill cut back from his regular 45-50 hours a week to a straight 40 hours a week. That was Bill's signal to managment that he wasn't going to fight to save his job and they should let him go.
Finally the expected cutdown day arrived. But then something unexpected happened. Bill survived the layoff. Well that was disappointing. Instead of severance and UI like many of his co-workers, Bill got left doing extra work to cover for those who were now gone. Plus the company was now struggling to survive so he had to work under all that uncertainty. The environment at Corel was even more unenjoyable after the layoff.
So that's where I came up with the term Corel'ed. That's when the big layoff is known to be coming. You're looking forward to getting fired because you think you'll be personally better off after you're gone, and you won't have to work at the crummy old company any more. But when the layoff does happen, you unexpectedly survive it. Then you're unhappy to survive it because you still have to work there and you miss out on the severance and other stuff you were looking forward to.
I don't know what happened to Bill after he got Corel'ed. Perhaps he's still working there.
