When You Know You're Getting Whacked [Throwback]

A recent discussion elsenet about bosses who expect you to work after firing you reminded me of a situation I faced several years ago. This was sort of the reverse of that, though. Teammates and I enjoyed a semi-vacation because we knew we were getting laid off weeks before it was official.

I was working at a major company, a name brand absolutely everyone would recognize. I won't name it here. Though the company has had many successful years in its history, the time when I was there was... not the best. Our market share was dwindling as we delivered new products that were only incremental improvements in an otherwise competitive market.

We had some revolutionary products... well, revolutionary product ideas... in development but couldn't deliver them due to a combination of technical complexity and weak leadership. Weak leaders were fearful of investing the money necessary to bring them the products in development to fruition. One of those products was a game-changer that had been been promised for so long without being finished that it had become something of a joke, both internally and externally.

With market share dwindling, profits dwindling, and stock price dwindling, the company decided on a layoff. A big layoff. 30% of the workforce.

Six Weeks?

The company announced this huge layoff well in advance of the details of who would be laid off. Final determination of which employees were being whacked would take 6 weeks. At the time that delay seemed crazy to me, though as I've gained experience with the business world I've seen it's par for the course.

Standard or not, the delay was demoralizing. The impending huge layoff cast a pall over much of the company. Teams were wondering, "Are we going to be hit? How badly?"

Not my team, though. Our boss found out early in the cycle that our project was being canceled, and told us. She told us that one portion of the team would definitely be laid off and the other portion was TBD. I was in the TBD half. Either we'd get laid off, too, or reassigned to another department— under managers we thought were doofuses. 😨 So all of us took the mindset of "We're out of here in 5 weeks," and we acted accordingly.

Continued in Part 2: It was like an in-office vacation!

One Lockdown Lifts, The Other Remains

On Monday California Governor Gavin Newsom lifted the state's lockdown order that had closed many in-person businesses and limited restaurants to take-out and delivery service only. Example coverage: Los Angeles Times article, 24 Jan 2021. The order had been based on hospital intensive-care unit beds across 5 regions in the state. See my Dec 5 blog with more details about how that worked.

The governor faces criticism from the political right that lifting the order was arbitrary and not sufficiently evidence-based. What, suddenly the political right cares about evidence? Science? Good governance? Wow, where were they the past 4 years? It's like the pot calling the milk black.

The state's decision is based on a forecast. Take a look at how new cases are trending in this chart from the New York Times:



Enactment of the policy came in early December when new cases were clearly trending up. Now that they're clearly trending down it makes sense to lift the restrictions.

This is hardly a case of "Woohoo! No more lockdowns!" though. California still has its four-tier system in place. And per today's update to the tiers (California updates them once a week, on Tuesday) most of the state remains in Purple, the highest risk level:




The four counties not in the purple tier represent less than 0.1% of the state population. So 99.9% of us are still under relatively strict safer-at-home measures. But hey, restaurants in many jurisdictions are allowed to resume outdoor dining (Eater.com article, 25 Jan 2021). That's a change from the past 8 weeks!