The Cut

My employer finally got around to enacting some layoffs. They've been a long time coming.

Ever since the company's inception, layoffs have been eschewed at every turn. "It's not a part of our culture," or so went the mantra. The company weathered the catastrophic downturn of 2001 without retrenching a solitary employee and the corporation was probably better for it. It maintained the warm fuzzy reputation that had hovered above it's corporate head like a halo since the day it was founded.

Now that's changed. There's a new sheriff in town and he's got different ideas about these things. The shareholders demand value, and that means heads must roll. Mine was one of them.

I'd been lurking the hallways of the company for over 10 years. Plucked out of Australia after finishing my studies in electrical and electronic engineering, I arrived for my first day of work sight unseen. My first role at the company was as a lowly hotline engineer. Sometimes cranky users of the company's products would phone in to rant about whatever was on their minds at the time. Like the bedridden elderly, most of them simply wanted someone to listen to their tirades. Treat the person first and the technical issue second. Most of the time I never got to step two.

Wind forward ten years and I'm a Senior Manager of the company's web site, an aspect of the business that it hardly considers central and with the new broom sweeping through considers largely expendable. I'd liken to situation to a dysfunctional romance, one that kept itself going based on the memory of glory days long in the past. The company hadn't broken up with me yet and I lacked the stones to break up with the company. Finally someone took action.

The writing was on the wall long before we were dragged into the executioner's chamber. The Director to whom I reported was being conspicuously dropped from any discussions of the future state of the company and its web site; the Senior Director to whom he reported had espoused her views of a smaller, leaner web group at the company. To be honest I tended to agree with her approach. So when the hammer fell on over 60% of my team it came as no surprise. Most surprising was the people the powers in charge sought to remove. Two of the developers on my team prop the site up in ways that senior management will only truly understand once they're gone.

But as I've repeated to myself over and over under my breath in an effort to reprogram my mind, it's not my problem.

My problem now is how to fill my days until business school starts at Berkeley in August.