Laid Off!

I thought I was going to be updating this more often, but I got a bit derailed a bit over a month ago when I lost my job; I didn’t want to write about it immediately as I was pretty upset when it happened and didn’t want to end up with a big fat lump of negativity in my blog.

What happened, as far as I can tell, is that when Indymac collapsed, the company (which is in the business of selling credit reports, mostly to mortgage lenders) decided immediately to downsize based on the amount of money it would not be getting from Indymac in the future. My position, deployment engineer, was decided to be unnecessary or easy to “part out” to other employees, and I was among those let go.

That said, I’ve moved on, got a new job which is much less stressful, and today I’m going to focus on what I’ve learned or decided for myself in the past month.

Show no loyalty to a company unless you have a damn good reason.

I was naive, I now know, to show loyalty to my old company. My reasoning was, the company paid me a decent salary, and it sure as hell beat making pizza, so I should stay with them even if I disagreed with some of their policies or processes. I passed by two separate emails from Google recruiters asking me to call them, once because we were in the middle of a big project, once because one of our two QA people decided to move on; had I left at the same time there would be a bit of a struggle to keep all of our environments running, as between the two of us we controlled QA, production, user testing, and production support. I was, of course, not rewarded in kind for my loyalty. Lesson learned, and my advice: Look out for #1. Answer that Google recriter’s email!

Don’t ever think you’re irreplaceable, and don’t think outsourcing is the only threat to your job.

I fell into this trap: when the company outsourced most of their programming to India, they kept me and a few others who were not primarily programmers; my job was to deploy software and troubleshoot our horribly unstable systems when things inevitably went wrong. I figured they needed me there, I often had to physically be there to reboot a machine or troubleshoot a failing network connection, they couldn’t outsource me!

The problem here is that companies, particularly companies that are not primarly technology-based, tend to see you as a standardized replaceable part, something that can be replaced with another piece when you wear out. Alternatively they’ll just try to take your job apart piecemeal and give a bit to everyone else; this happened when our DBA quit last year. Rather than hiring a new DBA, they decided to try to save money by parting out his job to myself, the network admin, and a couple of our analysts. Since some of us (particularly myself) had little or no experience with SQL server, this didn’t work out so well. Lesson learned, and advice given: If you want to be irreplaceable, you’d better have skills that no one else has, and you’d better make sure your boss knows it.

I suppose this may seem like the big wad of negativity I didn’t want this to be, but I think it’s just cynicism, which in my opinion can be a positive thing.