The End of an Era

Well … after working for nearly thirteen years as a QA engineer for a long-standing software company, I got laid off last week. Actually almost everyone in the company did. I’m told the only two people still employed are my former boss (more on why later) and our single Payroll accountant. The parent company still exists though, and while they were the ones that made this decision, the good news is that I will still be able to reach someone to verify my employment for my next job and we’re getting severance packages. On one hand this has been building for a little while, on the other this has, in another way, been a long time coming. But on the third hand (wait where the hell’d that come from?) this came as a complete surprise to us.

Disclaimer: I’m not a fan of doxxing (99% of the time) so I won’t say anything that would identify the software I worked on, the company name, or the people I worked with. But starting with the broad strokes I will say that the main product itself, in all of its iterations, has been around for over thirty years. Like with a number of ideas and creations from yesteryear, my company’s original creation was highly relevant and beneficial back then, but with the advancement of technology as a whole, both personal devices and infrastructure, that relevancy dwindled over time. We really didn’t have much competition in the industry, rather our ultimate competitors ended up being innovation and time. The positive spin here, though, is that this is a testament to how quickly and really how exponentially technological advancement is progressing in modern society. But we got to make our mark in the technology history books and I got to be a part of that. I’m content with that.

Narrowing things down a bit to more recent times three particular events took place over the course of a year or so that when put together spelled out an uncertain future for us. The first was our entire marketing budget ($10M USD) getting reallocated to the main revenue generator for our parent company. Our marketing budget wasn’t slashed or reduced, it was completely eliminated. Our products generated roughly $25-30M USD annually so the argument could possibly be made that our marketing budget might have been quite large compared to what we brought in, but I’m pretty far from an expert on corporate finances though. That said, one would expect an increase in revenue with a larger marketing budget. Plot twist: the product that received our $10M saw absolutely ZERO increase in revenue. The second event was at the end of November last year several long-time veterans in the company volunteered to retire (the actual decision was made mid-October) in order to avoid layoffs (both for themselves and others). This was only partially effective because there were still layoffs in my parent company, though my company was spared. The real shitty part was that those that were laid off got no notice at all. I know that most companies state in the employee agreements that the company is not obligated to give notice when eliminating one’s position, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t. The only time someone is fired on the spot is for a major infraction or worse, any other scenario involves a decision made in advance. So knowing this, again while the company wasn’t obligated to give any notice to those they laid off, they certainly had the option to. Personally, especially when it comes to severance negotiations and avoiding ligitation, I believe that giving people as much notice as possible is both the most professional and the least costly. But no, my parent company opted to withhold that information. If anyone did bring a lawsuit against them, I have no knowledge of it, nor would I expect to find out for legal reasons. The final event, if you could even call it that, was at the next monthly all-hands meeting our CEO said that “this division is going to face challenges in the coming months.” This isn’t quite verbatim, but it’s pretty close. The general response to this was “could you be any more vague?”. Well, with hindsight being 20/20 and all, we now know what the CEO was hiding. This meeting was in December, roughly four months before writing this. The statement itself is certainly open to interpretation, especially in the moment, and I have absolutely no reason to believe that wasn’t deliberate.

There are more details I’ll share, again without identifying anyone or anything. So let’s dive in.

Around the same time as the all-hands meeting (not sure if before or after) there was a monthly department meeting between the director of development and the developers. I am not part of these meetings, so this was relayed to me by one of the devs that I regularly correspond with, just FYI. But in this meeting the question was asked whether the devs felt they were on track to meet the next product launch date, which was April 15th. The devs responded in the affirmative and that was the end of the meeting. Less than a week later that same director called another meeting but this time the message from the executives was that R&D needed to do everything possible to make the April 15 launch date. No reasons were given, nor any explanation whatsoever, just that it was urgent we make our deadline. That meeting ended with a lot of raised eyebrows. But as I said I wasn’t part of these meetings, so none of this was conveyed to us in QA, at least not lower than the manager level. But even so, this particular piece of foreshadowing wasn’t exactly actionable and spreading panic isn’t healthy for the workplace.

Now for the part that came as a complete surprise. Fast forward to mid-April and we are behind schedule. Nobody was at fault, and we were all putting the proverbial axe to the grindstone to wrap things up, especially with it being a little after the end of the first quarter and nobody (myself included) had taken any vacation time yet. We were all more than ready to do so after this cycle. Alas, that was not to be. The real kicker? We didn’t get to finish our release. Yup, the finish line was in site only for all race participants to receive DNF. A few of us suspected we had a year or so after how last year’s final quarter went. Boy were we unpleasantly surprised. I didn’t care to ask anyone why we weren’t being allowed to finish because on that day it honestly didn’t matter to me at all. But I did voice that question that later on when talking with my now-former co-workers about the whole affair and after piecing together the puzzle we came to the conclusion that between our severance packages and regular paychecks, the budgeting for that was decided at least back in December, and keeping us on longer would have exceeded this budget. But this only takes time employed this year into account, it completely ignored the project status. We got confirmation that contracted developers were brought in to replace us and this is (near as we can tell) the reason my former boss wasn’t let go. I find it such a weird and honestly cruel irony that missing our deadline kept my old boss employed, but not anyone else. But on the tail end of that irony comes another: the company now has to spend considerably more to finish our projects and release them than they would had they delayed our layoffs. Why didn’t they do this? Answering that would require me to, as my first boss at this same company often said (and whom I dearly miss), speculate wildly.

So the TL;DR of it all is that in the second half of last year the parent company decided to make our upcoming major release the last one and throw the kill switch on us after they got confirmation that we were on track to meet the scheduled launch date. But instead of notifying us in advance, a courtesy that was only extended to those that were asked to volunteer for retirement last year, they kept everything a secret causing us mental anguish and robbing us of much needed time off, plus we didn’t even get to finish our release. So now they have to pay us severance, to which I will be negotiating as high as I can go, and they have to pay contractors to finish what we started. This decision and its implementation has cost the parent company a lot, both financially and professionally. If they had given us notice, we might not necessarily have demanded increases in our severance pay since we would at least have had an opportunity to seek and possibly transition to a new employer without a lapse in employment. Sure, plenty of people will try to get as much out of a company as possible when faced with a layoff, but if the company can grant an employee the chance to transition elsewhere before their final day, I personally think, in the grand scheme of things, that this would statistically result in a drop severance battles. Again, this won’t apply to everybody, and maybe it’s somewhere between naive and wishful thinking, but I think it’s enough to make a difference.

I’ve learned over the last few days that several of my co-workers are successfully negotiating the terms of their severance so I’ve reached out to HR to do the same. My biggest concern is health insurance, to which I think they’ll accept my counteroffer, but I’m also going for more severance pay. They could have made this so much easier for the company and its now-former employees, but they didn’t. Time for them to literally pay the price; my price.

Mentally I’m in a slightly better head space than before, now that the shock has worn off and I did get in touch with some prospects thanks to personal contacts. A somewhat cliché protip: make connections. Co-workers, clients, business/industry contacts, acquaintenances with similar interests, friends, family, etc: the more of them you have the greater your chances of reaching someone without having to go through job application websites that now use AI screening to auto-reject an obscene amount of legitimately qualified applicants, recruiters and temp agencies that are dishonest about working environments and wages, or any other “middle man” nonsense. If push comes to shove definitely avail yourself of these employment services, because leave no stone un-turned and all, but if you have some contacts you can lean on, always do that first. Regardless of the outcome, you’ll spend less time waiting for correspondence and more time being proactive. Thanks to my personal contacts I’ve already had two meetings with some CEOs of small-to-medium tech companies and those meetings went very well. Of these two prospects I’m liking one a bit more than the other (to be expected) but more importantly I’m getting direct interaction and current information on the positions at these companies.

That brings up something else to take into account: job listings can very easily be irrelevant to the positions they advertise. I don’t mean out-of-date like a listing for a position that has already been filled but not taken down, I mean the particulars of the listing itself can now be obsolete, no longer be relevant to the position or the company itself. I’ve seen this in the past and I was reminded of it again recently where a listing is created based on old information about the position for hire. Instead of updating the description, required experience, responsibilities, etc to stay current, pieces of an old listing, possibly not even from the same company, are copied and pasted into a new listing and then posted online. For example, a company reuses its old listing for web developers but list requiring experience with Adobe Flash, but Flash was completely deprecated at the end of 2020 and all major browsers now actively block it for security. Furthermore (in this hypothetical), what the company actually needs in a new web developer is strong backend skills like Python, Perl, and SQL, but the listing only mentions HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In my book, if you correspond with a company that has such a listing, that’s a big red flag. Sure you could just as easily have the background and experience in what the company actually needs, but if they can’t post a current and accurate job listing, which is just plain unprofessional, then I would argue they’re not a serious company. Talk to them if you wish, but personally I would just move on. And I won’t even get into the fake listings out there. We already have enough misinformation in this world.

That’s my long-winded rant on the latest in my life. I’ve still been very active with my homelab projects and posts will be coming soon. Severance negotiations and interview updates to follow as well. Catch you around the Interwebz.