On Being Laid Off And NOT Being Laid Off

Much has been written lately about strategies for what to do when you're laid off, as well as how to make the best of a really crappy situation. I know how that is, I've been there, and it's definitely one of the top five most stressful things you'll go through. It's actually #4 -- right behind being forced to sit through a Corbin Bleu concert at the Indiana State Fair.  However, also of importance are those of us who manage to not get laid off.

Now technically, I've been laid off, three times. All three times I saw it coming a mile away, and mercifully I pretty much had time to prepare a soft landing in what was, for the most part, a better position anyway.  Yeah, there were some sleepless nights.  Yeah, there was some heavy drinking.  Nothing like what I'm going through now, however. Currently, my stress level is so high that my blood pressure looks like the gas price board at Shell, I've been physically ill for a month, and I haven't had heartburn this bad since the night I tried to mix Chinese food and Everclear. It's not that I'm particularly worried that I'm going to lose my job, as my "vacation that wasn't" last week pretty much proves this place grinds to a halt if it has to go without asking me stupid questions for more than four hours at a time. It's not so much because everybody is laying people off, in fact the number of IT job openings is reported as being steady, if not slightly increasing, at the present time. No, the problem I'm having is that my current employer is really, really bad at doing this.

First of all, they're laying the wrong people off. We've got six-figure salaried employees who do nothing but surf porn and watch YouTube all day (I have access to the proxy logs, this is no idle claim), we've got backstabbers who intentionally sabotage projects to make teammates look bad, we've got incompetents who screw things up and blame it on vendors, we've got surly people who intentionally promote feuds and interoffice politics, we've got a team of six people that is being run by two managers. These people get to keep their jobs. The ones they're getting rid of are either ones that have ideas contrary to the ones that led this company straight into layoff city (ironically, this was the same reason they were hired); the people who do their jobs well, are genuinely pleasant and easy to work with, and most-likely won't make a scene when they leave; and whomever happened to be on vacation or medical leave that week.

Secondly, they're dragging this out way to long and promoting fear and chaos throughout the company. Rather than having the obligatory two meetings with the "haves" and the "have nots," getting everything out in the open and ripping the scab off the wound all at once, upper management has all but disappeared for the past month, and every Friday a handful of people are just gone without announcement or explanation. Meanwhile, the rest of the company, assuming the layoffs will continue and that they'll be next, spend all of their time polishing up the resumes, taking long lunches for job interviews, and calling the competitors to find out about openings and to blab about how this place is going down the tubes. Way to increase productivity there, guys.

Finally, upper management (when they're actually seen in public) completely denies this is what's going on. People are apparently supposed to believe that 20% of our company has voluntarily left during a severe recession because they found better jobs. In fact, and this is no joke, one account manager still hasn't been told that she was laid off last Wednesday, and one of our Graphic Design people I found out was laid off during a casual converation with a former employee who quit three months ago.  Now, of course I know better because, I'm not only a manager, I'm the head computer security guy, so I'm the one they have secretly archiving off email boxes and document folders days in advance of the people in question being let go -- and believe me, walking the halls, bumping into a friend, and not being able to warn them they're going to be fired on Friday will give you a serious case of survivor's guilt -- and acid reflux. However, when you fire a guy two weeks after you tell him to go ahead and have major surgery, and then deny him severance and continuing medical benefits for his surgical follow-ups, don't act all surprised in front of me when he sends his laptop back with all of his data and email gone, saying things like, "I can't believe he would act like that after all we've done for him." He may have been your "line item expense," but he was my friend. 

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