I think the conventional wisdom is that, when you lose your job, you find yourself with a ton of time on your hands. For me, for some reason this is not the case. Granted, time tends to fly when you have a decision to make with a deadline.
This decision is a struggle. Should I look for employment (in quasi-desperation) from the very company that pretty much humiliated me a few days ago? There are two minds in me. The first, quite reasonably, wants to tell 'em to go to hell. The other is the pragmatic one, the one I listened to when I decided to move my family here to work for Microsoft years ago. In times like this, a paycheck is all that matters. But is it really?
Let's take the first scenario: You line up with hundreds of other folks from my profession to chase down a small number of dubious quality openings in the company. Informational interviews are no longer permitted. There is a chance of being down-leveled in the transition. The work environment is not the one we left - this one is even more dog eat dog as tenured team members jockey against each other and, more importantly, the new grunt on the team. But if you take it, you do get paid. And if you get cold feet? Well, then you can kiss your severance goodbye.
The second scenario is the likely one. You look, find nothing that would prompt you to even send an informational request a few months ago, but apply. In fact, you apply to everything! I mean, why hold back? It's a complete lottery at this point so you might as well play the numbers. But the yield is low. Perhaps a few loops. Perhaps one. Perhaps none. Anyway, you end up with nothing to show for 8 weeks of work, and are back at square one. But this time a bit more pathetic. I mean, these guys told you they didn't want you around in January - didn't you get the memo?
The third scenario - death with dignity. You turn down the search option and immediately engage the thankless task of changing companies and/or careers during the crappiest labor market in two generations. This with the added burden of never quite being rid of the notion that you might have found a job. You could have gotten lucky! This was your doing, in the end.
How much is dignity worth? How much is it worth to know you did all you could?
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4 comments:
I've been pretty busy, actually. So extra time on my hands is difficult to come by, at least for me.
I'm going to look around internally and see if I can find something compelling to interview for. But I remind myself that I've been miserable the last 18 months or so. Things will NOT get better by staying. The only thing that will is that I will have a paycheck.
I need a smaller company. In absence of a compelling position in the company (and I doubt I will find one), I will probably wait until 3/23 and take my severance. In the meantime I continue to job hunt outside the company with an anticipated start date of 3/24.
I'm lucky in that I have some savings, I have accrued vacation and I've been here more than a decade.
This post captured my feelings more accurately than I had been able to identify on my own. Brilliant assessment and yet the questions hang.
My sense is that being identified as one of the 1400, one's chances of getting a position internally are essentially zero. In my experience, hiring managers will view any of us as "dead wood" and that's about as far as it would get.
I don't think I'm going to waste much time worrying about applying for open positions at Microsoft. I'm moving on.
There's a fourth option...
...salting the Earth.
There were a million and one truly stupid management decisions made by the top brass that laid us off which created the need to RIF.
Zune? Surface? Why was so much money poured into pathetic, dead-end efforts? Why was the plug not pulled on those before they consumed so much that VIABLE parts of the company had to be sacrificed to feed them? If we had to lose 1400 people, why the hell is there still fresh, free soda stocked up in fridges everywhere, EVERY DAY, at a $20m pricetag?
I'm done. Mostly because I think they're done. I'm not only going to take my dignity, I'm going to take the fertile soil with me, and I'm going to salt the fields as I go. They have earned every pain and hardship they're subjecting themselves to in the long term by attempting to transfer their failure to us, and I say "good".
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