And now, fast forward to 2023, they are laying me off, along with another 99 people.
In a way I’m relieved because I was planning to change jobs due to burnout (burnout that my manager referred to during my layoff meeting as being “a little bit stressed”).
However, due to the same said burnout, I couldn’t do much job searching and needed a long vacation.
I got laid off while on vacation, a vacation I took late because of the deadlines set by the company, also a vacation which I spent recovering from burnout (and doing other fun things, don’t get me wrong.)
Mainly I blame their obsession with “growth hacking”. Now this company is a TV company and have canceled a large list of programs viewers like because they aren’t making enough revenue.
And everyone does it with a smile on their face, under the guise of ‘efficiency’.
How does one increase efficiency by reducing the number of workers and not really coming up with any tools so that less workers could do the same job?
The negotiations with the union ended in disagreement about my team’s layoffs but I got the boot anyway.
So what did I get myself burnt out for? Absolutely nothing worth it. I should have just quit-quitted. This didn’t come easy to me because I place a lot of importance on product ownership. I’m early in my career and wanted to build cool stuff that people use and enjoy.
I used to work in field service for a machine tool company. One of the machine brands I serviced had a couple years in the late nineties that hated to work on. The machines were always cheap but those years were egregious. Corners cut everywhere and the original parts were so shitty we’d usually have to retrofit shit from a different year. Eventually bumped into a guy who’d worked on them at the time who explained the history. The owners of the company at the time were about to sell out to another manufacturer and they wanted to jack up the profits before the sale so they cut every corner they that they didn’t think would be noticable before the sale.
The brand stayed afloat for another ten years but everyone I know who was in the industry at the time said their was never any coming back from the damage two years of shit machines did to their image.
Worst part about was, because the machines didn’t start having issues until after the company sold, the new owners got all the blame and got stuck with bill for all the warranty work. Literally no incentive for anyone else to not do exactly the same as the original owners.
Not a coincidence that this company and team I’m being laid off from has one manager who resisted (and continues to resist) technical documentation. Everything is just to make things work NOW with a big middle finger to sustainability.
Ooof. Current job has a big problem with that.
I’m in facilities for a company with 2 dozen buildings. We’re big enough that we have a drafting department who needs to sign off on all of our drawings and documentation. For reasons that are always changing, they never want to convert the contractors’ schematics for remodels into something that can be shared. If we’re lucky, the contractors are willing to share prints with us directly more offen, we just have to hope the labels are still there when it breaks and/or ring out individual wires. Huge waste of man hours on our end but every time we suggest fixing it, the drafting department insists that it can’t be done for whatever reason. Our department has offered to handle these schematics several times but, “that’s not in our scope”.
That sounds awful. Maybe one day will dawn on this world when companies will just listen to the professionals doing the work. My manager’s manager (the one resisting docs) seems to be on some kind of power trip. He’s an exceptionally bad listener who treats us like chess pieces in a game he is playing in his own head. I thought he just annoyed me, but after having a chat with my manager about him, it turns out that everyone is having problems with him and he’s unwilling to be flexible.