I am fairly sure that I am being laid off with other Sr. Engineers tomorrow and need some ideas. Basically, I saw a calendar mistake by HR, so oops!
Meh. It’s gonna suck for a bit, but whatevers. Life is more important than a shit job. :)
Get all your questions about unemployment ready, including the forms filled in today… File asap! File as soon as they let you go.
If you have stock/equity decide now if your going to exercise it. You may have to pay taxes in addition to the exercise price.
Bring all your work stuff from home. Hand it over and get a receipt, nobody wants to play phone tag with a ex to get their stuff back.
If you have access to sensitive systems or passwords, put it in writing what you know and tell them they need to change those passwords now.
Make sure you keep contact with anyone you care about now, before you lose access to the systems.
Be the adult, let them you know these transitions are hard, compliment them for doing a difficult thing so well, make it clear there are no hard feelings. I’ve had multiple long term highly lucrative consultation arrangements after a layoff.
While good advice, he did specify to YOLO the exit interview, this is too responsible to be a YOLO imho lmao
Honestly, the biggest yolo is to be professional, prepared, drama free. Don’t even let it bother you.
I’m above this, I have my own plan, I have confidence… It will distinguish you.
I once had a new job lined up, but hadn’t put my notice in, I got laid off before the Friday I was going to put my notice in. The firing officers complemented me on how well I was taking it.
Then 3 months later they hire me as a side contractor at 5x my salaried rate while I was still doing my new full time job.
So yeah… Yolo is about having your life together and being above other people’s drama, a bit of luck helps too.
I know a few people who have been hired back on as contractors when the company realised they went too far or laid off people with unique experience.
Yolo is for teenagers leaving Burger King naked.
To be contrarian,
I’d count this as a YOLO. You only live once and choosing to live it with decorum and immaculate professionalism or playing the long game is also a valid response.
Maybe one day, they come crawling back to you? Take them for all they’re worth or shove it back at them.
I had a lucrative job offer for a fairly senior role from a company that previously retrenched me. I got their senior management to wine and dine me. All in the guise of discussing the role, how I saw the future of the industry and my plan for taking the company to where they wanted to be in 2 years. Then after all was said and done, I told them I wasn’t interested. It felt good and besides I make way more now than they could have offered me and it would have taken me away from my family and put me in a very stressful role.
Props for the prep advice.
If you have access to sensitive systems or passwords, put it in writing what you know and tell them they need to change those passwords now.
I am in security, so I know the logical reasons for that even though someone is sure to say that is bullshit.
However, I left a job once and encrypted all critical passwords I knew on a USB drive and gave it to my manager. For the password, I created a riddle that only he would know. I gave my old manager (he was cool) the USB drive and walked. After about a week, he was laid off for pure money reasons. So a month goes by and I get a frantic phone call one morning asking for all the passwords to some super important systems and I was kind enough to know they had pointlessly fired the only person who would of had access. (They had blindly destroyed his remaining equipment and paperwork, so they were gone.)
Damn. You left all the launch codes on a usb stick. Rookie mistake.
It was intentional, encrypted and before enterprise password managers were common place. The key was a riddle and actual key was never actually written down anywhere. I sure as fuck didn’t trust our network, so I couldn’t store them somewhere accessible.
I am fairly sure the drive got put in our evidence safe which was then shredded with the other drives that were in there. (The company I was working for got bought by a venture capital group and nothing original was sacred.)
They literally don’t care. Don’t tell them “the truth”, don’t tell them “what’s wrong with the company”, nothing. Just say you’ve enjoyed working there and if things turn around you’d be open to coming back.
The best outcome for an exit interview is you leave on good terms so you can use them in the future if necessary. You never know when you’ll need a reference.
Again, any criticism or negativity you bring to the exit interview will just be used against you. You’ll be labeled as disgruntled, or whiny, or just didn’t have what it takes. And that will cut you off from using them in the future if you need to.
My partner got laid off in a beeeeg round of layoffs, worked with me at the same company. I wanted to be laid off SO BADLY so I could take some time off work to spend with them—we had the means to take some time off.
A month passes, and one day my boss calls me into a room where our HR person was sitting. They’re both suuuuuper morose, my boss looks like she’s about to tell me my gramma died.
I’m BEAMING. They pull out papers and start explaining, ask if I have any questions, and I’m like
“excellent! I gotta ask about severance” (yes absolutely)
“so I can do the whole unemployment thing? (yes you can)
“DOPE! Do I have to work the day out? (…uhhhh no, you can’t)
“Stellar! Mind if I go say goodbye to some people?” (Absolutely, take your time)
As I left the room, HR person was like “I must say, Rai, this is the most unconventional one we’ve done so far…” and I thanked them and frolicked out. Gave some hugs, got my stuff, and dipped.
That was December 2019. The timing could not have worked out more perfectly.
Thank you, job that laid us off.
Agreed if you’re quitting. If you’re getting laid off then you’re not coming back anyway.
If you get laid off “ethically” (as in the company really does have budgeting issues and they really are trying to weather the storm and they really are cutting back your role which isn’t critical to continued business operations) then there might be potential options to come back in the future if the business can course correct.
If you’re getting laid off because they’re too cowardly to fire you, yeah. There’s no position to come back to.
Yup, I got hired back a month after being laid off. My job search didn’t pan out well so I was glad.
Do what the others already said and be mature and professional. Just wear a full clown costume to the zoom meeting. No comments on it.
It depends. If there is any money on the line or don’t want to burn bridges then I’d do the smart thing, whatever that is. Otherwise I’d just skip it.
Yeah as much as I’ve fantasized about going nuclear on past employers (or more recently, when firing a client), it just doesn’t bring any good besides a fleeting moment of feeling superior. It’s not worth it, be the bigger person and keep it professional.
Come in sharply dressed with a top hat, cane, and unbreakable smirk
It’s going to be over Zoom, so it would be missing the full effect. Still, I might be able to slap an outfit together and even 3D print a monocle…
Hey, look at the bright side, now you can be fired in paris! I would wait for some more ideas before picking this one though, it’s rather uninspired
Since it is zoom you can focus all your energy from the waist up!
Something something cat filter https://youtu.be/lGOofzZOyl8?feature=shared
So I did the tuxedo thing when I left a job. Security wanted photos.
I told security that there are only two ways to leave if you know it’s going to be your last day: Head held high and dressed to the nines, or carried out by as many security guards as possible.
They thanked me for choosing the former.
- Finish my ticket.
- Submit the PR.
- Log out.
- Mail back the laptop.
- Block and delete contacts.
No, pick up a bunch of issues and half complete them. Lol.
Calm down, satan
There’s no point in doing anything but being polite and "professional"1 and doing so gives you the most leverage. If nothing else you can try to negotiate a higher severance. But it also potentially enables the best kind of “revenge”.
Like the time I was laid off and instructed to revoke my and my team’s access to systems. Yes sir… right away sir. Only the bean counters never verified that there was somebody left in the hand-off plan who could access everything.
Github admin? Not anymore. AWS root account? Who knows?
Honestly the fallout from that, including frantic begging emails for passwords about a month later, was far more entertaining than anything I could have said at the time. Best of all, the head bean counter got fired over it.
And because I was completely “professional” my boss there was super supportive and helped me get my next gig. Still checks in on me once in a while.
1 People often confuse playing the game to believing in it. Use it to your advantage.
I heard the rumored date of layoff and booked a surgery I needed for that morning 8am. I got 2 more weeks / another paycheck because they can’t lay you off when you’re on medical leave. Everyone else was let go that morning. I also did it because I was going to lose my insurance (shit American healthcare system)
That’s beautiful. Well played.
Added bonus was at my group’s reunion happy hour my colleagues said things like ‘Damn, well played. You win’
I know this isn’t the “fun” answer, but I wouldn’t. I’m a manager, and I’ve been on the other side of that situation too many times. I’ve never met a manager who wants to do it - we’d all rather have enough work for everyone. It sucks but far the most for the person being laid off, but it’s a shitty time for everyone.
Plus I’ve also hired back good employees when work picked back up down the road, so there’s the bridge burning aspect to consider.
It might be just a little bit more shitty to be laid off and have finances jeopardized than to fire someone. I don’t know the market you’re in but I’d never stoop so low to come back to a place that laid me off earlier, I’d really have to be desperate.
Bring an emotional support clown
Always skip the exit interview if you can. It doesn’t help you or your former coworkers. It’s just an HR box-checking exercise.
Exit interviews aren’t box checking exercises, they exist to give the company a heads up if the employee seems like they’re disgruntled and might try to sue. Always skip them, it only benefits the company that laid you off, nobody else.
Exit inerviews can be valuable and beneficial if the exit is on good terms all around.
I left my last job for a better-paying position elsewhere, but I still loved my old job and coworkers. It’s still the best job I ever had.
I couldn’t pass up a 50% raise and they couldn’t match it. No hard feelings or bruised egos. It’s just how things work out.
Having an honest conversation with HR about what worked and didn’t from an employee perspective with zero stakes for either of us was productive and informative.
Do you know if it was productive and informative for them?
For example, I left a job several years ago, and not long before I left, I met with the boss and explained some of the massive issues facing my department. He sounded interested, but of course he never did anything about those problems, and my former co-workers have told me that the situation is worse than it was before. In my observation, and that of my friends, this is what happens most of the time. After all, if they didn’t listen to you before, and especially if they didn’t ask you before, then why would we expect them to care what you say now?
Fair enough, but I think it really just depends on how you look at it. From my POV it’s just a box-checking exercise in the vast majority of cases, and a waste of your time (if you’re the one quitting). But you’re right, employers are super paranoid about this kind of thing (even though they have most of the power). If it is one of those disgruntled-gonna-sue people then you are right, it’s something they need to try to get out in front of.
I was very happy to do the exit interview at one particular job. I wanted to make it clear to HR that I wasn’t leaving because of the manager or the work or my co-workers but because they paid about 2/3 of the market rate in our area.
This was important to me because my manager and co-workers were great and it had gotten around to me that HR was eyeing our manager over having had a few people quit over the last year or two, when it was very clearly all about pay and nothing to do with him.
You did your manager a solid, because of the meme people quit managers not jobs.
Does it help your co workers?
If you got fired, no, probably not.
But if you quit then you can leave them a few clues as to why you’re leaving and how they might avoid losing more staff. That can help the people you left behind.
But if you quit then you can leave them a few clues as to why you’re leaving and how they might avoid losing more staff.
The reason I’m quitting is because they didn’t pick up the clues that I was looking to leave, and I don’t want to help them avoid losing more staff because of it. The people I left behind should take the hint if they were smart.
Just because I might be leaving doesn’t mean I want it keeping being a sucky workplace. Ideally I’d move on to something better for me, and people left behind might get an improvement as well.
Well sure, because they don’t do exit interviews for people who got fired.
I know it can feel good to speak your mind, and in an ideal world it would make some impact. It should make some impact. They should listen to people who leave. But they don’t. Because it’s not the purpose of the exercise. They don’t really care about your feedback. They care about the optics only. Remember HR is there to protect the company, not advocate for workers.
By all means if you want to waste your time go ahead and do an exit interview. There’s not much risk or harm in doing one (unless you make a complete ass out of yourself). But it’s really just there to prop up the thin veneer that HR and the corporate lawyers want businesses to hide behind.
Some companies in my experience do do exit interviews for people who are fired. This makes more sense when you realize exit interviews are mostly to give the company a heads up if they think you might try to sue them.
That makes sense. Never heard of it, but I believe you.
Advice I have heard is decline an exit interview, because those are for the company’s benefit and not yours.
Or say it’s about money to give your coworkers a hand.
If you’re being laid off I don’t know if that works.
It is my understanding that they’re going to try to get you to say something on the record or worse sign something they can deny your legal rights over.
Ah… I did miss the part about the scenario being a layoff. I agree - Not that useful in that case.
It is my understanding that they’re going to try to get you to say something on the record or worse sign something they can deny your legal rights over.
It depends on where you live. Where I live, if they get you to sign it on the spot it’s very likely unenforceable as you need time to have legal documents reviewed so you aren’t just blindly signing your rights away.
Sign something, yes. The severance package. Don’t sign it, you don’t get the money.
Just sign it and do it anyway. Teledyne for example wouldn’t pay me a package unless I agreed to never bash them on social media. Never for example call them a crooked tax dodge or worthless parasites that liquidate smaller firms. Or so incompetent I am almost convinced they might be a front of some foreign government to weaken the technology of the US as a whole.
Don’t go? I mean, you’re being fired, what’s the worst that can happen so just don’t go. Go for a walk in the woods or mountains while the company is paying you…
The worst that can happen is that your severance package is dependent on attending the exit interview.
The last time I got laid off, that morning I had sent a PTO request to my boss for a family trip the following month.
I got called into said boss’ office for the afternoon meeting letting me know I was being laid off, which I had not been expecting at all. I was given the paperwork to sign, etc. and mostly silently acknowledged everything that was going on. When the boss finally asked if I had any further questions at the end of the meeting, I deadpanned “so, you’ve approved my request to not come in on _____ days next month?”
