Austin Willis

What do you do after a layoff?

1. Follow orders

Basically do nothing. Learn who your new manager is. Say hello nice to meet you. What do I do now. Then just do that. I don't blame anyone. Rent to pay. Mouths to feed. We all know you can end up on the street.

Maybe that's what I'll do. Just 'rest and vest'-ish, but not rest too much cause maybe working 'hard' acutally matters. Doesn't seem to entirely. I don't know if I necessarily work hard but I'm proud of my work. Honestly if I put a number of hours on it, I'm a little embarrased. Like pretty low. I'm honestly kind of spoiled most of the time. But I have worked long hours this year. Oncall overnight babysitting a dashboard, trying ranom little tweaks to get something unstuck. That was a while ago and I have slacked off a bit lately. My partner has been upset at me during these times because of working too much. I've sacrificed family for work, which feels even worse when you see how little it actually matters. How little your work really means to the people making decicisions that could derail your entire life. I genuinely like to help our customers get stuff done, and have seen positive feedback from customers directly on my work. But what am I really getting out of that? Even though I can find purpose in doing things like this, I don't really 'own' the results. No matter how well they pay me, or how many 'kudos' or promotions are handed out, it's ultimately not my customer but the corporations.

2. Be an opportunist

Do yoy have ideas about how the workplace should operate? People are gone and there are now possibly less people between you and power. Know a manager who you could get a call with? Think they could be receptive to your ideas? Have no shame? There are incentive structures that I do not trust. Lines that maybe can't be crossed. A dogma...ideology...philosophy...culture? One that I'm not sure I belong to. Maybe I'm wrong, we can't do things any way other than the direction everyone else is going. How honest are the calls for 'every idea is on the table'?

Maybe I already I am already an opportunist. I've been around through other layoffs and I'm still here. There are people that have climbed the ladder through attrition and there are definitely opportunities that those relationships provided me as power was redistributed.

3. Organize

Can we organize collectively to take power over our workplace? This will not be easy. It will be a fight. It will be uncomfortable. We have to have uncomfortable conversations. That's the nature of the resource bargain. It's easy to understand how any power someone gains is used to protect themselves in the heirarchy rather than to share it. This whole system is designed from the beginning as a strict hierarchy. Is there any possiblity to dilute it, or does it have to be completely destroyed? Could the organization even survive without it at this point? How do you even start organizing in an organization like this? Striking doesn't really hit the bottom line. Layoffs are possible because the product continues to print money without any work being done. Maybe we are just doomed.

But maybe that means there is nothing to lose by trying... It has started to feel like the writing is on the wall. How big will the layoffs be when the next hype bubble bursts? Is the work we're doing now just preparing for the end of our own jobs? Any improvement in reliability just creating an opportunity for your job to become obsolete?