Informal Poll WAS RE: [geeks] Laid off blues

[David Cantrell]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2001 at 08:52:16PM +0100, Chris Byrne wrote:
> Okay time for another informal poll.
> 
> How many of us on this list have been laid of, made redundant, downsized,
> restructured, or otherwise terminated without cause in the last year?
> 
> It's been twice for me, and hell it may be a third time before the end of
> the year (it REALLY sucks when your company is doing VERY well but your
> partner goes bankrupt thus fucking everything up)

Happened to me twice.  First time was in November.  I was one of the lucky
ones, I got my month's notice and salary for December.  I was one of four
or five given the boot at the same time, chosen because we'd finished the
stuff we were working on and there was no new work.  Then on the 4th of
January, the company went titsup.com and all of my ex-colleagues who were
left got nothing.  In the meantime I'd found an even better-paying job,
doing security stuff for a satellite broadband ISP.  I started at the
beginning of Jan.  We had a working product, we had guaranteed customers
(all the local government and schools in the Basque region of Spain; we
got it as subcontractors for Euskatel, who were in turn contracted by the
Spanish government), plenty of other customers in the area who were
interested, we were making money on each installation, and we had a full
order-book.  We needed funding so we could ramp up production of the
hardware - and the investors pulled out quite literally minutes before
transferring the money into our bank account.  So in May I was job-hunting
again.  Finding a new job then was pretty tough, but I ended up at the
BBC in June, where I'm a project mangler for Internet Services.  I'm
working with very clueful people on interesting projects, my manager
supports me and my colleagues respect my judgement.  I took a considerable
salary hit to go there, but you can't get much more stable and they
*really* look after their employees.  All the usual jazz about pensions
and stuff, 25 days paid holiday, excellent training (I'm going on a Cisco
course in December because "even if it's not essential for your job it's
good to spread the knowledge around"), and I can even get cheap flying
lessons through the employees' club!

-- 
David Cantrell | david at cantrell.org.uk | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity.  It
eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the
business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation.
                -- Johnny Hart