A Short, Sharp Shock

Originally published at Blind, Not Dumb. You can comment here or there.

One morning a few weeks back I was told to get in early to meet about an upcoming release that was happening…

Unfortunately, we were in for a big surprise.

Three of my co-workers and I were laid off that morning, along with 23 other unlucky souls from different parts of the lab.

In some sense I can understand the necessity for this kind of overt deception - there are certainly a non trivial number of people who would not react well to “Hey, be sure to be in by X time, because we’re doing lay offs and we don’t want your tardiness to clog up the gears!”, but I can’t help but feel there has to be a better way.

For some reason this one was a bit harder than most for me to accept, because I loved working at the Broad and had no desire to leave. I don’t harbor any ill will against anyone over it - everyone was just doing their jobs, and in truth save for my misgivings about leading lambs to the slaughter like that, I think everyone handled the whole process with a great deal of professionalism, which is all anyone can ask.

I had the pleasure of working with a bunch of incredibly bright, talented, friendly people for 4 years. In high tech that’s a pretty good run actually!

So, I’m doing the job search thing again. I chose to eschew the job placement seminars and such they’d set up for us - I know how to polish my resume and how to interview, and to my mind that 2 or three days was much better spent trying to find a soft place for myself to land while the incredible shrinking job market vaporized before my eyes.

I’ve been very lucky, things are actually going very well thus far - I’ve had 2 first round interviews and one 2nd round, with another set for today, and two more first round interviews set for tomorrow.

So, we’ll see where all of this leads me.

I can’t say enough about how amazing my wife has been through all of this - I’m a very lucky guy indeed