1 story from Experience
I worked for an MSP straight out of college. It gave me a lot of really quick hands on experience providing IT support for a variety of businesses, and looking back it was pretty invaluable for my career. However, I felt overwhelmed most of the time. There was no relationship with our clients. We were the helpdesk, and the person that was calling was always mad and frustrated that something wasn’t working. I compared it to working and visiting a hospital emergency room, no one is happy to be there. That’s never a good start to a working relationship. I’ve had several people on the phone break down crying because of the IT situation on the other end while I was talking them through it. Did I work in IT or did I work at a crisis intervention hotline? The truth was, it was probably both.
A couple years later, I came in one Monday morning to find half of our helpdesk crew gone, including my co-team lead, who I relied on a lot. The company had to layoff a significant portion of their workforce. It's interesting how none of the executives were laid off or even took a pay reduction because of the “Hard Times”. As you would of guessed, they didn’t cut half of their paying clients to help with the workload of their now reduced workforce. The same amount of Support Tickets came in, but now their was half as many workers to take care of them.
This led to me feeling what they are calling “Layoff Survivor Guilt”. Not only are you doing the all the work now with half the staff, you feel bad for your comrades in arms that didn’t make the cut and that you did. Layoffs suck, for everyone involved. Companies should be held way more accountable for having to do them. It’s one of the biggest failures a company can endure, and they should be chastised for it. I still blame the only company that ever laid me off and their leadership for doing it 5 days after my first child was born. But life goes on, and the ebb and flow of your career shouldn’t be reliant on any one company anymore.
Just as you would have server backups and database backups, you should always be developing your career backup plan in some other way. Certifications, a side business, a newsletter—anything that helps you develop outside of your normal job or one day, like me, you may come in on that Monday morning to find out half your co-workers are gone or even that YOU might be the one laid off from the job you thought was such a sure thing in how much they needed you and couldn’t live without you.
2 Ideas from Me
No ideas this week, just some advice. Everyone is very on edge, the looming recession, the lasting effects of covid, prices are skyrocketing for pretty much everything and layoffs, especially at tech companies, are happening more often. There’s a lot of fear in general, so I’d ask everyone to be as kind as they can to their neighbor. Be the help they need to get through these tough times and I guarantee you’ll find help yourself to overcome anything this world can throw at you.
3 Quotes from Others
A recession is predominantly for the middle class. Where I come from, the majority of people have always lived in a recession.
-Curtis Jackson
When you see people getting involved in Comic Relief, especially in tough times or times of recession, that's very positive.
-Aisling Bea
The other thing is quality of life; if you have a place where you can go and have a picnic with your family, it doesn't matter if it's a recession or not, you can include that in your quality of life.
-Jim Fowler