I've succesfully gone through the stages of grief around my current job and have moved on to active job hunting. The way my brain works, is that I am now legitimately spending every fleeting moment and thought on the problem of what I want my next step to be. Reaching out to friends / ex-colleagues / work acquaintances and thinking out loud helps a lot, but it also spurs more thinking and reflecting and pondering. Meanwhile, I've lost any and all motivation to work. I knew I need that inner motivation to work, but I didn't know I needed it this much. I now realise I've been lucky for always having had some kind of motivation for the past decade, so it is jarring to have absolutely none of it and to feel so adrift. Fortunately I really don't have a lot on my plate at work. I can just do a bit of quiet quitting and I doubt anybody will notice or care. Especially since my conversation with HR last week went like "yeah, you're one of our high performers, so we get it if you want to leave. We'd love to keep you ofc but it's best if you just take your time to figure things out".
wow. That was extraordinarily frank of HR. "We don't see this situation getting any better? And it's unlikely this organization will ever truly utilize your talents again." By way of comparison the last jobbyjob I had hired a consultant to follow me around for a week to figure out how to do my job cheaper. When they couldn't, they just decided to see what broke by firing me. It cost them $23m. I don't want to be a downer on this but if this person is telling you "things aren't likely to get better" they are probably planning their own exit, and their replacement will likely be utterly without loyalty. They'll look at what you cost, they'll look at what they need, and they'll recognize they can get a gold star for the quarter by remaindering your ass. So definitely figure things out, definitely give it the time it deserves, but also keep in the back of your mind the reality that your situation is not as stable as it appears.
It was unusually frank, and I did get a strong “I’m leaving too” vibe. I think our corporate overlords haven’t quite gotten that so many of us are thinking of leaving, so for me the most unstable part is that I have no idea what they’ll do once they do realize it. Although - the move to reorganize might be initiated by someone high up the chain deciding it was a mistake to acquire us, so perhaps they dgaf. There’s an all hands update on this early next week, so I’m very curious what the message will be then.
The minute an organization is big enough to start thinking quarter-to-quarter, they cease to be able to contemplate anything further than two quarters out. Your worry is not someone thinking about remaindering the company they acquired two years previously, your worry is some MBA with a hard-on knowing he's more likely to get an end-of-year bonus if he can juice the numbers. PlayNetwork didn't intend to lose $23m. They just lacked the planning horizon to go 'what happens when we lack the institutional expertise to support a system more complicated than a clock radio." Especially as their modus operandi was to let Sales promise the moon for functionality, give the systems away for nearly free and then book the recurrent monthly revenue out past the heat death of the universe. When there's only one guy on staff who can turn a $70 DVD player into an $1800 DVD player through judicious application of $190 relay modules and $30 thermostats, and when you have 2200 restaurants expecting $1800 DVD player performance, that sweet, sweet $100k/mo RMR goes away when you have to spend $6m fixing the systems your troglodytes spec'd. But the guys who decided to let me go didn't even bother to look up whether or not we'd sold Jack in the Box a $4500 AV system for $700, let alone investigate the shenanigans necessary to fake it, so out the door I went.