You will almost certainly experience a layoff in your first few years of post-college work. You may or may not be affected directly by the layoff, but either way your first layoff experience makes an impact on you. You will watch others around you who may have even been great at their jobs lose their jobs for no fault of their own. It sucks.
When a layoff happens to/around you, TALK ABOUT IT WITH YOUR PEERS! Every one of your peers will be having feelings. Engineers are not good at talking about feelings. But OMFG seriously, when that first layoff happens just drop everything you're doing, grab a pile of people you work with and go out for a long lunch right away and then talk about wtf just happened. It makes the situation less bad and will help you get back to being productive much quicker. Your boss won't mind, and if they do, they're a horrible person.
> You will almost certainly experience a layoff in your first few years of post-college work.
Or you'll get hired on the cheap right after the layoff, and everyone left behind will hate your fucking guts for it. Especially when you need their help.
- First job: laid off. Found a new position in 2 weeks.
- Second job: wanted to move, so this doesn't count
- Third job: laid off. But I was already looking for new jobs, it just worked out really well for me
For the ones I got laid off - severance pay is always a nice bonus, particularly if you can get a job prior to it running out. Just remember that when a layoff happens, it's can be more beneficial than a loss (both in monetarily and shaking up things a bit to find new stuff to do.)
Very bad gamble if you need the job and a bunch of people just got laid off. If you can afford to move jobs, you would have done it already after the layoff.
My first internship in college, on my last week, my entire organization got laid off. We all went out to lunch at 9am, none of the engineers went back to the office that day. My first job after college, I was there for 6 years, we had I think, 11 layoffs in organizations I worked in, the first one was less than 6 months after I joined. My 3rd job after college, I was there for 5 years, we had at least 3 different layoffs.
In all cases the managers were completely understanding about the mental impact of the layoffs, both for those directly affected and those who kept their jobs and would need to pick up the work of the departing. Never once did I see a manager expect any work to be done the rest of that day after a layoff was announced.
If you ever work for a manager who isn't compassionate during a layoff, I'm sorry, that sucks.
When a layoff happens to/around you, TALK ABOUT IT WITH YOUR PEERS! Every one of your peers will be having feelings. Engineers are not good at talking about feelings. But OMFG seriously, when that first layoff happens just drop everything you're doing, grab a pile of people you work with and go out for a long lunch right away and then talk about wtf just happened. It makes the situation less bad and will help you get back to being productive much quicker. Your boss won't mind, and if they do, they're a horrible person.