away271828

Pretty much. In a prior role I didn't have a real job any longer but the people making the decisions for a fairly small layoff probably didn't know that. Would have been happy to have taken a decent severance package. Hung out for a while more or less.

I wrote a (shortish) book with someone once who was obviously much more attracted to the idea of being an author than actually writing a book.

Mostly I had team calls. Theoretically had 1:1s with one former manager but with both of our travel schedules it ended up monthly at best.

I reached a point--somewhat older than that--when I didn't have a real job any longer, but nobody seemed in a big hurry to get rid of me, and they were paying me pretty well. I made it through a small layoff though I wouldn't have minded the good severance. I might have hung around in different circumstances but figured I should optimize the payout up to a point and wasn't really interested in heading somewhere new.

Maybe. It's very situational. Beyond the spreadsheets for a given location, there are times in your life when you want to be able to pickup and move fairly easily and there are times when you want to be able to put down roots and be in a pretty stable situation that lets you tailor things.

I did "reasonably" well for a couple decades and then I did, if not spectacularly, well for a decade+ that certainly set me up for retirement. And I might have even retired earlier absent COVIVD. Not spectacular sums but certainly reasonable amounts given owning a house and modest travel sums.

The other thing I see is that people nearish retirement age and are comfortable, who might have cruised on for a few years, are pretty much going: now is probably the time. Maybe do some consulting though that's tight right now. So, maybe not optimal, but why stay in a non-ideal situation?

I do know various people who left a job with a former employer because they weren't happy and seemingly landed fine AFAIK. I mostly stuck things out for a bit because I was mostly retiring. Otherwise, I'd probably have done the same even if the end-result was retiring a bit early.

Probably not uncommon. My final year at my last employer post re-organization and other changes was cold-hearted money extraction for (generously) part-time work. I was sort of disappointed I didn't get a package when they laid a fair number of people I worked with off. But I took a hard look at my vacation balances, upcoming holidays, RSU vesting, etc. and decided to coast for about the next year which, as it turned out, was just about the point it would have been difficult to continue on with no real job not that I would have wanted to.

On the other hand, you have to guard against being that person who is in a perpetual state of "Benn there, done that. Didn't work the last 5 times we tried it." Because sometimes the circumstances/market/tech ecosystem genuinely are different.

I'm a bit hesitant to describe $NEW_CONCEPT/TECH as just $OLD_CONCEPT/TECH. Echoes of older things in a new context can really amount to something different. Yes, VMware didn't create the idea of virtualization and Docker et al didn't create containerization but the results were pretty novel.

For me, it was very obvious at the end. Technical but not programming. Felt like I was winding down. Circumstances were such there wasn't a lot of mobility within the company. Was somewhat disappointed that I didn't get a package as part of some layoffs but I assume powers that be didn't want to voluntarily lose headcount.

Ended up hanging around for a year effectively working part time. Not sure that was the right idea or not (had lots of vacation which I pretty much all took) but year+ passed by and it was pretty obvious at that point I couldn't drag my feet any longer and didn't have the interest or need to do a job search.

Sort of does. Can't imagine it's a typical experience and makes me wonder what's so unusual in this case. There are always bad experiences with support but usually systematic tire fires indicate some other issues.

Years and years ago, I got a warning because I downloaded some new series or other there was a lot of hoopla about.

It wasn't something I did regularly but it was definitely a wakeup call that if I was ever going to do something along those lines, I needed at least some minimum level of protections in place. Not 100% reliable I'm sure but almost certainly enough to protect against random torrent tracking.

And even a larger company I'm familiar with has been looking very hard at lease renewals and has been walking away from a bunch of them. There's a certain lip service to the energy associated with having people back in the office but, in practice, people are being switched to fully remote if they don't come in and offices are being eliminated or swapped out for smaller spaces.