- I got a excellent performance review and a small raise. All good, keep on doing what you are doing! I was pretty happy.
- Nokia started to prepare for layoffs and gave units targets for numbers of people to lay off and amounts of money to save. They tried to spread the pain.
- Because of my team's multi site setup the choice came down to cutting at one of two sites. They picked my site. Management was concentrated at the other site.
- Because I was at the higher end of the spectrum in terms of salary, I was one of the natural choices for laying off. This was just done based on the numbers and had nothing to do with performance.
So, my bosses boss flew over to give us the news and that was it. Nokia was pretty nice about it. I was put on immediate gardening leave, I got the usual severance payment based on time served, and a decent amount of start up funding in the form of a grant.
Since things were chaotic, other teams in the same site were still hiring new people with roughly the same qualifications. I was actually bucketed in with a project I wasn't even a part of. That whole project got shut down and apparently it was convenient to pretend I was working on that just so they could avoid firing other people in different parts of the organization. Somebody had to solve a big puzzle and I was a piece that fit in the right place. It wasn't personal.
In retrospect, one of the best things Nokia could do for me was firing me. I was coasting and the whole thing forced me to rethink what I was doing. If you are late thirties and a bit comfortable in your job, you might want to make a move. Or at least think about what you would do if you were forced to suddenly.
Lesson learned: job security is an illusion and employment relations are business relations. Don't take it personal. These things happen. Part of a high salary is insuring yourself against this kind of stuff and dealing with it when it happens. Part of the job.
This is fascinating? What was it in absolute terms, or relative to your base salary?
Did you have to have a viable startup idea and it was paid to the incorporated company? Or was it just extra cash in your personal bank account?
Did you do that, or did you just get another job?
I've worked with Allianz's cybersecurity personas previously on EBRs/QBRs, and the issue is they (like a lot of European companies) are basically a confederation of subsidiaries with various independent IT assets and teams, so shadow IT abounds.
They have subsidiaries numbering in the dozens, so there is no way to unify IT norms and standards.
There is an added skills issue as well (most DACH companies I've dealt with have only just started working on building hybrid security posture management - easily a decade behind their American peers), but it is a side effect of the organizational issues.
That is their choice though - they could setup a technology services subsidiary, and then provide IT services to the other subsidiaries, transparently to the end users in those subsidiaries.