It's been a funny couple of days, yesterday we had the work Christmas party in the evening we also had a surprise company meeting in the morning, which announced that we were being taken over by an American firm. Today there was a meeting where they said there will be redundancies ... Merry Christmas everyone!
Anyway it sounds like pretty much all of engineering will be ok as the new company has very little in terms of duplicated engineering focus and they want to maintain our current brand and since they have two software engineers and our stuff is heavilly software based they are not likely to be axeing too many of those roles. Other sections of the company where there is duplication may well be not so lucky.
It doesn't sound like we will get a clear picture till the new year of who will be out on their arse but still I can't help but feel doing this now rather than waiting a few weeks is somewhat harsh.
It does make sense of some of what has been happening of late and some general feet dragging from the US people seems sensible given they had no idea what structure the new company would be if it all went ahead. Plus all the hints people had been dropping and mysterious visitors hanging around painting bulls eyes on peoples backs are more clear.
I think I'm fairly safe and even then since there is no real way of knowing how it's going to pan out at this stage I'm not going to let it bother me over the christmas break. Still might be worth updating the CV ... just as a precaution.
Comments
That is really bad timing on their part...best of luck mate...
I'm amazed at how much this is happening right now...in the last 3 months Baron, myslef and Nibbles, Aggro, and now Matt have been in the vicinity of redundancies...
Fingers crossed for you, EMW.
There have been redundancies here, too. They're shedding the contractors bit by bit between now and February and have also laid off 6 permenant staff. There are 2 more to go. The permenant redundancies have been from the parts of the company that are not directly revenue generating (like the Developers). The contractors are being replaced with off-shorers. I'm certainly not a hit-list but it goes to show even some of the most profitable tech companies can have problems.
EMW, I hope the feel of the company doesn't change too much. When Pezza's (father in law) company was bought by Lockheed Martin, they pretty much ruined it.
Good luck man, hope it works out for you.
This is the second time this year there have been redundancies threatened this year and I dodged the ax that time so I'm hopeful to make it two for two. It's the sort of thing where this may ruin the feel of the company totally or not and only time will tell.