It's been a tough start to a new year. Everyone in and around STEM fields have witnessed multiple unfortunate lay-offs happening in every company even the tech giants sitting on mammoth profits. Though the reason for terminating a person's employability isn't quite clear and many are left to wonder that they are incompetent, the truth is far from reality. I'm going to cover quite a few signs to look out for to not fall into the wake of lay-off and even if you're in the wake how to swim out of it.
This article will cover the subtle and blatant signs that you might be a potential Jetsam.
New day same shift
Waking up to a new day, routine fixing bugs of a project you've been working on for the past 10 years might seem like an easy way to mint money but the higher management doesn't. A project with no new updates is very likely to be caught up by a competitor company and realized faster than one might imagine. This is not to be confused with maintaining a software. Maintenance is necessary to make sure the piece of tech works but to make sure people use it, you need to add features, make it look and feel better and to prevent it from becoming obsolete. It's always good to have a talk with your manager to work on something different for a change from monotonicity.
Product/Service is an overhead
Most of us have seen how on-prem products slowly transitioned to cloud. Even among cloud based products we have seen how some products were a hit and some were a miss. There might be a possibility that the product or service you're working on is taking its last breath. It's always better to be informed about the revenue, client acquisition for that product and clients who have shifted from the product. This will help judge if the product is bringing revenue or just burning cash and if it's burning cash, it's better for you to move to a different product/team.
"Work-life" balance has turned to "life" balance
Deadlines are a major part of any project to keep it in line of business. If you find yourself working without hard deadlines or lately your manager has been giving you a slack on your JIRA tasks, certainly that's to prepare you for a smooth and gradual exit. It's counterproductive for a company to keep resources which are availing all benefits but costing the company man hours and profits. It's always recommended complete the tasks on time even if no one is putting hard deadlines.
Disappointed hierarchy
Hearing constructive criticism to improve oneself is good till an extent. However, if you have been hearing from top management constantly to improve your quality of work, then it might be something to be careful about. In the end it's all about the man hours the company is paying its employees for and they would always aim for more work in less time.
Boring tasks
Boring tasks are those kinds of tasks which no one else wants to do or it's not of much use to the company or anyone using it. These are those features which are inconspicuous and of a very low value to a project. The only reason someone might have assigned you this is for you to be prepared for a smooth transition out of the organization. Once in a while boring tasks are fine but if it has been continuing for a long stretch of time, it might be time for you to consider a quick call with your manager.
Conclusion
I have a ratio, which I keep in mind while working in an organization:
The ideal way would be to keep this probability low. So always aim to maximize the results of whatever products you're working on in decent amount of time. There is a way to measure this probability but that is somewhat an involved process, it's time saving to go with intuition on this. Whenever in doubt always make sure to have a one on one meeting with your manager and clear out any confusions which arise.
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