Is it normal to be disgruntled after a layoff?
I got laid off my IT role for a biggish MSP firm, they just called some people to say they had difficult measures to take, I was one of those people…
So a month and so later, I’m still searching and I just feel bitter and jaded, I’m not getting calls back.
Is it perfectly normal for me to feel this way about companies? I’m still confident I can try to get back into it from this setback but I just feel these firms no matter what industry they are, are utterly void of any camaderie.
Am I going insane?
(TLDR - Bitter Bri’ish guy who’s just asking if being infuriated with this isn’t like a mental disease)
Executives need to present company forecasts to shareholders at annual business meetings. If they mess up the forecast so the business plan doesn’t match the reality, they scramble to make the books balance somehow — the easiest place to do this is by cutting staff so that expenditures line up with earnings. Modern accounting means that even though they still have payouts to employees, they can count this in a separate loss bucket so that the bottom line item that investors watch still comes out where they “predicted” it would, which props up the stock price, making investors happy and preventing them from replacing the executives.
That is one part - the other half is just simply that the market expects a response to any perceived failure. If a publicly traded company has a bad quarter the market wants to see some corrective action and it wants it now (long term plans don’t mesh with the constant news cycle of the market). Layoffs are a way to lower your expenses and cause a sudden shift in profit numbers… even though they nearly always result in long term damage to the company.