The Glamorous Life of a Systems Engineer (SE)
Involuntary Career Transitions
Let’s talk about the ugly world of “right sizing.” Or perhaps we should call it “workforce realignment,” or maybe “organizational restructuring,” “optimization,” or that oldie but goodie, “business transformation.” No matter what euphemism upper management chooses to use, the bottom line is that we’re discussing layoffs. This means that many of our beloved coworkers are quietly and dejectedly updating their LinkedIn pages with phrases like “seeking new opportunities.”
Corporate layoffs, from a systems engineer’s perspective, are a dismally predictable ritual. I have seen this same pattern of botched deployments repeated nearly every other year over my entire career:
- Poor Planning – Execs over-hired like drunken sailors chasing “hypergrowth” without noticing that the cash burn was hotter than a misconfigured firewall. Suddenly, surprise, all the money is gone.
- Bad Communication – Leadership announces the layoffs with a 5 a.m. email. An early morning all-hands call will follow. Bonus points for locking employees out of their accounts before the call ever takes place. This is a typical “kill the process before checking the logs” move.
- Survivors’ Guilt: SE Edition – The folks left behind now have twice the workload and half the morale. It’s like inheriting a data center after the last guy rage-quit mid-patch. We all smile on Zoom, but our Jira boards look like scenes from a disaster movie.
- Exec Spin – The PowerPoint says “strategic realignment.” Translation: throwing away the bath water and the baby.
Let’s not overlook the cruelest irony: The same geniuses who steered this ship into the iceberg somehow all kept their jobs. – If I pushed out a config that tanked this badly, I’d be polishing my resume before the error logs finished updating. But if you’re an exec, congrats! You’re a “visionary,” and you “weathered the storm.”
For those of us still standing, layoffs lead to a few new behaviors:
- Learning who actually does what (spoiler: it was the person they just fired).
- Trying to automate twice as much with half the resources.
- Avoiding HR’s “resilience workshops,” because nothing improves morale as much as mandatory mindfulness while you are grossly overloaded and your good friends are jobless.
Layoffs can be devastating. They painfully remind us of one universal truth: in tech, people aren’t “resources” that you can scale up and down like Kubernetes pods. But try telling that to leadership (or even the inappropriately named “Human Resources” managers); they’re too busy planning the next “we are family” meeting for the survivors.
On that note, I have a sudden urge to update my LinkedIn profile.
Stay tuned for more nerdy columns about my experiences as an SE. Next month’s topic: mergers and acquisitions.
