When "Restructuring" has your name on it...

The morning of the 3rd of August started like any ordinary Monday morning, with my son jumping on me to wake me up at 6am, sharp. I eventually drag myself out of bed after a number of snoozes on the alarm (my phone this time, not my son!) and go downstairs to have my usual bowl of cereal and glass of orange juice. Then back upstairs to have a shower and get ready for work before heading to my office to logon. Pretty normal stuff.

First thing I normally do after logging on is open Teams a respond to any messages. It's normally the Devs needing a push to the UAT platform or complaining their services aren't running on the dev platform after checking in something a bit wonky.

After responding to messages, I open Outlook and check my emails. And that's when I see it. An ominous looking meeting with a title of "Business Announcement" from the managing director, scheduled for a few hours time. Now, I immediately have a bad feeling about this, mainly because the company I work for have a history of making people redundant, although that's seeming to be a much more common thing these days. Anyway, despite the bad feeling it gave me, it couldn't possibly be redundancies again. We couldn't possibly shrink the number of heads any more after the last time a couple of years ago. Especially after we've been doing well since the takeover by another, obviously better run, business midway through last year. After discussing it with my team on the daily stand-up, we agree it wouldn't be redundancies again. It must be the managing director leaving or something. Oh, how wrong we were.

Fast forward to the meeting, I join and before a word is even spoken, I see the beginning of a PowerPoint presentation with a heading the same as the meeting title, except this also had a sub-heading which said "A difficult update on our 2027 plan".

Fuck. Again? Really?!

They announced they needed to restructure the business, and of about 80 people work at the company, of which 26 roles are impacted. Rough maths, that's a third of all staff may be leaving in the near future. I say "may be leaving" because this isn't as cut and dry as I believe it is elsewhere in the world.

In the UK, when someone is being made redundant, it isn't actually the person who is made redundant, but the role instead. That means if there are multiple staff with the same role, they're all impacted. Then there is a consultation process where leadership team have to justify the reasonings, and also try to work out a way with the impacted staff to see if there are alternative solutions.

Anyway, on the meeting, we were all told that our respective department director would call if our role was impacted, and then the meeting ended. I immediately took the decision that I was going to do exactly zero work until I knew if my role was impacted. I was hoping this would happen pretty soon after the announcement, however hour after hour past, and as time went on, I was starting to feel more confident I wasn't going to get that call. Wrong again.

I was away from my desk and then I hear that dreaded Teams ringtone you don't want to hear even on a normal work day. You probably know the one I'm talking about even if you haven't used Teams before! Well, it was my department director, so already knew what was coming.

I answer the call and I'm told my role is affected, however it's didn't have anything to do with my performance but with other areas of the business instead... blah blah blah.

Fantastic. Just what I want to hear. I do my job well but I'm the one in line to be without a job in a couple of months time. I've been through this three seperate times before, but unfortunately for me this time, I am the only person in my particular role so it feels a bit like a forgone conclusion.

I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do next. I've spent some time sprucing up my CV and LinkedIn (eww) profile, and looking at similar jobs out there at the moment, but I find myself looking at them and feeling that I just don't want to do that anymore. One of the main reasons I've spent the last 13 years at this company is because I enjoy working with the people there and I like stability. The idea of applying for new jobs, having interviews, and meeting a bunch of new people fills me with dread. I'm considering leaving IT behind altogether as I'm fed up of trying to keep up and constantly chasing the next new technology, protocol, etc.

Fortunately, if my redundancy does come to fruition, we've got savings and a fairly decent redundancy payment to fall back on, so I've at least got some time to figure out what I'm going to do next.

Unfortunately, there's probably another 4 to 6 weeks of uncertainty and feeling lost whilst this consultation process happens.

To be continued I guess...