Imagine a scene where your boss, HR, and manager walk into your office in the morning. You probably wouldn’t see it coming. You were enjoying the comfort of your full-time job with excellent health insurance, coming in at 9, leaving at 5, five days a week…
But the reality is that there is no job security—not the way you imagined when you first left school. The core logic of a business is that your role exists only as long as it is essential for generating revenue for the company.
I still remember my first day at my first job in a tech company in Canada. My team leader brought me a 2015 MacBook Pro with a charger, which was full of dirt. Although it was an older model, I appreciated that it worked reliably for the past two and a half years. Today, it is packed and ready to be picked up because I am no longer part of the company. The leadership team abruptly showed up in our stand-up meeting and announced that the entire development team was being eliminated, effective immediately. All of a sudden, everyone in the software development team was kicked out of Slack, and ten minutes later, their Gmail accounts were disabled.
It’s too late to say goodbye. But no matter what happens, life goes on and the earth keeps rotating.
So, the job search begins for everyone, including me.