When you're down - who are your friends

There is an old quip that goes something like: don't judge a man by how he treats his friends but how he treats his enemies. Or in my case, you never know who your friends really are until you're unemployed.

Last week my work group got re-orged, dissolved, RIF'd, downsized, rightsized, whatever you want to call it but in the end it's the same - we were laid-off. Oh, they were really nice about it and all, telling us how good a job we did and such, but in the end it's still the same in that you are being let go through no fault of you're own and it's time to find a new paycheck. Er, home.

The timing was tough for me in that I'd been with the group over 5 years and had just welcomed my first child into the world the week before. And my wife isn't working. And oh, we're in the process of selling moving up from a condo to a house. Bad timing? Ouch! Ah well, when life gives you lemons make lemonade, right?

One other thing I noticed is how easy it was to tell who your real friends are at work after this occurs to you. Some people treat you as if you never existed - as if all those times you bailed them out never happened and all those times how they told you how wonderful you are were never said - that once you were no longer any use to them directly they dropped you like a lump of coal.

Others immediately joined the "whatever was done previously is junk code/processes and now that we'll have a new team we can do real work and make quality products" bandwagon. Basically if they didn't create it, it's obviously a bad design. Nevermind that these same people who are now responsible for what you used to own never swing by and ask "hey, why did this end up the way it is", or were at the meetings where the customer put their foot down and demanded a certain piece of business logic be a certain way. Or remember when you tried to make improvements but management decided to make you work on something else, even if you were willing to make said improvments off hours. Yes, it's very interesting to see how people treat you when they have nothing to lose by alienating you.

But it's also motivating to see people reach our their hands to you when you're down. While I'm seeing some pretty shady behavior, I'm also seeing a lot of positives too. Family and friends especially, but there are also people at working sticking thier necks out for me, and it's been amazing motivating. So motivating that even though it seems like a lot of tough changes at one time, I can't help but be in a good mood all day. I admit I was in a bit of a panic/funk the first few days after the news broke, but in a strange way I am far more optimistic about my future now than before I was laid off.

While it's a bit of a shock to be told not to work on what you're working on and that your only job now is to find a new job, it's been quite refreshing. I see all the support email come in and am becoming quite adept at hitting the delete button without reading the contents. :) While at first all I could think about was all the work that I had wanted to do that will now never be completed and feeling disappointed that I couldn't complete what I had been working on, now I feel the opposite.

But now...I feel liberated. Instead of having to worry about updating all that old code - some of which was written 5 years ago, in my next position everything will be new. Or at least if it's old code, hey at least it's not my bad old code :)

So where was I? Oh yeah, who your friends are. Yes, judge not people by how they treat you when times are good and the living is easy. When you are flush with cash and have a cush job, and you are in a position of influence. Your true friends will appear when you are in more dire straights, when you are unemployed and pinching every penny. When you cannot go out for beer because you have no budget for it. Yes, judge people by their compassion, if you judge them at all.