Career Notes #1: Attach Yourself to Revenue - 11 January 2024

Google and Amazon are in the headlines again, for layoffs, again.  Initial reports about Google indicated a few hundred affected people, and newer reports are estimating more than one thousand.  Amazon is at similar levels, perhaps a bit higher.  Although Amazon is firing some of the creative folks in Amazon Studios, most of the people affected are "core engineering", mostly software developers.  Being told that your job is no longer needed, that you are no longer employeed, is traumatic.  Some people bounce back quickly, but most people are stunned by the news and take several days or a week to process and absorb the change.  Anger is often a quick response, but anger, confusion, or sadness are all the same in that none of them change the fact that you have been laid off.  Psychologists will talk about the five stages of grief, and entrepreneurs will tell you that it is a blessing in disguise.  Set this aside.  There are several ways to recover, but I would like to look at the root causes - to look at makes one a layoff candidate and what can one do to prevent it.

There are several reasons that make one person or another a candidate for a wave of layoffs.  Outside your control are reasons like corporations filing Chapter 11 (one form of declaring bankruptcy).  If a company folds, there is not much one engineer can do about it.  Or your company may be acquired.  The acquiring company is a bunch of strangers (to you) and, again, you really cannot do much about it.  

An engineer worked for me.  Let us call them "Chris" (not their real name).  The company we worked for had just be acquired and there were many rumors of layoffs coming.  Chris came to me and asked, "What are the safe jobs?  Can you transfer me to a safe job today?"  I told Chris that there were no "safe jobs", but that individuals can be safe or at risk.  I told Chris that there are three primary things you can do to make your job more secure.  Not "safe", but more secure.

The primary rule is Attach Yourself to Revenue.  As engineers, we all love to work on "cool" technology, on cutting-edge stuff.  It is rewarding, challenging work, but it may not be important to the corporation.  As engineers, we all love to deliver "cool" solutions, clever stuff that impresses other engineers.  It is rewarding to solve a challenging problem and show an insightful answer, but it may not be important to the corporation.  Furthermore, we can do cool, insightful stuff, but if we proceed in a manner that annoys our managers or causes them extra work, we will not be marked as important to the corporation.  Thus, before all the advice to be highly productive, highly creative, highly communicative, you want your most visible contributions to be important to the corporation.  Revenue is the more important thing in a typical company, so the conclusion is to contribute most visibly to results that generate revenue (and do not annoy managers).  When it comes time to name names for cutting, your name will be less likely to come up because losing you would (potentially) reduce revenue.  This works at salary-and-bonus time, too.  You do not have to be the most clever person on the team, you do not have to be the most productive person on the team, but you do want to try to generate the most revenue.

In this sense, "revenue" can take on many forms.  It may mean, simply, sales.  You may create or develop a feature that makes money for the corporation.  Or it may mean savings.  You identify a way to reduce costs for the corporation, savings that can be retained, passed to customers, or passed to shareholders (dividends).  This latter category can include reduced production costs or reduced support burdens.  

Working hard, being clever and innovative need to be focused on the right things.  If you improve a product that no one is buying anyway, it does not affect revenue.  Conversely, you may be working on some dull maintenance task that leaves little room for creativity, but that IS important because it is for the primary corporate product, the product that generates a lot of revenue for the corporation.  

This means that personal benefits coming from hard, clever, innovative work may not pay off.  Stay alert when new opportunities come up.  Evaluate them as if you were the CEO.  If you are a risk-loving adreneline junky, you might want to chosse the cool new project.  But if you are seeking to be "safe", you might want to select the job that has the greatest revenue opportunity and attach yourself to that project.  It may feel less satisfying to work on such a job, but you can channel your creativity into other areas of your life.