Random Job Cuts

Call them layoffs, reductions in force, or as the Europeans say: "redundancies". They are what they are: people out of work.

Job cuts. What a thing to go to sleep with and wake up to. :(

Not MINE, per se. At least... not so far. But the month is young. ;)

After driving back from KC and quickly unpacking to head to grad school, I get home from class late last night and log in to see what I've missed at work. Oh oh... (!) I missed some stuff, I guess.

Including an invitation to attend a 7AM meeting this morning to discuss the "announcements", which said that the company is going to eliminate some 10% of its global workforce, and that my department has now been repositioned in the organization (now reporting to what was once a rival department.) Yikes! Here we go again...

So not exactly restful sleep last night. And here I had been thinking that the biggest thing I had to worry about today was filing my expense account and trying to find tickets to the U2 tour stop in Chicago in September (I am SO there..) :)

Ha!

After listening to the executives and their corporate-speak this morning, my reaction was that it was the same-old-same-old. I have heard it so many times before, and have delivered that same speech myself a couple of times. I know what lies behind it.

I've been the man behind the curtain pulling the levers, and have also been the one trying to peek inside. I have chosen people to be cut, and have been chosen to be cut. I have protected people from cuts, and have been protected from cuts. I know how it works.

To the one making the decisions, it all seems logical. To the one hearing the news, it all seems random.

When I teach statistics, I lecture that the universe is deterministic and randomness is an illusion. It's a mental construct we employ to help us deal with ignorance - not knowing the details of all the causes and effects that produced an event (like a card that got dealt, or a traffic jam, or lottery winner, or a job loss, or a birth defect.)   I wrote about it before in some depth, so there's no need to re-explain the theory here.

Suffice it to say that there are reasons behind job cuts. They may seem random, but they are not. What's more likely is that the people making the decisions are 1) several time zones and walnut-panelled walls away, and have never looked in the eye those being let go, and 2) personal motives creep in to the decision-making process, motives to which we are NEVER privy. So.. the decisions seem random, arbitrary, and maybe even capricious. But it's just because we don't know all the details. If we did... it might make it worse.

So maybe the best light we can put on seemingly meaningless things is randomness. Like Old King Solomon said back in Ecclesiastes 9:11:

"I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all."

Granted that doesn't make it any easier to take when it's you that's let go. And it doesn't matter if the decider is some guy with an accent in another country who is no more to you than a talking head in a videoconference, or the President of the United States telling GM to go close more plants and fire workers he's never met. It still hurts.

But it isn't random. It's cause and effect. Even if it's you. Or me.