My dad has been a server engineer for a single company for my entire life and he lived like this up until quite recently. His fear oscillates in magnitude with the success of the industry the company is a part of course so it isn't always severe but I remember every few years as a kid I'd hear him and my mother murmering about lay offs. These days he just jokes about it being an early retirement
Don't wait for a layoff, start organizing a union for that juicy 'represented' employment status (as opposed to at-will). Unions can't stop layoffs, but they can minimize the impact, negotiate a higher severance, and provide advanced notice. I highly recommend the good folks at CODE-CWA, they specialize in organizing tech workers
My company has a 6 month probation period. It also has a 6 month password expiry. Because of all the SSO nonsense, it's quite possible for it to lapse without warning.
It's now a running joke that get locked out on the last day of probation, and you're expecting a call from HR any minute.
The current thinking as I understand it is expiry policies make most types of accounts less secure because users just cycle through the same predictable pattern of adding increasing numbers of exclamation points or incrementing the last digit at each required password change, and if you require new passwords to be too substantially dissimilar from x number of previous ones then users can't remember them at all. Policies that make people use minimally complex passwords because they have too many to remember and don't understand how password managers work inevitably increase password reuse between services and devices which does the opposite of improving security. Especially with MFA enforced, which I've been known to do as aggressively as I can get away with, there's just no sense in requiring regular password resets -- as long as the password remains complex, unique, and uncompromised. I'm not a network security expert but I am responsible for managing these sorts of things in my role and that's the rationale I use for the group policies in a typical customer's environment.
At my last job, every time they added or removed someone’s key card access, the system would reboot and everyone would be locked out for like two minutes.
We also had two floors that were connected by a fire stairwell, so you needed a card to re-enter the next floor.
At least twice my card stopped working in the middle of the word day while I was standing in the stairwell and I assumed that they just fired me and assumed I’d see my own way out.
Way too stressful. I worked at a company that was bought by a hedge fund and they were always downsizing, even if it was key employees. It made me under perform and caused insomnia that I never quite got over and it was 11 years ago.
Don't let that fear cow you into accepting marginal raises or career stagnation (assuming you're not happy at your current level). Severance (outside the US) is usually generous enough to skate into your next opportunity and, tbh, working in constant fear is fucking awful for your mental health.
Would probably say in your contract if you have any sort of severance regardless of where you live? Or is there some sort of mandatory severance in some places?
In most of the developed world there is a mandatory level of severance (and companies can obviously exceed that if they want but the base amount is guaranteed). In BC it's one week after three months (the probationary period) a second week after one year and then one additional week per year up to a maximum of eight weeks.
Most places in the US will have nothing about severance written down anywhere, but it's very common to actually pay severance in a mass layoff situation (unless the whole business is going under).
Ah but I love in the US, so I'll just continue in constant fear. On the bright side, those marginal raises go towards the hilariously high cost of therapy.