I was made redundant.
It wasn't inevitable but it was predictable. My employer was exposed on a number of fronts - globally to the hydrocarbon down-turn, and nationally to the Australian engineering contraction resulting from a simultaneous collapse in the iron ore price, and the completion of all those infrastructure projects the government brought forward as part of the GFC stimulus. My employer was cutting costs wherever they could and restructuring however they could. And when the cost centre funding my position was eliminated, none of its successors were willing to take me on.
It was an error on my employer's part. A normal prerequisite for redundancy is, well, being redundant, and not, as was the case, being buried in spite of averaging 60 hour weeks. In a pathetic demonstration of misplaced priorities, I was glancing at my watch throughout my redundancy notification meeting, more distressed by my wasted time than by my imminent unemployment.
Having said that, my position should never have existed. If the IT department hadn't become so completely estranged from its internal customers, and if the Kafka-esque layers of bureaucratic and legal approval (on another continent, mind) hadn't accreted around every single decision, then there would have been no need for an engineer inside the IT tent pissing in.
I have never witnessed redundancies carried out well. Perhaps in the early rounds, the fat is fairly obvious, and can be excised safely. But when you're carving at the meat, the solid engineers who may not stand out, but work quietly all day to produce the deliverables that bring in the money, and then when you're chipping at the bones, the rising stars and greying subject matter experts whose presence alone will win you the contracts - that's when the choices in who stays and who goes can provoke incredulity.
But when you're finally amputating limbs, lopping off whole branches of the organisation, redundancies are carried out from such a position of glorious ignorance it begins looking like strategy. Positions such as mine which should never really have existed, but which keep broken business processes teetering along, can mask problems so well it can frustrate upper management attempts to fix them. Sacking everybody and waiting to see which bits of the corporate machine seize up can be one solution.
I think that was the intent anyway. I've heard of noises since my departure remarkably reminiscent of (my small bit) of the corporate machine seizing up. That they've been ongoing suggests I might have been naive to think anybody else was listening for them. Perhaps my overseas colleagues who took up my responsibilities have managed to keep them below a deafening level. Certainly they are talented and committed enough to do so. But supporting a country with only minimal timezone or cultural overlap seems to be taking its toll.
I thought I'd feel schadenfreude. But I can honestly say there is none. To an extent, I have moved on, and I am glad to say consider many of my former colleagues friends. But given the choice between keeping a broken process running or replacing it with something new, my former employer has, for the time being, chosen neither.
