I'm using this time to prepare because I think the cuts are not far away. The question is how big will it be and who could be the biggest target?
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All great responses thus far! I can offer this from past knowledge - where whole product lines are going away, so are those whole teams. Elsewhere, it will be political and know the final list goes to HR for review. No company these days does not conduct a full review of the list to ensure there’s no possibility of age discrimination, tenure discrimination, race discrimination, etc.. So you may start out as not on the list, could end up on the list because of a certain criteria you met versus someone else. Companies will not chance a civil lawsuit these days for something like too many people over the age of 50.
It won’t be possible to tell beforehand if you’re up for the chopping block. In an effort to do a worse job than Anthony, Harv has moved teams around by roll of the dice. Who gets chosen for layoff will be entirely political and not based on performance.
The typical layoff cycle is early Feb, usually a Thursday, you can check the public event calendar and EBC schedule and they block the week of a formal layoff so they don't run into losing speakers. Last year they pushed to May, none of the leadership plans were ready. In general Netapp is in constant layoffs these days with rotating cycles through teams... Expect Cloud teams to merge with the core sales team to drive some cuts, especially in redundant leadership, channel, alliance, marketing and sales ops teams etc. The selection of resources to cut is a political process with leaders sitting in groups reviewing the layoff lists based on performance and then pulling their "friends" off the list and replacing them so hard to predict, but usually teams being impacted and leaders being impacted have open schedules so check the calendars of leaders and see if they have dropped off. If a leader goes, their team is usually hit hard. Being new is probably an asset as cutting legacy employees and salary mass is usually an objective.
As always, update your resume, refresh your network inside the company and more importantly outside the company. Once your on the list it is extremely difficult to get off the list and you lose the internal network. Big mistake is to assume you are ok or over invest in your internal relationships. Cloud companies are hiring, Storage companies are hiring (Pure , Vast, Weka etc) with much better cultures... There are jobs out there but make sure you are in a position to find them and valuable to them.
Always best practice to keep your resume up to date and be putting out applications. Never know when something better will come along.
As a 2022 hire, that All Hands a few weeks ago pretty much told me that my time with NetApp is limited at best. I'd have to imaging I'm one of the first ones on the chopping block if my team is told to make cuts.
The last all hands was pretty much an announcement for layoffs. So we know it's going to happen or already is happening.
I doubt they'll ax entire product groups or teams and instead layoff subsets of those teams with underperforming products or team members. Regardless, I do think we'll see layoffs near the end of January or next quarter.
It's smart of you to prepare now. Everyone should be prepping for the worst-case probable outcome.