Six weeks into my new job, and the day after my father-in-law passed away after a brief battle with cancer, $BIGCOMPANY swung the axe on 7% of engineering, including my entire group plus our manager (and most of the floor of the building we were in). Of the layoffs I've been through, including the ones where I had to lay people off, this one was handled fairly crisply and decently, without any disrepect for the people being shown the door. The severance package was reasonable, too. At noon, the local brewpub (Tied House), was full of recently redundant, exchanging email addresses and phone numbers, and promising to stay in contact.
Thus ends my experiment of working with a big company. I'll stick with situations where I know the people who're making key decisions. Meeting your division V.P. for the first time when he's in town to lay you off kinda sucks.
And then the flu hit.
Fortunately, I have a big backlog of books at home. Alistair Reynold's Chasm City is a fun read so far. There are a couple of Agile Development books in queue behind that, and I'm looking for a good, beyond-the-basics book on data warehousing and data mining.
