I hate these rituals at $bigCo, but pretty strongly believe I need the stability of working for $bigCo to feel happy. Is there somewhere that isn’t a startup that doesn’t have these issues?
As recent tech layoffs showed, job security is an illusion even at big corps. I work in toxic and heavily understaffed group. And guess what, the guy who loudest complained about being understaffed was let go. Problem solved!
It's a false sense of security. At a $bigCo, your entire division might disappear tomorrow because the Board wants to cut costs.
A shift in perspective might help: instead of tying "stability" to time at a particular company, think of it in overall employment terms, and in that sense things can be extremely stable even if you work at a lot of different companies.
I think I may be less exposed to the risk of losing my job to an RIF due to belonging to an especially small but necessary niche (cryptography).
That perspective is an interesting one that I’ll need to devote more thought to. It seems particularly interesting in the light that the most lucrative and numerous employment in my field (large financial institutions) tend not to provide significant raises or internal mobility. The oft-stated workaround is to leave the company for 6 months.
In fact, you can think about OKRs as a cargo-cult magic charm to try to keep layoffs from hitting your manager.