> I talked to one guy who's a former Goldman Sachs guy who left to go to the tech industry who said the adage in the tech world now is "be wary when the pretty people show up."
I have never heard it put quite that way before, but I know that if I ever see someone in a suit, I start distributing more resumes. The same goes for an all-hands meeting scheduled for Friday afternoon.
The beautiful people just don't talk to nerds without some compelling reason to do so. (And they don't consider new episodes of Doctor Who to be compelling.) So when they do, you have to find the hidden motive. If you can't find it, the motive is to screw you somehow.
In my anecdotal experience, if they talk to me at all, it's usually to say some subset of the following: "We lost the contract, sold/merged the company, and now your office will be closed down, all of you are fired, and whatever work it is that you do is getting tossed in the trash. You get no severance pay. If you had options, they aren't worth anything as of this moment. If they are worth something, the IRS will want 300% of whatever you get from them because that way the company can save 0.5% on its own taxes. Vacation will not be paid out, since you don't have any. Remember how we merged it with sick leave and trimmed 33% to make it flexible leave? You will be getting your COBRA packets shortly, giving you the option to pay $4000 a month out of the $600 you will get from unemployment to continue having health insurance in lieu of food and/or shelter. Have a good weekend."
So yeah, be very, very wary. In fact, you might just want to prep for the bad-news meeting by stashing a current copy of the employee emergency contact list in your car and walking in with an already-active audio recorder.
I think it's ironic that almost all other industries actively discriminate on the basis of appearance, and yet the tech industry is the one under attack for being prejudiced.
I think one reason for this is that anyone who complains against an industry discriminating in favor of attractive people looks like a loser.
The beautiful people just don't talk to nerds without some compelling reason to do so. (And they don't consider new episodes of Doctor Who to be compelling.) So when they do, you have to find the hidden motive. If you can't find it, the motive is to screw you somehow.
In my anecdotal experience, if they talk to me at all, it's usually to say some subset of the following: "We lost the contract, sold/merged the company, and now your office will be closed down, all of you are fired, and whatever work it is that you do is getting tossed in the trash. You get no severance pay. If you had options, they aren't worth anything as of this moment. If they are worth something, the IRS will want 300% of whatever you get from them because that way the company can save 0.5% on its own taxes. Vacation will not be paid out, since you don't have any. Remember how we merged it with sick leave and trimmed 33% to make it flexible leave? You will be getting your COBRA packets shortly, giving you the option to pay $4000 a month out of the $600 you will get from unemployment to continue having health insurance in lieu of food and/or shelter. Have a good weekend."
So yeah, be very, very wary. In fact, you might just want to prep for the bad-news meeting by stashing a current copy of the employee emergency contact list in your car and walking in with an already-active audio recorder.