A stroll through corporate minefield
As the world moves towards an uncertain path where most don't know where it'll end up. I found myself in the middle of an interesting situation where things were working out for me. All of a sudden we see that top tier companies except a few where mass layoffs are happening and all these high risk high payment jobs feel like landmines and ticking time bombs.
So like most people I also aspired to be apart of these MANG companies and was lucky enough to have interviewed at Microsoft(I know this is not the M here :P), Google and Amazon(aws){yes these are the G and A} but never got through the interview process. Okay this is not just about MANG, there were quite a few dozen companies where I lost. And like everyone even I used to feel that I was not good enough but what I always forget is sometimes it's not you it could be the other guy sitting across the table. Even after interviewing around hundreds of candidates in my career so far and giving a whole bunch of interviews it always felt like each interview is something which can go either ways either you hire the best fit or end up hiring the worst of the lot. And this is what most employees and candidates feel and this is something which is natural.
A different perspective on this is something which I saw at my company which is a small startup where I started to figuring out what happens behind the scenes "The why?" of hiring, which is most of the times unknown. Now like all processes hiring is also a process which is driven by the leadership of a company. If your leaders are stupid your people strategy is also stupid. What happens at small startups like us was that either the leadership decides to carefully hire like us or go on a hiring spree where they try to hire everyone who they find smart. Now both these approaches have their own risks and benefits. Now the second one is what is seen in most startups, pretend startups and sometimes even some hyper scalers where they go and hire everyone they want thereby having enough resources to run any project they find valuable enough. But now the risk of this is you end up becoming a person who has just stepped on a landmine where you don't know if you would be needed in the company tomorrow or not. The reason why this becomes a landmine is because you, me, the company and the leadership can never predict if these projects can be funded for the longterm. And when you see disruption in the markets around the globe it blasts, and you end up seeing huge number of companies laying off people because they can't sustain these business. Now the first case where the leadership decides to cautiously hire, the teams are quite small and sometimes even understaff to do what they are asked to but even in disrupting markets such companies survive without even a speed bump in their growth. And such companies tend to do well in any situation and layoffs is next to null or minimal in such cases.
The problem here was people that even included me always get carried away by high paying salaries and growth driven mindset and tend to overlook the risks and we see the ifs of what if you would be able to achieve the high growth you expected. This is the sad but true reality of career progressions. So what do we conclude to? It's difficult to find a job which can keep you engaged and motived but it's even more difficult to hold on to it in difficult times. While planning your or even my next career progression we would want to see if how the company makes money? and if you want to take the landmine or stroll around the mine fields. The idea is not to say that some companies are good and some are shitty it's just a way to figure out where we would want to invest our time energy and some part of our short but packed life.