>> ...to the company, I was just a row in an Excel sheet.
TL;DR it won't make you feel better but you're not a row in a spreadsheet; you're a fungible generic resource.
<For all but the smallest organizations>
At a certain level and/or for specific events, executive leadership is playing checkers not chess. You see this in overall staffing, budgets and lay-offs. Your executive is tasked with very excel-like tasks, such as "cut n people" or "trim your budget xx%". They then get political and attack specific initiatives or teams, or peanut-butter it across everyone. By definition they need to work at a generic level to "scale". When it gets to selecting the actual people, it's either done by the people who DO know individuals but you might not have credibility and a good reputation (or worse, they actively target you), or at an even less related metric, like a calc that provides the perception of "fairness" (true story: I saw HR try and calc how much "experience" we could get for each dollar of salary). IME only if it's a very small layoff (~ < 10-15%) and selected by the front-line manager do you see the high performers saved, and it's still political.
Context: I report to the CTO but still have lots of direct interaction with ICs. I struggle to meld these worlds at the intersection almost daily. I've been involved it doing the lay-offs at two companies.
Aside: there are TWO failures in doing what is the incredibly unpleasant job of laying people off:
1. Everyone knows you only get one lay-off before it's all over. After the second round nothing gets done. You almost always hear "this is the only round" and I believe leadership actually believes this, there's just know way they can know for sure.
2. Botching the order of operations. You need to get your sh!t in order and not do stuff like send out the laptop return courier before the announcement, or cause extra panic and confusion with timing and poor messaging. Ignorance, Incompetence or Schadenfreude; I have no sympathy for less than perfect behaviour and execution here.
TL;DR it won't make you feel better but you're not a row in a spreadsheet; you're a fungible generic resource.
<For all but the smallest organizations>
At a certain level and/or for specific events, executive leadership is playing checkers not chess. You see this in overall staffing, budgets and lay-offs. Your executive is tasked with very excel-like tasks, such as "cut n people" or "trim your budget xx%". They then get political and attack specific initiatives or teams, or peanut-butter it across everyone. By definition they need to work at a generic level to "scale". When it gets to selecting the actual people, it's either done by the people who DO know individuals but you might not have credibility and a good reputation (or worse, they actively target you), or at an even less related metric, like a calc that provides the perception of "fairness" (true story: I saw HR try and calc how much "experience" we could get for each dollar of salary). IME only if it's a very small layoff (~ < 10-15%) and selected by the front-line manager do you see the high performers saved, and it's still political.
Context: I report to the CTO but still have lots of direct interaction with ICs. I struggle to meld these worlds at the intersection almost daily. I've been involved it doing the lay-offs at two companies.
Aside: there are TWO failures in doing what is the incredibly unpleasant job of laying people off:
1. Everyone knows you only get one lay-off before it's all over. After the second round nothing gets done. You almost always hear "this is the only round" and I believe leadership actually believes this, there's just know way they can know for sure.
2. Botching the order of operations. You need to get your sh!t in order and not do stuff like send out the laptop return courier before the announcement, or cause extra panic and confusion with timing and poor messaging. Ignorance, Incompetence or Schadenfreude; I have no sympathy for less than perfect behaviour and execution here.