It isn't as if I didn't know it was coming. A week ago today, as I worked from our San Francisco office, the partners of the firm met in Pleasanton at the corporate offices. I got an e-mail Friday night canceling our weekly Monday morning meeting, because the partners had had an over ambitious agenda and needed to finish on Monday morning. I knew it was time.
Unlike most firms our size, our competitors, we have had but one layoff. Last January, when I lost 1/3 of my team. The decision was preemptive, and deep in order for us to survive and exit healthy and we made it almost a whole year without having to do it again.
I have had it done to me, and it is surreal being on the other side. Being the one who is management and having to make the decision and deal with it's consequences. It is easy to say it is harder to be cut than to do the cutting, but that would be wrong. I agonize over it.
This time around not only did I loose another 1/3, well I lost two of three workers, but I gained one from another team, so it was a net 1/3 reduction. But the 2/3s, they were young women architects, who I have had the privilege of teaching how to be an architect. I love that. And watching as one cried as soon as we told her, my heart sank to my feet. How could the career she loved treat her like a bad boyfriend? Well architecture is a fickle lover. We give her our all and she pays us back with a cyclical nature that loves to snap at her young.
And as if we who survived didn't have enough survivor guilt, we got a sliding scale pay cut that cost me 12.5% of my wages, but I am still employed. I am still working doing what I love. And I am reminded each time I walk to my desk that two young women that I cared about, are no longer there to help me do my job and learn to be a young architect.
We'd like to thank you Herbert Hoover (George W. Bush). You have taken a thriving country and in 8 short years torn it asunder. You should be ashamed.
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