Sorry in advance if this sounds like rambling, my thoughts are all over the place and I'm posting out of fear for any support, advice or anything…
I've been working at company X for a few years now, began as an entry level position, job started off normally, got shown the ropes by senior people but everyone knew there was a lot of BS involved in the position. This includes fighting our own tools that often break and cause a lot more workload than necessary, but eventually I got into a groove and did well.
Fast forward the first bit of BS I encountered, my promotion from entry level to the next tier up is SUPPOSED to be automatic, but according to them after all was said and done, it was delayed a full year because my hiring date was about a week past the end of the promotional period. This is including my first supervisor actually understanding my position and the fact that I did the same work as my seniors, was already heading up my team for a few nights a week when one of our two most senior people left for a supervisor position after 6 months of me starting (were almost constantly understaffed) and I worked my butt off to keep up with the work that flooded in and taking charge of my higher level teammates, I impressed supervisors but nothing mattered, the senior manager (not supervisor) who I was appealing this to let it sit in his mailbox for a month before I saw an email congratulating him for moving on to a new team, all that work went down the drain and his replacement just canned it…
Moving on from that, I just kept on working, training people, all the while over the course of my time I've had 5 different supervisors I reported to, were a 24/7 position, understaffed because noone else wants to do the night position.
Continuing from that, we're nearly constantly getting new work to do, tools that kind of worked are being suddenly replaced by tools that should have never left testing, so we have more and more to deal with, it all just got to me.
Over time my burnout became evident, I stopped caring as much, stopped going above and beyond, just did my job and stopped bothering. I'm sure that Covid lockdowns didn't help with my outlook.
Time went on, I did what I had to do, I feel like I was still alright at my job but in light of seeing how little the supervisors cared, every one of my end of year review I was told to sign off on was Saif to be a canned response, not personal, but of course didn't reflect extra projects or effort or anything. I didn't feel noticed so I stopped trying to be.
Suddenly a couple weeks ago we get not one but two new people joining the team, out of the blue. We knew one was coming this month but the second was out of nowhere. I was excited to finally get to train again, felt good. But then the reason I'm writing this happened…
We're getting another supervisor rotation (normal) and we have our team meeting that we haven't had since the last one (mine) left the team a couple months ago. There is a 'RIF' (reduction in force) coming. Essentially a layoff. I got clarification later that this includes no severance package and is merit based, we don't know how many members are being let go and won't have any more info until the end of the month.
I've never heard about this in the years I've worked here, we've always been understaffed so I guess that's why. But it honestly scares me. I feel like I'm finally getting my life together, hiking rent shoved me to buy my first house and emptied my bank account out. My plan was to move on eventually but im not ready yet for a few reasons I won't discuss here. The job market isn't great and North Carolina doesn't offer much in the way of help being a 'right to work' state.
I've checked with friends on the other shifts that started with me and I was the first they heard about a RIF. I honestly don't know what I'm gonna do, I started applying the same night of the meeting but I dont feel good about the market at the moment…
Sorry if any info is being left out. I'd rather not make it easy to identify too much. Hope you guys are doing better than I am right now, working graveyard is hard enough but this looming overhead had limited even that little sleep I've gotten.
Thanks for reading.