Mothership Hatch Opening; Thoughts Aloud on Dronehood

The rear hatch from which they airdrop supplies to beleaguered populations and troops to secret objectives has cracked open a bit, and the air whistling in is cold, very cold. This isn't a C-5, though, with its objective focused on the ground below. It's the mothership, and the engines are whining under load, and some of its personnel need to spread their wings.

It seems someone leaked an internal memo, and plans to quietly reduce headcount made the news last week. This week the CEO, who hates nontransparency as much as he hates leaks, confirmed it. It had to be "quiet", of course, so as not to impact the vast majority of workers not affected, and to make less a subject for public discussion the difficult time of those who are. But the news is out, and though the air out there is cold, I feel I'm one of the luckier ones.

This is because there are separation packages (SP) both voluntary (V) and involuntary (I). The ISP is basically a month of employment during which time you'd better strap on your parachute. It was performance-based and I did not get one (hence my feeling lucky). The VSP can be either a somewhat gilded parachute a week or two from now or a rather less gilded parachute if you don't find a job over the next couple months. I have a strong intuition against taking the immediate VSP, but I can't say how well informed that intuition is. I don't want to go through the hassle of starting over again after twenty years in one embrace, of losing a couple weeks of annual vacation, nor of managing the money I borrowed out of my 401(k) (yes, yes, but it was a good idea at the time), nor of losing my next sabbatical (eligible in fourteen months); plus external job interviews are always so much tougher. On the other hand, a glance at more news and at the business makes me wonder if maybe that more generous package shouldn't be looked at after all.

I got reorg'd out of a job because we're just not making it into phones, and tablets are hot and use basically the same core parts, so they merged those businesses and found supposed redundancies. But tablets (and phones) are hot at the expense of desktops (and laptops), and it's the continuing loss of sales in those that drove the reductions. Servers continue to grow, and so does the side business of solid-state storage, and there are jobs opening up over there. But I look at the overall company and wonder if it can they really sustain its domestic employee base on servers and storage while phablets, laptops, and desktop computers cannibalize one another, and competitors such as Qualcomm and Nvidia continue to make opportunities out of the burn and churn. It may be that finding an internal job this year only defers the break to next.

But wait, no, having written that, my intuition says Hold on and bids me think it through. Another year here is better than a year somewhere else if only for the vacation time and nearness of sabbatical. Oh, and maintenance of pay level. Not that I make so much, but I may have reached the point where my next job will be offered at less. That happens commonly with people like me who never became great industrial leaders and attain a certain gray hair count. I may be "worth" $Xk to the corporation I've been at all these years, but a sober reassessment by someone else is not unlikely to place me at $0.8Xk instead ... certainly not $1.1Xk or something like that.

I will remain a corporate drone, then, if I can, and buzz around inside the mothership rather than out in that cold if invigorating air. That's my thought anyway on this midpoint of the 25th week of 2015.