The safe job fallacy

Reading through various “laid off” threads on hacker news, Twitter and LinkedIn one thing always sticks out: The people most shocked by their — totally unexpected — layoffs are people who thoughts that their job was “safe.”

The “safe job” most of the time defined as:

• worked there for a long time (whereby long means a timeframe from a few months to decades)
• great communication with their boss
• the company was doing well, is doing well
• or was well-founded, is well-founded

I am part of the digital workforce since 1998. Since then, three big recessions happened:

• the Dot-Come Bubble ~2000
• the Financial Crisis ~2009
• the Coronavirus Crisis 2020

The story was always the same: People with “safe jobs” lost their “safe job.”

And it always was is totally unexpected … for them. Here is the thing, your “safe job” is never safe. There is always the risk that your job will be gone tomorrow, maybe even today. And it’s practically a certainty if you start thinking in decades. But your job loss risk is hidden. The risk is not communicated to you. Companies, all hierarchical organizations that employ people, pursue the activity of hiding culminated economic uncertainty from their employees.

Stateless Risk and Stateful Risk

Risk: the potential for uncontrolled loss of something of value — either through action or inaction.

When you bet on a coin toss, either heads your tails; your risk is 50/50. Either you win or you lose. If you wager a second time, your risk is the same, 50/50. It does not matter if head or tails turned up the first time round; it’s a complete new bet with a blank slate. The coin does not remember what happened before. This is a stateless risk, and it has nothing to do with real life.

We live in a world of stateful risk. Actions lead to (re)actions lead (re)action lead to (re)actions. And even if we do nothing, stuff happens, which leads to other stuff happening, which leads again to other stuff happening.

Or to turn it around: Things happen because other stuff happened. To prevent an “uncontrolled loss of something of value,” the only thing we can do is to act knowingly or deliberately non-act based on our always imperfect knowledge of the current status quo and the even more imperfect understanding chain of actions so far. Our life is not a coin toss. We can act on what happened before if we know what happened.

Hidden Feedback, Hidden Risk

The thing is, you need to know whats going on to act accordingly. Hierarchical organizations are hiding the real economic risk from their employees. Not (always) because of ill will, but to keep the company going. To focus the company on what needs to get done, not on what might happen. And anyway, we all act on incomplete data. But if CEOs would communicate that most of the time, they do not know what’s going on either, most people looking for safe jobs would neither start nor stay long enough to create value for the company.

Additionally, there is also culminated internal risk as most companies suck

• at giving their employees honest feedback about your performance
• or the importance of your job for the value creation of the company.

So if you are doing a sub ideal job, the feedback to set you on the right path might reach quite late (i.e., via damn useless yearly performance reviews) or because of social conventions not in the intensity, you need to adequate react on it.

And the work you are hired to do has the risk to get less valuable overtime — for the company, because of strategic shifts (a fancy term for, let’s try something else), because of more or less external competition, because of technological progress, because of other employees, because of you doing a good job. And you might not even realize all of this.

All companies fail over time.

In the end, all companies fail. Only 25% of new businesses make it to 15 years or more. 20% of all businesses fail in the first two years, 65% died in the first ten years. And even those that survive will go through boom and bust, hire and let-go cycles once or twice every decade.

You will always lose your “safe job.”

Taking into account the culminated stateful not communicated risk and the fact that all companies fail over time, we need to accept that “safe jobs” are a fallacy. Wishful thinking, nothing more. Said that, yes, there is no way you can have a safe job, but you can have a resilient career.

The resilient career.

Resilient: able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions.

Doing a job gives you three things:

• money
• network
• experience

Money

Being employed means money grows linear. Time equals money, with some percentual (getting a raise) improvement at some points. You can “save some for a rainy day,” but this gives you a buffer if you finally lose your “save job.” Said that a buffer alone will probably not be enough in the event of a global recession.

Network

Your colleagues, your partners, the companies clients, the people you correspond within your job are your ultimate network. (No, Linkedin cold connect leaches are not your network). When you start in a company, you have a short period of rapid network growth; after this, it goes stale or slow linear growth. If you stay too long, negative growth, network decline.

Experience

You can only gain so much experience doing one thing. Whenever you start a new job, you have a steep, harsh learning curve in front of you. Figuring out who things work, how things work in this company, how to make things work for you in and for this company. At some point, you are fabulous to know what matters in your job and how your company works. After this, it is smooth sailing and a less steep to a nearly flat learning curve. But knowing how one company works is not much experience, knowing how half a dozen companies master their challenges is. Experience is not measured via an understanding of one solution to a problem but via the understanding of tradeoffs of different solutions.

Always change your job!

Continually changing your job is the only real safe long term strategy. And never let it depend on external factors, only base it on your money buffer, network growth, experience saturation in your current job.

If you have a (1) small buffer of money and if your (2) network is not growing anymore and if you (3) do not learn anything new within your position, look for a new job. Your job will vanish sooner or later. Accept that fact. If you stay too long in one job, you might have a money buffer, but a stagnating network and a tiny variety of real-world experience. Your career might not be resilient enough to quickly deal with factors outside of your control, i.e., a recession.

It should not matter for your decision to change jobs if we are in a recession or not. There never will be a perfect moment. But if you feel the need to grow (your network, your experience), then act on it. Otherwise, you let factors outside your control be the master over you, and that’s never a good idea.

Franz Enzenhofer works in “online stuff” since 1998. He usually quitted his job after a pay rise, enthusiastic yearly performance reviews, or shortly after the birth of his sons. He is running his own agency now since 2011, with a break as a stint as VP growth at a debit card company in London. fe (at) f19 dot com