With the bomb about to drop....
I was laid off in March with the 21K or so other amazing Oracle employees. I was an M5 with 13 years of seniority and amazing performance appraisals. No one is safe. Here are things I wished I did before getting the 6am email:
- Draft that goodbye email and literally have it ready to send with all the recipients in it. You want that to be a 30 second activity when you have 3-4 hours before they lock you out
- Remove EVERYTHING now from your PC that is personal. Delete your cookies. Log out of Chrome. Literally make it purely work. Uninstall any personal software.
- REVISED: Unfortunately everything you created for Oracle is owned by Oracle. I lost everything and I'm pretty sad about it. But based on other's feedback to this post I'm revising my instructions, not worth the risk trying to save it or send to yourself.
- Download or print your entire personnel file. It took months for Oracle to send to me
- If you have outstanding expenses get those reports in....it took months to get those paid.
- Your insurance will only be good for 2 weeks. Get all your prescriptions refilled. Even better get any appointments done. On that front spend down your HCRA. Oracle will eat this.
I'm sure there are more ideas that others can add.
And for those of you who survive...have the courage to talk to your now former colleagues. Your manager likely won't speak to you...they are instructed not to do so. And likely you will feel conflicted--happy you survived but possibly freaking out because what will it mean for you. There will be plenty of time to worry about the reorg and ask the questions which won't be answered. Please instead think of those who are unceremoniously out of a job, out of insurance, got a crappy severance package, lost out on vesting of stock. Put yourself in their shoes and reach out to them...even a text will make an enormous difference.
This could be Monday. The last one was on a Tuesday. That would be my guess. If you can, do as much of this stuff TOMORROW.
Good luck