Life always has two sides. When the life give you the good side, it will throw you the bad side as well.
I'm still in the happy mood for my growing baby, here comes the bad news. Our group has been asked to relocated to east coast or lay off. It is a no-brianer decision for me to choose. Not to talk about any career potential or those kind of serious topics, just to think about I'm so happy to feel my baby growing day after day, how could I prevent my husband from this kind of happiness?
I'm usually on the pesmistic side for the world. In the past, I might be worry about looking for a new job in this uncertain economic world. My husband was so worried that I could be too stressed for the bad news. Weird thing is that I accept it calmly and put it behind me immediately. My emotional curve passed through so quick that I even didn't feel it. I'm not worried about that I will be out of job very soon. It's just a little bit pity that I haven't enjoyed the company maternity benefits. It's also a littlbe bit sad to see a great group dismissed. But other than that, I do not have any further regret or panic. My mind is full with my baby and all the joyness coming with that. Every time I hear her heartbeating using doppler, my heart seems melting down. Nothing else could let me risk that kind of joyful moment.
On the other side, from a professional point of view, I knew it could be a very costly and wrong decision for the company to dismiss the R&D group here. Our R&D group here has been supporting two product lines for many years with a lot of domain knowledge and lesson learned experience. We had a lot of great ideas about how to improve the products and make it better for the business. We have the rest of business team and operational team located in east coast. Since our company acquired another middle-sized company in the same wide domain and put our 2 product lines under the management of the new company, a lot of issues arise. The organization has been re-structueded multiple times in the past 2 years. Our R&D director left the team, and no local replacement has been put into place even for a year afterwards. One of the product line business director left the company, the other one turned to be changed right before the team dismissal. The new management team from that newly acquired company never has experience with distributed virtual team, and looked at us the same usage, but more expensive than their outsource India company. Since our R&D manager left the team, in a year, I have changed 3 different bosses who always have other higher priority to take care instead of team here! Now it comes to the time that R&D team will be dismissed here unless anyone is willing to relocate to the east coast, though on the other end, the new management team does not really prepared to hear any "Yes" answer to really relocate. It sounds like a good stragegy to dismiss the team without the limitation of new hiring due to layoff words. As a result, none of team members will relocate and all the experience accumulated in the past years could be lost.
For my professional responsibility, though I said I will try my best to complete the rest of projects I managed and help the transition process, I told my latest manager frankly that I would expect the business will be impact and has to be slow down for some period of time no matter how good I or we make the transition happen. Surprisely that my manager didn't agree and still think that business will be almost no impact to move forward. More interesting and ironic, the business director called everyone in the team here and tried to persaude us to consider the relocation option. He was also shocked by the news the same day we heard the bad news because no one in R&D department management side consider the business impact before making the decision. So now the business is emerging and growing, but no R&D support in short period and have to wait for the new team formed. To make things worse, did I mentioned that the R&D team in east coast has different skill set and has no idea about the domain knowledge?
It is really sad to see a great team dismissed and business, which I believe in mind, has to pay high price in the future. I heard about very bad morale among all business and operational team members, which actually appeared in the current projects I'm managing immediately. The emotional curve for the rest of people might take longer time to overcome.
What I will do? Take it easy, try to do more exercise and stay healthy for my baby. Enjoy the lovely time with my growing baby, and do not bother with looking for a new job. I don't want to risk anything for my baby with a new job or job search, which could be stressful for baby to feel. Every time I touch my growing belly, I'm so grateful that my baby is with me this time. My baby would feel all the sweet moods I'm having because of her or him. Next spring, after my baby delivered to kick off the new adventure in my life, I can start to looking for the next adventure in my career too. Now, I'm just eager to know if that's he or she to decorate the nursery room and purchase the clothes. Anything other than baby? not in my mind at all:-)
