I hate these rituals at $bigCo, but pretty strongly believe I need the stability of working for $bigCo to feel happy. Is there somewhere that isn’t a startup that doesn’t have these issues?
In fact, you can think about OKRs as a cargo-cult magic charm to try to keep layoffs from hitting your manager.
Enormously less likely than you are to have a startup or SME shut down.
Much less likely, and guaranteed to be with some not-unsubstantial severance. Non-RIF layoffs (aka 'firing') comes with months or years of warnings.
A shift in perspective might help: instead of tying "stability" to time at a particular company, think of it in overall employment terms, and in that sense things can be extremely stable even if you work at a lot of different companies.
I know HN is 90% software guys but if your product is physical and you're at $bigCo this happens far less often.
More likely you get spun off as a different company.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ford-latest-automaker-to...
I think I may be less exposed to the risk of losing my job to an RIF due to belonging to an especially small but necessary niche (cryptography).
That perspective is an interesting one that I’ll need to devote more thought to. It seems particularly interesting in the light that the most lucrative and numerous employment in my field (large financial institutions) tend not to provide significant raises or internal mobility. The oft-stated workaround is to leave the company for 6 months.