Laid off - one year ago today!

SEATTLE, Washington - What a special anniversary this is, exactly one year since the one and only time I was let go from a job.

Media accounts of layoffs (and commentary upon said layoffs) often speak of reductions in staffing as if Something Awful has happened - a grave violation of the social contract, a cruel trampling of peoples' lives for the sake of inflating the bottom line. This is hogwash - businesses exist to provide goods and services, not to provide people a living*, and firings feed future hirings as market processes work to allocate labor where it is needed.

In my case, I speculated that the RIF was a preparatory step to my company being acquired, and that's exactly what happened. The layoffs were the right thing to do, every last one of them.

Most people would look at my situation and say that I got myself into a better place than I was in at my previous job.

* No matter how stridently labor unions and their ideological allies seem to think otherwise