Fifth Avenue Forum

What idiot would want to move manufacturing from Missouri to New York?

Well, the other shoe finally dropped at work. They announced today that they are planning on closing our plant and moving production to New York.

Well, the other shoe finally dropped at work. They announced today that they are planning on closing our plant and moving production to New York.
Timeline gives us 18 months to find new work so it could certainly be worse. At the moment they’re saying product engineering is one of the few departments that will stay in an office here in Kansas City, but I can’t see that as a long term solution. So it’s likely spend the next year looking for a perfect job, and the following six months looking for any job.

Ugh, what a tough break. Having that much runway can be a blessing and a curse, make use of it.

I didn't like being all Negative Nancy here, but I feel like our little group here is well over 50% turnover from our last jobs in the last two years, many of us all or partly involuntarily.

Some of you have casually followed my journey at my company over the last while...pretty wild ride, but it's officially at an end.

Out of absolutely nowhere, I was let go on Friday. After more than 10 years...I'm the product owner (with by far the most knowledge of how our flagship software works) and VP of Business Development...currently in the final stages of revolutionary deal with a vendor that will offer us multiple new lines of business and with a verbal agreement that it will save our largest customer...subject matter expert in most of what the company does, blah blah blah...

Out the door. And no reason given. I asked three times during the 90 second call. And they said they couldn't tell me. So after the third time, I said, "well, when you come up with the reason, send me a text please."

No write-ups, no performance anything...just three weeks (3!) ago I was greenlighted $80k to $100k to hire someone under me to build out my team (which was just me)...I liked one of the interviewees, I referred her to my COO and CTO for a second interview...which they conducted. I went to Europe for a few days. Came back and asked, "Hey, what did you think? How we lookin?" and it was all positive. And then they said some weirdly formal message to me about that person not being able to learn agile methodologies fast enough (which is total nonsense, of course...it takes like an hour to know what you need to know about agile)...so I said, "So, we're just not hiring for this position anymore?"

No, will that effect you greatly?

"No, it won't. Because I didn't have this person to begin with. So I'll just go back to my normal day...no big deal."

And then the COO hired a personal assistant for herself (no one else has had an assistant in the company's history, except the CEO's daughter when she was president for a brief spell).

Anyhow...so, it went from "hire someone...you're awesome..." and then three weeks later, poof...

So, that's that...

One thing I'm heartened by is the flood of people - from my company, from vendors I've worked with, etc. - that have reached out with varying degrees of "what the **** are they doing" to "I'm not sure how interested we are in continuing to work with [company] without you"...so that's nice. Ya know, you are who you are based on what people say at your funeral, so that bodes well for me...

But yeah, that's not how I would treat people...but that's how they treat people, so...onward and upward.