Pocket Aces, Four Times

Someone on r/auscorp posted overnight about their fourth redundancy in six years. A senior manager and a self-described high performer. Great feedback every time, nothing negative on file. Each time the direct boss looked upset in the meeting and said it wasn’t about performance. The post ended with a line that stuck with me: I’m not sure why I’m posting this, maybe to get it off my chest more than anything else.

Somewhere in there was a daughter asking, “Dad, why are you so stressed?” That was the part that broke them. I have a teenage daughter. I know exactly which sentence that is.

I’ve been in IT long enough to have watched a few rounds of this. The pattern in the comments was familiar. Someone said the axe starts swinging about twelve months after the backfills stop and everyone quietly absorbs the extra work. Someone else said there’s always a burst of hiring a year before. Another called themselves a “corporate contractor who happens to be on full-time paper”. None of them were bitter, exactly. They’d just done the sums.

One person made a point I keep turning over. Middle and senior managers are the easiest line on the spreadsheet. A consultant sorts the roles by cost and by customer impact, and a layer of management sits in the sweet spot of expensive and invisible. The spreadsheet doesn’t know you stayed late. It doesn’t know about the daughter. I find that both comforting and grim. It says it isn’t you. It also says nothing you do would have mattered.

The best reply, I thought, suggested reading Annie Duke on poker. You can play pocket aces four hands in a row and lose to a straight, a flush and a set. Good decision, bad outcome. Then someone else pointed out, fairly, that this can slide into gambler’s fallacy. The wheel doesn’t owe you a win. Someone brought up the Monte Carlo casino and its famous run of black. If the table is rigged toward black for the foreseeable future, because of outsourcing, AI, a soft market, then “your turn is coming” is just a nicer way of saying “keep betting”.

I don’t know which of them is right. I suspect both, which is annoying. Luck is real, and so is the structure. One commenter got a bigger job within eight weeks after applying for maybe two dozen roles. Another took six months after thirty-two years in the one place. Those are both true, in the same market, at the same time.

What gets me is the unpaid overtime. The original poster, after watching half the team walk out and a hiring freeze go on, worked late nights to hit the deadlines. It’s what decent people do. It is also exactly what makes the cuts survivable for the company. The work gets done by fewer people, the numbers look fine, and the next restructure has a clean case study. Another thread on the same page today had someone whose finance team went offshore and to grads, and who then absorbed four teams’ work and was told no to a pay rise. Same story, other end of the building.

Then there’s NAB, also on that page, signing an enforceable undertaking after underpaying staff by $127 million. I’m not drawing a straight line. But loyalty is supposed to be a two-way street, and it’s hard to ask for it when the other side is rounding down your wages and handing you a box.

I’m lucky at the moment. I’m in a field that’s still hiring, in a cautious sort of way, and I’ve seen enough to keep a bit of cash back and an updated CV I don’t need yet. That’s not wisdom, it’s a habit I picked up from watching other people’s Fridays.

What would I say to the original poster? Not much that the comments didn’t. You’re probably not the problem. Fewer unpaid late nights next time, because they buy you nothing on the spreadsheet and they cost you at the dinner table. And your daughter noticed. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. She also gets to see what you do next.

I mean that last bit. I’m not wrapping it up neatly. It’s just true.