The easiest (but not necessarily best or most effective) way to survive corporate life is to give your boss quiet, make your peers happy, and your direct reports miserable. Therefore, naively, people look very different depending on whether they are your direct reports, your peer, or your boss. Your partner is below him looking up; he looks very different from the standpoint of the executive looking down at him.

Case in point: budget cuts and layoffs are not fundamentally speaking failures from a business perspective. Sometimes, an executive just wants the money spent elsewhere, on some shiny new project. Often enough, failures to produce expected revenue do not have unambiguous scapegoats. Frequently, executives just suck at oversight - determining for themselves how things are going instead of letting their direct reports control the narrative and tell them how things are going.

There are further reasons: the consequences are harder for mid-level fires than for low-level fires. For one, there are much fewer open positions the more senior of a title you expect, and termination may simply result in early retirement. The personal consequences are worse compared to firing people with less seniority, who are perceived as having many more jobs open to them to find (for the sake of argument, leave aside for the moment the continued enshittification of hiring processes and actually getting hired anywhere, for any job). This is important both internally - executives don't want junior employees to perceive promotions as notice they'll soon be terminated - and externally, as disgruntled ex-employees have more influence on bad-mouthing their ex-employer if they are more likely to belong to the same upper socioeconomic groups. Firing 30 lower-level employees, by contrast, doesn't have the same effect on internal morale, or on external reputation among executive peers (just look at how many layoffs happened in the last few years).

The advice for most people is the same, because employment stability is an illusion:

  * Love your calling, not your employer.
  * Live below your means. The key challenge in life is how to desire less.
  * Stay in touch with recruiters and take an interview loop at least once a quarter.
  * Have a backup plan. It doesn't need to be fleshed out, just real enough in your mind.