After a Couple Layoffs, Would You Still Optimize for Prestige and TC?
Jason•4d agoI’ve been seeing more experienced engineers say some version of this lately:
After going through one or two layoffs, they stop caring nearly as much about the “exciting” company, hot AI team, fancy title, or maximum TC.
They start optimizing for:
- a manager they can actually trust
- a team that isn’t constantly being reorganized
- stable headcount
- reasonable expectations
- decent WLB
- and compensation that is simply “good enough”
Honestly, I can understand it.
A $400K offer doesn’t feel as attractive if there’s a serious chance your org disappears 12 months later.
And a cutting-edge AI role can become pretty miserable if the manager is terrible, priorities change every quarter, or everyone is fighting for scope.
The part I’m curious about is whether this is just temporary layoff trauma, or whether the tech career value system is actually changing.
Would you take:
$280K TC + stable team + good manager
over
$400K TC + high-growth AI org + much higher reorg / layoff risk?
And once you’ve been burned by layoffs, how do you even evaluate “stability” before joining?
- Company profitability?
- Team tenure?
- Manager history?
- Backfill approvals?
- Recent reorgs?
- How strategic the org is?
Discussion
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I still think people underestimate how expensive a bad manager is. A 30% higher TC sounds great until you spend a year fighting for scope, get weak reviews because your manager can’t advocate for you, and then have to job hunt again. I’d rather optimize for “will this person make my career easier or harder?” before obsessing over another $50K in paper comp.
I think after you get laid off once, “stability” stops sounding boring and starts sounding like a feature. The weird part is that company stability and team stability are totally different things. You can join a very profitable company and still land in an org that gets reorganized every 6 months. At this point I’d probably take a slightly lower offer if I trusted the manager and the team had actually been intact for a few years.