Yesterday was still like a dream to me. I walked into the office at 7:30AM, and saw that most of managers had already started their day. As I walked pass their offices, I gave them the morning greetings one by one. And just before I arrived my desk, my manager Dan asked me to follow him into the meeting room. I saw our boss was waiting there and some bad feelings just went across my head as I walked into the room.
In the next few minutes, the thing that I thought would never happen to me just happened. I was offered some legal papers to sign off, walked to my desk with one of the managers watching me to collect my belongs, and then finally to the lift, hand over the office key, and that was it. After 3 years of working in Hitwise, I never thought that I would leave like this. It was at around 7:50AM in the early morning, most of my colleagues were still sleeping or on their way to work, and I had no one to talk to, no one to say goodbye to. In just less than 20 minutes, I became from a happy employee of Hitwise to nobody.
I remember that one of my friends set her status in one of the social networking sites: “Who cares about recession?”. And my reply was: “I don’t”. Because at that time, I believe Hitwise was still doing very well and making lots of profits in the global market, as suggested by our president Chris in the last company update a few months ago. I guess now I have to change my reply to: “I am deeply impacted by the recession”.
Later on I learned that Hitwise cuts around 18% of employees, lots of my close colleagues were also affected. I am the youngest and least experienced PHP developer in our R&D department, so I guess it makes sense that I was laid off.
As soon as I got home, I turned on my PC, loaded up my long-time-no-touched resume, and started updating it. Once done, I opened SEEK.com.au and started sending resumes. I did receive two calls straightaway after sending resumes, but no interviews so far. Hopefully I would get some more calls in the next few days.
We had really good memories in Hitwise:
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I actually don’t feel too bad now. It might be just a chance for me to start fresh from another great company. I did really like to work in Hitwise though. I love its working environment and the friendly colleagues. I will definitely miss it.
Thanks to all my friends and colleagues who gave me courages on Facebook. I think I am pretty strong, and learned to look things in more positive ways.
And good luck to everyone who was impacted by this great recession.
