Announcement - everybody in cubicles 1000-1999 are fired.
We just merged with a competitor or had a management consultant report/market survey that said this business unit is no longer a core competency.
So you're all out, doesn't matter how good you are - the shareholders have decided.
That's what everyone says when this discussion comes up, but of course:
* It is far more likely that your pre-cash-flow-positive startup is going to die, abruptly, with no severence, than it is that NYSE Euronext or Coca Cola is going to cut 1000 IT jobs.
* If you can hack it in a startup, you are worth enough that finding another job isn't going to be hard. If you're doing it right, you're always going to have another job in your back pocket.
A point that this "debate" often misses: just because you're doing a bigco career doesn't mean you get to be lazy. You have to actively manage your career either way. The debate between startup life and parking your ass in the same cube for 15 years is a straw man argument.
Fortune 500 companies announce that they are killing their IT depts and outsourcing to $SERVICE CO$ all the time.
When you go for the next job interview do you want to say.
I was developing Rails apps to link facebook to Xbox for iPhone users.
Or
I was a level 3.2 group manager responsible for coordinating all inputs from level 3.3 staff and collating them for level 3.1s !
And I have technical experience writing macros in XYZ running in our custom ABC billing system.
Again with the straw man argument. If you're worried about being the 3.2 group manager responsible for etc etc etc, manage your career better. Crappy roles and big companies aren't synonymous.
So, let me respond. What looks better on a resume:
"I was developing Rails apps to link Facebook to Xbox for iPhone users", or
"I designed, implemented, and successfully deployed the first 3 revisions of Instant Bloomberg for Bloomberg, which provided IM capabilities to everyone with a BB terminal".
Because Bloomberg is notorious for crappy 3.2-group-manager-of-GS-integration-backend-foo-XYZ development jobs, but I have a couple friends who got to do Instant Bloomberg.
True story: I worked for a startup that was acquired by a large company, which then went public, and a bit later laid me off (and everyone else in my division apart from a few poor chumps kept around for maintenance). I got more in severance than I got from my stock options.
When you also consider that the same large company took one look at my skillset and responsibilities and promptly doubled my salary post acquisition, it's not nearly as clear what the downside is.
Announcement - We lost our VC funding, we were bought for a small portion of what we are worth by a company that is just taking a few of the best employees and some intellectual rights.
You weren't "bought for a small portion" of what you were worth, or someone would have paid more; more likely you had an inflated notion of what you were worth.
Announcement - everybody in cubicles 1000-1999 are fired. We just merged with a competitor or had a management consultant report/market survey that said this business unit is no longer a core competency. So you're all out, doesn't matter how good you are - the shareholders have decided.