Victim of global economic downturn

by niranjanPosted on October 31, 2008 Posted in Life, Technology, UK

Yup, I became a victim of global credit crunch last week. Our CTO and VP for finance politely explained that the company didn’t meet it’s target last quarter and it’s nowhere near meeting it this quarter too. So, several jobs will be cut and mine was one of them. I think more than 30% of the IT team was made redundant.

Watching news about the economic downturn, global credit crunch and job cuts is one thing but experiencing it firsthand is a different matter altogether.

How does it feel?

Awful, I felt something swirling in my stomach 🙂 I can tell you it wasn’t a pleasant experience to be on this side of the table (it used to be other way round). Anyway, there’s first time for everything. It felt awful for a while, but the fact that this redundancy had nothing to do with my personal performance, and I had no control over it provided me some consolation. I was over with it pretty soon. I didn’t see it coming though and was caught with a surprise after enjoying my Dashain holidays…

After all it’s just a business decision for the company. I believe that whatever happens, happens for good. So, hopefully ShipServ will be able to weather out this storm. As for myself and other affected colleagues at ShipServ there might be something good waiting for us.

Its slightly painful now (you know you start thinking… oh my god how am I going to pay my rent, bills, food, blah blah…) but I’m absolutely positive that something good will come out of this. Lets see…

BTW, Cnet has an excellent list of 14 things to do if you are laid off from a tech job

Looking at the brighter side… I’m excited about new opportunities and have attended few interviews, which look promising. Also, it’s a good news for prospective employers; thanks to the credit crunch there’s one more very talented and experienced network, security and infrastructure engineer available on the job market 😉

Anyone interested?

Grab my CV here.

Orange is the worst ISP in UK?

by niranjanPosted on January 17, 2008 Posted in Life, Technology, UK

I don’t know about other ISPs in UK but I can tell you that Orange is the worst I’ve encountered. I’ve been without the internet at home for 23 days. The broadband stopped working from 23rd of December 2007 (for unknown reasons) until yesterday, but I still don’t know what was the problem. I’ve made more than 10 calls to it’s customer support and they’re clueless about the cause of outage. The call gets redirected to it’s support center in India and the support staff absolutely have no idea about the problem. Every time you call them they’ll tell the same thing: “The case has been escalated and will be solved within 5 working days” and they’ll ask you to follow the Livebox (wireless router) reset procedure. It’s probably one of the worst customer service… no followups, no idea about the problem and the service goes on and off like magic. They sign you up for a 18 to 24 month contract and once you’re hooked who cares…

I’ll probably never join Orange again!

Thanks to the iPhone, I was able to keep up with the personal emails and relatively decent web browsing.