by Serguey Shinder
There were consultants in the building from the October, a hiring freeze from the November, and our director left two weeks before Christmas without a leaving do. I decided, privately and with total conviction, that I was going to be made redundant in the spring.
I never said it to anybody. That turns out to be the important detail, but it took me years to see why.
What I did instead was act on it. I turned down a secondment to a new team in January, and the reason I gave, which I half believed, was that the timing was not right. The real reason was that it would have moved me away from the system I was the acknowledged expert on, and being the only person who properly understood that system felt like the safest thing about my position. I stayed on that system all year. I declined a course in February on the grounds that I might not be there in June to use it. I sat through two design meetings where I disagreed with the direction and said nothing, because the version of me who might be looking for a reference in four months did not want to be the difficult one. I kept my CV current and applied for three jobs without much conviction.
The restructure happened in March. Nine roles went. None of them were in my area, none of them were mine, and a manager told me long afterwards, in a way that was meant to be reassuring, that my name had never been on any list at any point.
The bill still arrived. The colleague who took the secondment led that team within two years. The system I had made myself indispensable to was decommissioned in 2024 and the expertise went into a skip with it. And the two things I did not say in those meetings turned out to be right, which we discovered the expensive way over the following year.
Fear does not keep you still, which is what I had always assumed it did. It makes you act immediately, at the full price, on an event that has not happened and may not happen, and every one of those actions is individually defensible. Not the right year for a secondment. No point starting a course. Pick your battles. Said one at a time, each of them sounds like judgement.
Two things came out of it. I ask myself what I would be doing if I knew for certain the thing was not going to happen, and whatever sits in the gap between that and my actual behaviour is what the fear is costing me, payable regardless of the outcome. And I say the fear out loud to one person, early, because a belief that stays inside your own head has no opportunity to be wrong for nine months.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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