I worked at this company for nearly 10 years before I was laid off at the end of 2023 along with numerous of my peers. I've long since moved on and didn't really want to write this review or think back on my decade there. But as this year comes to a close I might as well as reflect and bring closure to my experience.
I, along with a lot of other folks, drank the company cool-aid a bit too much. At least earlier in my career there I was surrounded by folks who have worked 20+ years in the company and promoted this "big happy family" concept. My coworkers were pleasant people to work with and the work I did was stress and drama free. I rose through the ranks in this company from a entry level technology associate to eventually becoming senior software engineer, having always gone above and beyond, staying late to coordinate with offshore folks, mentoring dozens of interns and new hires, and hosting team building events.
I was too naive and dumb to realize that everything I've done was ultimately a waste of time since there was no recognition of any of this. I've generally had a new manager once every year and no one remembers or cares to know of all of my contributions. When push comes to shove and layoffs happen, you're just a line on some excel spreadsheet.
Liberty has a general habit of playing copycat to other companies but don't let that fool you. They copy "good" policies out of necessity, not because they want to treat their employees nicely. As soon as it starts impacting their bottom line and when other companies regress, they will not hesitate to follow no matter how many people it impacts. One specific example of this was their remote work policy which like everyone else was adapted in the covid period. During that entire time leadership was praising us over how effective we were and how great that turned out to be. But at the beginning of 2023, following the lead of the likes of Amazon, etc they rolled out a deeply unpopular RTO policy. The announcement post garnered an unprecedented response, almost a thousand replies in the comments, largely negative which I've never seen in my decade of working there. I added my own opinion about how little this policy made sense in my situation since the rest of my team was in the east coast and I was the only one in Seattle, following this policy would mean I had to be in the office by myself, at the crack of dawn, just to join a Teams standup call. The fact of the matter is that the company many org changes and new hires during the covid period with a remote mindset only to roll it all back and essentially tell all those impacted to take a hike, get on with the program. I can't help but suspect that my comment about this played a role in the layoffs.
I know what I wrote is long and rambly, so I'll end with this. Working at Liberty is a job and treat it like any job. Don't be deluded into thinking that everyone is a family of sorts here, don't let them fool you into wasting any extra effort here unless you are absolutely sure that your contributions will be recognized and leads somewhere. At the end of the day everyone is expendable, I don't know why I didn't realize this on my first day when I got my employee N-number.
I have a personal philosophy of "never say never", but I'm not coming back to this company under current leadership. And frankly, after a year of working somewhere else, I'm not sure I ever want to.
