Companies rarely go from healthy to bad news overnight. They drift, for two or three quarters, and the drift is visible from an ordinary desk long before anybody stands up and says anything. Learning to read it is not pessimism. It is the difference between having six months to prepare and having a Tuesday.
The signals are boring, which is why people miss them. A role that opened and then quietly never got posted. Someone leaves and is not backfilled, and the work is absorbed instead. Contractors go first, all at once, with no explanation. Conference budget, training budget and travel all become a conversation rather than a form. A tool renewal that used to be automatic now needs a business case. Finance starts asking your team for numbers nobody has asked for in years. A reorganisation that moves boxes around and produces no new work. Senior people leaving without saying where they are going. The roadmap horizon shrinking from a year to the next quarter, and then to the next month.
Any one of those is nothing. Four of them in the same quarter is a pattern.
What you do with the pattern matters more than spotting it. Do not announce your theory in a channel. Do not start coasting, because a company under pressure still promotes people and still keeps the ones who are visibly useful, and you may well be one of them.
Do the quiet, cheap things. Update your CV while the work is fresh and the numbers are still in your head. Make sure two or three people outside the building know what you have been building this year, which usually means a short message rather than a coffee. Check what your notice period and your notice terms actually say, because almost nobody reads those until the week they matter. Keep a record of your own results, and only your own.
Then carry on doing good work. If you are wrong and the company is fine, you have lost nothing at all. You have an up to date CV and a warm network, which are two things you wanted anyway.
Being prepared is not the same as being on the way out.
– Asael Shinder
