Raise, paycut, pay freeze, or layoff? Dealing with unease in the Silicon Valley

The latest news is that the unemployment rate in the Silicon Valley is now at 11.2% and this is the highest unemployment rate on record for our area.  From a survey of my friends and family it seems that everyone is a bit unsettled about their jobs right now.  Here is what I found.

Many of the large tech companies around here already went through rounds of publicized and internally announced layoffs and a good majority has had pay freezes or paycuts starting as early as late last year.  These are all public companies that you probably have heard of.  Basically noone I know in a large company has had a raise this year with the exception of people at Lockheed Martin.  Lockheed is doing fine since is a defense contractor and we are in the midst of war.  The government cut some of their contracts and added others.    The largest organization in California is the state of California itself, and we all know how terrible the state coffers are right now.  Pretty much all public employees I know are  getting paycuts in the form of furloughs and some are being laid off.  Banking is another industry that got hit extremely hard for obvious reasons.  For example, we have a Downey Savings, WaMu, Wachovia, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America all on the same block.  Two of those banks are technically dead.

On the flip side the friends I know that work for smaller corporations still managed to get raises and bonuses this year.  This is not to say that smaller companies are doing better than larger corporations as a whole, but I think that in general smaller companies have less fat to trim than large corporations.  Most startups tend to pay less than large companies, and have a leaner team to operate everything.    For the most part raises are rare this year, and they are also much smaller than previous years.   Many small companies depend on the spending of large corporations so there is really a trickle down effect.   Personally I have no idea if my company is giving out raises, but I am not expecting anything.  I would seriously be happy with a 1% raise just to cover the increase in state taxes.  The hubby got a small 3.75% raise and I am pretty happy about that even though it is smaller than any previous raise.

Anyway, the greater economy is really out of our control, and I am pretty grateful that we still have jobs.  However, I think everyone should try to give themselves a bonus or raise through saving or earning more money.  I have done several things to essentially give ourselves a raise this year such as refinancing our mortgage, renegotiating our rent, and continuing to blog.  Reducing our mortgage and rent is basically saving us 3300 after tax money every year, and that is significant.  My blogging income is also much higher than last year as my articles age and I have a bigger collection of articles.  These changes make me a little less uneasy about the general doom and gloom atmosphere we are in, and I am hopeful that the American economy will recover eventually.

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