Just saw a job posting for the exact position I was let go from a few months ago. Does anyone making these decisions have any shame? Has this happened to anyone else? It's a slap in the face honestly.
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EM has bought in and there’s nothing to profit from so they will hollow out the company, send development overseas, where there is no IP legal protection and by the time they cash out, Medtronic will collapse. Many good engineers will be laid off in that push to mediocrity.
@ce Sigh. I also never said that lawyers make decisions about who gets laid off. Managers make that call, lawyers make it happen legally.
A lot of you on here are really quite emotionally immature.
@bt Never said that everyone that gets let go deserves it. That's you and your emotions. Perhaps you should calm down and try and read better.
@bm I quit and went to the competition. Next question.
Imagine pretending people don't get "laid off" for performance. There are some smart people on this board, but some people here are really astoundingly lacking in self awareness and maturity about how things work in the corporate world.
@be
I used to work at Medtronic as a contractor. My job was sent to India. IMO, I observed very excellent contractors who were highly productive and routinely automated manual processes which fits in with the "move to AI" because automation does integrate with AI effectively. Now, contractors are usually the first line items to go regardless of "performance reviews". It's an "at will" contract. As an experienced lawyer, you would likely point out "no cause is needed" to end a contract. So, there's that.
Now, as an experienced engineer with over 25 years of experience and multiple master's degrees in STEM centered upon medical devices, I focus on risk assessment, quality, and management of quality versus time versus budget. It's a form of engineering optimization. I observed very elite STEM engineers laid off with jobs sent to India. These were full time employees with many years of experience. One of the best in his field I ever met was at Medtronic, and he had over 25 years of experience. His department was gradually reduced until he was laid off. His department was essentially outsourced to India.
Now, as for India, I had to train them before I left. I found them to be highly inexperienced and at high risk of making errors and slowing production. Moreover, technical writing for FDA compliance becomes very high risk when moving jobs offshore. I've literally seen requirements having to be rewritten from scratch at one other medical device company.
From the purview of data science, i saw two lawyers make comments that look like objections in court. I must have watched that "People vs OJ" about 30 times in the classic legal battles of objections and counter objections by the prosecution versus the defense. From nuance, the lawyers seem to suggest the following categories: (1) category A involves layoffs which effect high performers, (2) category B involves "firing" of low performers and (3) category C involves some sort of "quasi-layoffs" for a legal term referred to as "release" for employees who are low performers but likely to sue. That also begs the question if there are other categories? Old employees are given "strong persuasion" to retire to facilitate an RIF without a formal "layoff"?
From my observations and having watched many YT videos by employment lawyers, I saw cases where it appears there could be grounds for "age discrimination" - especially by subject matter experts whose elite knowledge will most likely not be matched by sub par performance in offshore teams. I also saw white males who IMO are not racist but are still at risk. I am a minority engineer, but I am an "old minority". The older minorities tend to have higher thresholds and don't get offended so easily. Think of Muhammad Ali participating in the classic "Dean Martin Roasts" back in the 1970s. By contrast, young Gen Z can be very hypersensitive. A comment that is not deemed offensive by the old school minorities could very well be vilified by young Gen Z - the "woke" crowd. Which means they document what they deem as offensive on video with a smartphone and dox it or send it to a lawyer for a lawsuit. The same goes with s-xism. I know older women who loved "M.A.S.H." But that show would be doxed as "a toxic male example" in today's woke generation. So, I saw men at Medtronic who are at very high risk of being doxed for racism or s-xism due to very low thresholds of tolerance in young Gen Z which had been far less likely among Boomers or Gen X (e.g. Muhammad Ali versus young left-wing protesters of Gen Z at a school like Berkeley).
The fact that lawyers are facilitating layoffs to help move jobs offshore tells me those lawyers are not technical in STEM engineering. They are likely making mistakes without knowing it much like Marcia Clark lacked the STEM expertise to know her lab personnel had fumbled the evidence. By contrast, Barry Scheck was very astute in state-of-the-art DNA forensic science which was new at the time. So, does Medtronic have counsel with a JD/PhD in STEM fields with electrical, mechanical, biomedical, or computer engineering? It doesn't look like it. They are more like Marcia Clark then Barry Scheck (it seems). So, lawyers can object just like Marcia Clark did. But that doesn't mean they're right.
So, lawyers make mistakes. Modern AI analysis shows OJ was guilty and that "planting the glove" as Cochran and Bailey claimed was not scientifically plausible. I suspect mistakes have been made by corporate counsel at Medtronic as well - the "Marcia Clark" genre of lawyers missing a STEM background. Medtronic needs counsel more like Barry Scheck with a deep STEM base of knowledge.
I put this term into Google AI Gemini: "Corporate counsel in medical device companies often lack a STEM background which can lead them to make mistakes." The output was very comprehensive. The manager of corporate counsel should check it out. Part of it said "In the medical device industry, corporate counsel without a STEM background face significant challenges due to the high technical complexity of products. This gap can lead to critical errors in regulatory compliance, risk management, and intellectual property protection."
I'm glad I don't work at Medtronic anymore. I am excelling in finance at my new job but still do medical device work in a PhD in collaboration with data from the Mayo Clinic after work and on weekends. I'm in the intermediate stages of the dissertation and making progress while gaining new AI skills daily.
AI can now do the work of junior associate law school graduates. If lawyers want to survive, they need to add AI asap if they haven't done so already. If I had to do it all over, I would have done a JD/PhD and done patent law when I was younger. But the PhD is still great for medical device research since Medtronic ended its contract for me. I'll bet they regret it now that they've seen my posts here - lol. I could have helped them transition to AI more efficiently. On Friday, I saw a seminar where a physician used an avatar to enhance communication with patients using AI. I know how to do AI models for EHR, clinical trials, medical imaging, and control systems for electro-mechanical devices.
Great employees are being pushed out of roles and the job is being posted right away.
I have never seen one example off shoring improve quality. Not once!
What is worse I have seen more than once where a group is penalized for the quality issues of their service providers. I seen these same groups raise the issues up to the highest level only to be told you have to live with it. The game is rigged my friends and you are not allowed to win! This is the reality at this company.
@be everybody reading this board knows good employees who were laid off at some point for no reason other than corporate wants to cut expenses. So you can lie and say that everyone who gets let go deserves it, but we all have seen the truth with our own eyes and know you’re full of it. I was part of a team where 90% of it was offshored and the quality of work suffered as a result.
So the bell curve strategy.
@be were you let go for the same reason?
@a9 As ex counsel at MDT, you're the one being dishonest.
Yes, plenty of good performers get laid off all the time, and the layoffs are genuine.
However, there are also tons of poor performers/highly-likely-to-sue individuals that get "laid off" as a means to getting them to sign a release. That also happens all the time.
You need to grow up.
I worked in Employment Law at MDT.
You weren't actually laid off. You were fired for being a low performer that was either not managed, or too risky to just fire. There is either some kind of risk associated with you or your manager did a sh*t job at managing your performance on time.
It's very unlikely they decided to re-hire for a truly laid off role. It's a requirement of the JE (Job Elimination) form that they provide a justification for the elimination of the role, and then they are held to not rehiring for it for 6-12 months.
People here can attack this comment all they want. To the person saying it's a "bootlicker attitude", you are doing OP no favors. You think MDT doesn't choose layoff and payout as the option for the intersection of high risk + low performing + possibly litigious people all the time?
It's the truth, and I'm saying it so that OP has an opportunity to look inwards and see if there is anything they can improve about their performance, or their attitude.
@az OP will need to return all or partial severance package if resume the previous job if just a couple of months.
DId you apply for the job or are you already back to work?
@a7 this is such a dishonest, corporate bootlicking attitude. Each round of layoffs I’ve seen good, honest people worth their salary get let go. If your theory was true, the entire c-suite would laid off next week.
Laying off instead of firing has been the popular corporate strategy for awhile now for cutting high salaried or low performance workers.
Which one are you?