My lesson on corporate survival: do what the business needs. I was hired by Travelocity 1 OCT 2007 as a designer. After a couple of months of doing no work I

My lesson on corporate survival: do what the business needs. I was hired by Travelocity 1 OCT 2007 as a designer. After a couple of months of doing no work I was involuntarily reassigned to a developer position. I had to learn to program. I had to figure it out from nothing. It turns out designers and Java developers were a dime a dozen, but the business couldn't hire competent front-end developers to save their lives. I finished 2008 with a negative annual review. My manager had to intervene to raise from review to a higher level than catastrophic failure. Keep in mind I was learning to program from nothing on the front-end of a billion dollar website. Some areas of that website had limited or no safety controls to prevent you from blowing things up at the click of a button. In 2009 there were massive layoffs. Despite my abysmal annual review my job was safe. I mean super guaranteed safe in a special HR bucket labeled CRITICAL, DO NOT TOUCH. There were people with tremendous tenure and even directors and vice presidents that were being laid off. Some of these people walking out the door were rising stars in the company but every team was impacted, for fairness, using quotas. At the end of the day it was clear performance was only a minor factor in whether you kept your job. More important was critical need. The didn't layoff the very few database people that worked there. They didn't layoff the front-end developers. They didn't layoff the people who monitored critical infrastructure. In each of those critical roles there were only a tiny hand full of people (count them on one hand) keeping the lights on. Travelocity's primary business is a website and you need those few people who maintain that billion dollar website.