Financial records: A publicly held company must file financial statements quarterly with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). While it's possible for these filings to obscure details of the company's financial position, they must follow instructions that present enough information for you to assess the company's health.
SEC filings are made available to anyone through the EDGAR database, which you can access through Yahoo, other financial Web sites, or at www.edgar-online.com. These filings tend to be long and obtuse, but if you take the time to work your way through them, you might be surprised at how much you've learned about your company.
Sometimes a privately held company will also make available limited financial information, either to employees or to current and potential investors. Private companies seeking to go public almost always have audits conducted by accounting firms. While it's likely that you won't have access to the full audit, the company usually makes available some general statements made by the auditors.
Message boards: If your company is publicly held, it almost certainly has a message board available online, offered by the likes of Yahoo, Raging Bull, or other financial Web portals. These boards provide a means for stockholders, employees, and interested parties to anonymously exchange information, rumors, and gossip about the company. Even if your company isn't publicly held, there may well be complaint-oriented message boards for employees or customers at sites such as netslaves.com and workingwounded.com.
Participating in a message board as an employee during work hours is a bad idea; in some companies, doing so is a firing offense. Participating during your own time is permissible, but it should be done with caution, especially if you post inside information material to your company's prospects. You are usually required to give the message board administrators your true identity, so your company may be able to use legal means to determine your identity and file charges if they believe you're posting information not generally available to the public.
That being said, there are few restrictions on reading messages posted by others on the board, especially if you do so on your own time. Yet information on these boards range from accurate to trivial to completely false. A good practice in evaluating postings is to follow the most active posters to determine if they have consistent agendas, or if they appear to objectively offer and evaluate information without attempting to promote a biased viewpoint. These objective posters are the ones whose information is probably the most reliable. Ignore those that have an ax to grind or are clearly trying to manipulate the stock price without information.
How To Evaluate Your Information
Once you've gathered information, how do you evaluate it? Knowing something about how your business operates during normal times helps in this process. If your business is cyclical, the time of year may be important. If the company typically does a lot of business during the spring, for example, and the manufacturing plant no longer has a second shift operating this spring, then it's pretty clear that business isn't normal.
Sometimes manufacturing isn't the key operation to focus on. A friend who writes embedded code for machinery reported that his company's manufacturing operations were busy. However, the company was aggressively signing up international distributors who were required to accept a set number of machines. When distributors couldn't sell the machines, they came back to the factory, and there was an immediate slowdown in all aspects of the business.
This means that you can't rely on any one source of information for your assessment. Changes in a single policy, or a batch of negative comments on a message board, may simply mean that the company's management is at-tempting to change the business to adapt to new opportunities. But if many of these indicators are negative, it probably signals that finances aren't favorable, and layoffs may follow.
If you conclude that your company's prospects aren't good, that doesn't necessarily mean that your own job is at risk. Your project may be an ongoing cash cow for the company, or the executives may consider it the best hope for future prospects. Every company keeps a core group of professionals that are needed in order to get moving forward again once business improves, and you may be a part of that group.
But layoffs are notorious for not following logical thought processes. Over the last decade, they've struck young and old, novice and experienced, entry level and highly paid, seemingly indiscriminately. Sometimes corporate-level staff members are let go. In other cases, line employees are released.
In times like these, you should update your resume, think seriously about what direction you might want to take with your life, and be emotionally and practically ready for some changes. Even if your job survives the latest technology employment downturn (and the vast majority will do so), this may be your best opportunity to take a chance and try the career change you've always dreamed about. And as in all of the previous technology downturns, things will get better sooner or later.
Financial records: A publicly held company must file financial statements quarterly with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). While it's possible for these filings to obscure details of the company's financial position, they must follow instructions that present enough information for you to assess the company's health.
SEC filings are made available to anyone through the EDGAR database, which you can access through Yahoo, other financial Web sites, or at www.edgar-online.com. These filings tend to be long and obtuse, but if you take the time to work your way through them, you might be surprised at how much you've learned about your company.
Sometimes a privately held company will also make available limited financial information, either to employees or to current and potential investors. Private companies seeking to go public almost always have audits conducted by accounting firms. While it's likely that you won't have access to the full audit, the company usually makes available some general statements made by the auditors.
Message boards: If your company is publicly held, it almost certainly has a message board available online, offered by the likes of Yahoo, Raging Bull, or other financial Web portals. These boards provide a means for stockholders, employees, and interested parties to anonymously exchange information, rumors, and gossip about the company. Even if your company isn't publicly held, there may well be complaint-oriented message boards for employees or customers at sites such as netslaves.com and workingwounded.com.
Participating in a message board as an employee during work hours is a bad idea; in some companies, doing so is a firing offense. Participating during your own time is permissible, but it should be done with caution, especially if you post inside information material to your company's prospects. You are usually required to give the message board administrators your true identity, so your company may be able to use legal means to determine your identity and file charges if they believe you're posting information not generally available to the public.
That being said, there are few restrictions on reading messages posted by others on the board, especially if you do so on your own time. Yet information on these boards range from accurate to trivial to completely false. A good practice in evaluating postings is to follow the most active posters to determine if they have consistent agendas, or if they appear to objectively offer and evaluate information without attempting to promote a biased viewpoint. These objective posters are the ones whose information is probably the most reliable. Ignore those that have an ax to grind or are clearly trying to manipulate the stock price without information.
How To Evaluate Your Information
Once you've gathered information, how do you evaluate it? Knowing something about how your business operates during normal times helps in this process. If your business is cyclical, the time of year may be important. If the company typically does a lot of business during the spring, for example, and the manufacturing plant no longer has a second shift operating this spring, then it's pretty clear that business isn't normal.
Sometimes manufacturing isn't the key operation to focus on. A friend who writes embedded code for machinery reported that his company's manufacturing operations were busy. However, the company was aggressively signing up international distributors who were required to accept a set number of machines. When distributors couldn't sell the machines, they came back to the factory, and there was an immediate slowdown in all aspects of the business.
This means that you can't rely on any one source of information for your assessment. Changes in a single policy, or a batch of negative comments on a message board, may simply mean that the company's management is at-tempting to change the business to adapt to new opportunities. But if many of these indicators are negative, it probably signals that finances aren't favorable, and layoffs may follow.
If you conclude that your company's prospects aren't good, that doesn't necessarily mean that your own job is at risk. Your project may be an ongoing cash cow for the company, or the executives may consider it the best hope for future prospects. Every company keeps a core group of professionals that are needed in order to get moving forward again once business improves, and you may be a part of that group.
But layoffs are notorious for not following logical thought processes. Over the last decade, they've struck young and old, novice and experienced, entry level and highly paid, seemingly indiscriminately. Sometimes corporate-level staff members are let go. In other cases, line employees are released.
In times like these, you should update your resume, think seriously about what direction you might want to take with your life, and be emotionally and practically ready for some changes. Even if your job survives the latest technology employment downturn (and the vast majority will do so), this may be your best opportunity to take a chance and try the career change you've always dreamed about. And as in all of the previous technology downturns, things will get better sooner or later.