How to make the best of continuing to stay after layoffs?

For anyone who stayed in the company during mass layoffs, how was the experience after staying?

1. Morale goes down - This is the biggest one, and it weaves into every aspect of your work, especially if you're a senior+ engineer with a more collaborative day-to-day.
2. Workload goes up - Team charters always remain the same, but now there's less people to carry them out. Oncalls become thinner.
3. Retention bonuses may go up - This depends a lot on how much your company cares about its talent, but I've heard a lot of recent anecdotal data points of high-performing layoff "survivors" getting huge raises in the most recent performance review cycle. For top-shelf US companies like Robinhood and Meta, I know senior engineers who got a $100k TC increase.

Is there a way to put the case forward for the compensation revisit?

Yes, but it will be tricky. Negotiation is always about leverage, and tech workers don't have a ton of leverage in the current economic climate. If you can't get a competing off while working, your only real leverage is threatening to leave. Appealing to goodwill is tricky as every business, especially those who just did layoffs, just want to save money. Even if your manager is 100% supportive of your raise, it's not likely your director and VP will also agree.

For more threads about this, I recommend these:

• "How do I ask for an out-of-cycle pay increase?"
• "How to ask for a pay raise at my current job?"

In general, it’s very hard to negotiate with your current employer, and even harder in this market. To explore that route, I’d start chatting informally with coworkers, and potentially even your manager if you have a good relationship with them. Check if any of them had any luck negotiating their compensation with the company.

Where this could work: if the company is doing their annual salary adjustment. In these cases, you can suggest to your manager what you’re expecting, and justify that with some combination of (1) you’re doing more work due to the layoffs and (2) you have numbers from a competitor paying you more.