This is a private, employee-owned company and does not need to play the Wallstreet quarterly earnings game. For 100 years the company avoided layoffs, even during the 2008 recession. The company was full of dedicated and talented employees that could be paid more elsewhere, but made the fair tradeoff to stay due to long-term job stability.
The firm is now the most profitable it's ever been, yet due to greed, a desire to be acquired, or lack of imagination and playing follow-the-other-CEOs and consulting firm recommendations has been and will be laying off people over the next 3 years in a stressful ongoing process. They are offshoring, automating, and getting rid of talented people - but keeping layers and layers of senior management which takes in much of the firms' earnings but are prime examples of the Peter principle - while everyone else remains stressed about whether or not they will have a job in 6 months, a year, or two as they have made clear that more layoffs are coming through 2027. It is a stressful work environment due to this and I would recommend staying away until the dust settles post-2027. The culture and trust has been ruined and this is now just like any other corporation, thus no longer worth the lower pay.
The last round of layoffs I saw a department that fired all the senior skilled talented workers, but kept the unnecessary TWO layers of management that had NO experience in the job family to manage over the junior workers. Thus the junior workers have no one to mentor them to grow into those more senior roles, and there are no seniors or leaders left that have any experience in the job family to lead the group whatsoever. The leader above these two layers of management that made the latest layoff decisions have zero experience or knowledge about the job family themselves, and only started leading the group a few months prior to the layoffs since the firm decided first to re-org leadership and then immediately have them cut their new orgs that contain skillsets they've never worked with and are unfamiliar with. Competency will not get you promoted here.
