One thing people on this forum helped me recognize was that despite how valuable you may be or think you are to your company, they will pretty easily adapt once you are no longer there.
Granted, I wasn't all that invaluable to Megaconglomocorp, but let me digress to a bemusing anecdote...
My first RIF, in the late 90s, occurred when I was a staff flunky, having sneaked out of the tech side under the mistaken impression I might be able to climb the corporate ladder a rung or two. One of my tasks was to coordinate sending important "stuff" to corporate archives. Being a R&D group, it was deemed important to save prototypes, lab notebooks, etc., for patent issues, tracking corporate "history", and to help all the engineering staff clear all the crap out of their offices. [emoji12]
Anywho, about half the department, including me, was summarily dismissed, to reduce costs, i.e. get rid of older w*rkers, and their high salaries and retiree benefits. But, as it turned out, they had to staff up again to meet milestones, and I sneaked back in as a technogeek within a few months, most fortunately soon enough that I retained seniority, preserving my retiree health insurance benefit, without which I'd still be w*rking.
Fast forward several years, and Megaconglomocorp decided that the foundries in Asia could do much of their process development, so, again, a big chunk of the department, including me, were canned.
Amusingly, one of the branch managers in my group called me shortly after the announcement, inquiring about getting his stuff back from corporate archives. I did some checking, and no one seemed to know anything about it, and a web search produced nothing. Apparently, the corporate archive was moved, then forgotten... Never found it...
When I was laid off, twice, and then when I retired, no one wanted my files, notebooks, etc., so they were all trashed.
