So I got laid off last Friday.
Technically, it was a “reduction in force,” which is the same thing but seems to be some kind of technical classification for firing large swathes of your overall company staff during a difficult period of belt-tightening. “Reduction in force” ended up being apt, since that’s also pretty much how I feel at the moment: force reduced.
Getting laid off was an experience I’ve never actually had before. I’ve left a few jobs with only a hazy plan for what my next steps would be. I had at least one job where we mutually recognized it wasn’t a good fit and I was being not-so-gently encouraged out the door. But laid off or actually fired? Never. You can chalk that up partly to luck and partly (I like to think) to conscientiousness in that I actually really care about doing a good job at work and put effort into my career.
Sometimes caring isn’t enough, though. It’s been a rough year for tech, I knew our company was running into financial issues, and sooner or later everyone’s dice turn up snake eyes. It’s been clear to me for a while that things couldn’t go on at work like they had been, and I was pretty certain that we’d be having to take these measures at some point without dramatically improved financials.
I’m a little surprised at how much it stings to be cut like this, though.
Nobody likes to be off the team. Especially when a huge part of the reason I took the job in the first place was that I wanted to be on a team. I was doing fine (financially) independently consulting and writing last summer, but I missed building things with a team and I missed day to day camaraderie.
I was so excited to jump into this startup and get building when this opportunity came up in 2022. One of the first things our head of product (to whom I reported) asked me during my interviews was whether I was planning and willing to stick with them for the long haul and not just use them as a stepping stone into a better job, and I honestly told him “yes.” I was excited about the role I had been pitched; excited about the business model and the company vision. I was excited about the ways in which I was going to be able to use a lot of different skills and knowledge areas I’ve built up over the years and excited that I was finally getting to work in a product area that I was personally passionate about.
There are a lot of things I wish I could talk more about from this job experience: things that were and weren’t working at the firm, things I could see and that I wasn’t sure how much others could see, things that I felt like I could have fixed or (at least) helped with if I had been given more opportunity to try to help them avoid this outcome. But I can’t and shouldn’t. I genuinely think everyone involved was doing the best that they could and knew how to with the information and resources available to them—this is always my default assumption about people, whenever possible. I know it’s never easy to make cuts, and I intimately know that running a business can be hard.
I just wish I felt a little bit less bad and conflicted about myself in the wake of this outcome, when intellectually I know I shouldn’t.
I did everything I could (everything they let me) to try to help them succeed, but this one was ultimately out of my hands. It’s a weird experience to be let go just because a company needs to scale back, to know that that’s the case, and even still to feel like it’s somehow your fault. It doesn’t even help when the CEO literally tells you not to feel like that and takes full personal responsibility for the cuts to your face.
Mostly I just feel demoralized, and I’m struggling to come up with a vision for what comes next I’m really excited about.
This job was supposed to be it for me: a role that was in line with all of my accumulated experience, working on a product I was truly passionate about with cutting edge technologies that were personally exciting for me, and an opportunity to continue to grow and learn in new skillsets at a high level while working closely with a motivated team to regularly build and ship.
It didn’t end up delivering on much of that. I had put so much effort into carefully choosing and vetting this role beforehand that I’m left wondering how I did that vetting poorly enough to wind up laid off with kind of a lackluster and confusing year behind me that didn’t give me any of the things that I’d intentionally sought when I left independent consulting to take a 9-to-5 again. It’s not an accident that I wrote about responsiveness and meaningful work this summer.
So I feel a little lost; a little disoriented right now. Maybe I’m just still a bit shell-shocked. Maybe I should feel more frightened or anxious, especially given the tech market right now, or maybe the fact that I don’t is evidence that I’m not really grappling with the situation yet. It’s hard to say. I still feel like I have plenty of things I could drive for if I could stop feeling sorry for myself and find the fire to go after them.
I keep opening LinkedIn to browse job openings and closing it after a minute or two because I don’t even know what I’m looking for. I’ve been opening and closing Word documents with book outlines, flirting with the idea of writing another book but not liking any of the ideas enough to commit. I’m playing with the idea of starting another company, another publishing brand, another technical project… but there’s no idea lighting me up from the inside right now and pushing me to go do it because it must be done, which is how I felt with a lot of my big projects I’d put 16-20 hour days into. I miss that feeling. It feels like my spark is dampened.
I already had compassion for people who got fired or laid off, but this experience has given me even more of an appreciation for how much of a morale and self-confidence impact it can have—even when it’s not your fault and even when you tend to be someone who’s fairly self-confident and feels good about her abilities at baseline.
I need to do something soon to refill my well and find that spark again, because right now I’m just feeling pretty defeated. It’s a rough way to be, and it’s not my style to hang out in that space for too long.
Here’s hoping that it’s a short stay.
Thank you for this read. Have you heard about Job Search Councils? Or Never Search Alone? They have these free councils you can join to talk through this as you search for your next job. Phyl.org is where the details are... so many in this situation!
This won't be surprising but, yeah that "do something" might just be to feel the feelings for their natural lifespan, and in their wake may flow the next right thing.