Tag: work

The Layoff Line

With yesterday’s layoff at Gusto, I was inevitably thinking about my own history with . For my jobs as an adult, I’ve only left by something OTHER than being laid off twice. Here’s the history:

  1. AOL: I survived more rounds of layoffs than I can remember (it felt like we did them once a quarter for awhile), and left on my own after 13 years.
  2. Music Intelligence Solutions: I ended up having to lay everyone off when we ran out of money, and even laid myself off.
  3. Rails Machine: I was laid off (which I think was just in lieu of firing me) because… reasons. I’d be happy to discuss them over a beverage sometime.
  4. Planted: COVID crushed the recruiting business and PPP wouldn’t cover all of us. I was effectively laid off, but mostly because I was both expensive and was able to find a new job.
  5. Outvote/Impactive: I left on my own.

Being laid off isn’t a black mark on your job history. If you’re in tech long enough, YOU WILL GET LAID OFF. It’s the consequence of working in an industry that’s pretty unstable, or for early stage startups.

It’s heartbreaking to go through them, on all sides. It’s obviously worst for those who’ve lost their jobs, but the people who stay get to deal with a flurry of emotions and questions – a lot of which management legally can’t answer, which makes it all even more frustrating.

All of those feelings are completely normal, and justified… but most of the questions aren’t going to get answered in any way that will satisfy you.

Your leadership team will NEVER be able to PROMISE that there won’t be more layoffs, EVEN IF THEY’RE BEING PLANNED. No one will ever tell you a layoff is coming. No one will ever tell you why people were laid off.

Layoffs are almost always followed by people choosing to leave because they’ve lost faith in their employer. That’s normal, and should be expected.

My friend Cindy Li always said, “work won’t love you back,” and she’s right. We’re all “resources” for our employers and the company is not your family.

A long time ago, I made a conscious decision for how I would work:

  1. I will treat everyone with loving kindness, and work where I love the people, the work, and I will love my coworkers as long as it’s possible to work with them. People leave, but they’re not dead.
  2. Change is constant. I will work to be comfortable with ambiguity and help create order from it.
  3. At the end of the day, there are three choices when confronted with any change: Accept it. Fight it. Quit. That’s it. If you’re between one of those three options, you’ll be miserable.

That was a lot. The last piece of advice I’ll give is… if you just survived a layoff, don’t get fired.

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Aggressive Accessibility

I’ve been working in tech a long time (it’ll be 28 years in May), and I think some of things I think everyone already knows, or are obvious, maybe not everyone knows and aren’t all that obvious.

Updated to add a disclaimer: This is what’s worked for me. Coralie posted a really observant comment – and I think it’s worth mentioning that this might have worked for me because of my privilege. It’s very difficult for me to tell because I’m in it, but I’m not going to discount what’s a pretty high likelihood that privilege has had a lot to do with this.

So, since I’m at risk of missing my back to blogging goal of 3 posts this month, I figured I’d write up something real quick on my favorite topic.

I think developers focus too much on technical excellence and think that’s the only way to get ahead in their career. It’s definitely important – but it’s the bare minimum. To excel, I think you’ve got to be able to grow other people, and part of that is something I like to call being “aggressively accessible.”

It means:

  • Offering to help when you see an opportunity to offer it.
  • Looking for opportunities to provide help, even if it’s outside your normal duties.
  • Making things better because they need to be made better.
  • Volunteering for special projects.
  • Showing up places you think you might be useful.

By offering help instead of being asked, you put yourself in a place to be of more use than just waiting to be activated. You’ll meet more people, learn more stuff, and become more effective, and you’ll never be bored!

None of this needs to be super overt. Just showing up and being open to helping is enough. Just quietly offering help when it looks like someone is struggling is enough.

It has made such a big difference in my career and built so much social capital that I don’t know that I could actually quantify it.

It’s also part of moving from “senior” engineer to roles like staff, principal or into leadership roles like CTO. You have to go from being an executor to an enabler / multiplier.

That’s it.

A Quick Friday Thought on Soft Power

I was talking to someone today about soft power, and an hour of me giving advice and workshopping things came down to:

  1. Build trust by working in the open and asking people for feedback. Praise them for their contributions, often.
  2. Talk to people and ask their preferred work style, and respect it.
  3. You build trust by delivering on what you say you will – repeatedly.
  4. And finally, do everything with kindness.

That’s it. That’s how you build influence and get things done without having hard power.