I got laid off…
..and I never thought it could happen to me. So I want to tell you my experience as being part of the massive layoffs happening these days in tech companies.
During my last 7 years I worked in 3 of the most prestigious tech companies for a software engineer: Amazon, Google and Meta. Every time someone would hear my story they were impressed and admired the career path. At some point even I looked at myself and built (wrongly) some sense of invincibility towards certain real life events such as not having a job: “I am a senior software engineer, I manage a team and have a lot of work responsibilities, my performance review is great, I never had HR issues, no teammates issues, …”.
10 November 2022: you can imagine my reaction when at 6.00am of just a normal day like others I woke up here in Singapore ready to start my new working day and suddenly two minutes after I received the email that I was part of the lay-offs.
I initially felt lost and disoriented. “And now?” I asked myself. I immediately woke up my partner as if she could do something to fix it: I just needed someone next to me at that moment. I have to say thanks to her. She quickly cheered me up and managed to give me motivation and stay positive: the fact that I always kept my mental health is surely a lot thanks to her. Because of that, I feel so grateful I had someone next to me to share this moment with and I didn’t feel alone. I know for a fact that people move to countries for work, they are on a work visa, they don’t have many familiar friends and in these situations they are in an extremely weak condition.
I wish I had…
One thing I experienced is that I started going into a spiral of negativity made of “if only I had..” or “I wish I..” — I am sure many people (if not all) have gone through this:
- I wish I saw this coming…
- I wish I didn’t leave Google for Meta…
- I wish I didn’t move to Singapore…
- I wish I had moved to a different org before this happened…
Quite often we wish to change our past when we’re not happy with our present. But life is all about that, it’s about choices that we make and that will have consequences in our future (positive or negative). We have to be ready to marry those consequences, whatever they will be. You can’t predict all the consequences, it’s impossible. You can estimate them, but you’ll never have 100% confidence.
What my partner suggested to me was: “Let’s put a timer of 60 seconds in which you are allowed to say all the negativity you want. After those 60 seconds, we move on and we plan the action items.” — I felt it made so much sense, so I recommend it to you.
It’s not you against them
It’s not you against them because in reality there is no “them”.
I read so many posts and comments on different social networks that were mostly sharing the same pattern: “They (the company) were so brutal in this layoff / They don’t deserve us as employees / This is a demonstration that they don’t care about you / They only care about business growth” — this tendency of humanising things and creating an “us against them” environment is very frequent in the human psychology.
Who is “they” actually? Where are these cruel people that are doing all of this?
Those people are us! We are those same people that make the decision to lay off thousands of employees. We are those same people that try our best to get the promotion and get more money “whatever it takes”. We are those same people that exploit the growth wave for our own interests by knowing that there will always be a recession waiting for us.
There is no “you against them” and nobody hates you. This is part of the game that we have designed for ourselves. It’s how our society works and you can decide how to play. Funny enough: when we are proud of something our company did we tend to say “We”, when we are angry and in disagreement we tend to say “They”.
If one day you will be a VP, you will have to make those decisions. You will likely make the same decisions that are being made these days. There is a good chance that among those people who had to make a decision of laying off employees there were some who got that position thanks to the overhiring that led us into this: it sucks, I know, but it’s all related to our human nature of seeking for unstoppable growth.
To be clear: I am not happy that I was laid off, I surely didn’t deserve it and I felt betrayed. But the reality is that nobody deserves to be part of a massive lay-off.
We all risk to become like a dinosaur
People who spend years and years in the same company have higher likelihood to become dinosaurs: being a dinosaur fundamentally means that you are outdated for the current market and less and less companies will be willing to take you. A dinosaur is extremely good at the routine/tools/mechanics of their current company but eventually bad at what the market needs.
In fact, interviewing for a new company is a full-time job itself. Once I will get a new job I will share my full experience mentioning all the companies I interviewed for. It’s a serious job, it takes a lot of effort and discipline. Interviewing for senior roles is even tougher: the margin for error is extremely small. Not only do you actually have to know things but you need to be mentally fresh, confident and lucky.
Becoming a dinosaur it’s not something you must avoid because it’s not acceptable that being in a company for many years is a bad thing, it should be the opposite. But you need to face the reality that nobody is safe: Google recently laid-off so many people that had been working there for 10+ years.
Work hard or do the minimum required
It’s your choice, nobody will force you. I have always preferred to work hard and I will likely continue to do so as long as I love my job. But this didn’t save me from being laid off. Someone would tell me: “See? It’s not worth it, they don’t deserve this” (as I was mentioning before in the previous section…).
The reality is that I’ve always worked hard because I wanted to do so, I liked it and I did it for myself so that I could learn as fast as I could.
Chances are that in most places if you do the minimum required you will survive, get your salary at the end of the month, eventually get promoted (at a slower pace, but who cares?) and you’ll still be happy. But the problem is that some people are just not fine with that, they are happy doing more. If you decide to work hard and go beyond what is expected from you, just make sure you are doing it because you like it and you are passionate about it. Not because of mine or to be liked by someone else.
How close are you to the core business?
I think that one thing that contributed to the layoff in my case is that our team in Singapore was surely not the most important in our organisation. We (60+ people) were part of an organisation in Meta that “protects users and businesses from harm” — these organisations (typically called “Business/Community Integrity” or “Trust and Safety”) are basically measured on how “clean” social networks are from violence, pornography, scam and all other things that are not compliant to the company policy.
Even though the organisation was extremely important, it became more and more evident that us in Singapore were being left behind and most of the important things were being managed between North America and EMEA. As an organisation that ultimately does not generate “direct revenue” and needs to shrink, the first impacted employees are the ones that are part of less important or redundant teams, this is obvious. For american tech companies and for engineers Singapore is also geographically in disadvantage from this point of view because it represents a minority and a third geographical area in addition to the predominance of NA and EMEA.
I am telling you this because I want you to keep this in mind in the future for yourself: choose a place that you like (first) but also keep in mind that the probability to be considered redundant in a tech company is inversely proportional to the importance of your team in the organisation/company mission.
Conclusions
Recently I learned the parable of the Chinese farmer (this link is just the first one I got from a Google search — or maybe you can ask ChatGPT?) and I loved it. You must read it if you don’t know the story. I loved it because it’s fundamentally true and it manifests it in every single day in the world: a bad event in your life might not still be perceived as such in the future — it might actually turn into something to be thankful for (and same story for the opposite).
This is how I hope these huge historical lay-offs will be remembered for all of us: “bad luck, good luck, we’ll see…”.
