I’ve Been Laid Off 5.5 Times. Here Are 4.5 Lessons I Learned.
If you lost your job, don’t be scared. If you have one, don’t be afraid.
I’m a software engineer with about 20 years of hands-on development experience and a proud member of an exclusive club of people who’d been fired 5+ times. Actually, I don’t know anyone else who belongs to the club that I’ve just made up, therefore I consider myself to be the sole member of this elitist community until proven otherwise. Let me know if you want to join. Anonymous applications are accepted too.
The truth is I hadn’t actually counted the exact number of ‘your-services-are-no-more-required’ letters that my eyes have seen through the years until I decided to write this piece. I just remembered it’s many. Six? Phew… My jersey number is 33, so six kinda makes sense. Right, the next firing will ruin that beauty. No worries, I’ll come up with something equally symbolic and eloquently stupid. Another truth is, I hadn’t actually decided to write this piece until I stumbled upon yet another LinkedIn post about yet another layoff at {Tech-Company-Of-Someone’s-Choice}.
They say the recession is here. I say, it sucks but you’ll be fine. I went through my personal recession six times. Along the way, I’ve learned some lessons I want to share.
Before we do it, let me say this — each and every job change was for the better. They always say it, don’t they? “It’s for the better”. And you think — no, it is not. It is scary, unpleasant, discouraging, and overall bad. The truth is, it is for the better. Well, it was for me. Six times. Every case was a blessing in disguise if we’re back to one of my favorite cliches. Not the blessing like my mom’s cancer but still. We’ll talk more about it in lesson #4. Now, let’s start from the beginning. I mean, from the end (of one’s employment).
Lesson #1. Do not eat yourself up. Most probably, it’s not your fault.
To be fired doesn’t always mean to suck at your job. I can’t say I have been flawless in my duties. Nobody is. Nevertheless, 9 times out of 10 you have no control over your job security. Well, maybe you do. I had not. There are a total of eight private companies in my resume.
All eight were or are start-ups. The smallest had 4 employees, the biggest — had 150+. None of my past seven employers made an exit or anything. I do count on the present one. You do not have to call me names.
So, what happened with those 5.5 that told me goodbye? Two got completely broke and out of business. Two made cuts (that included yours truly) before and/or after M&A that swallowed them. I haven’t heard anything triumphant either about the swallower or the swallowed afterward. One funny place pivoted from the NLP domain to AdTech and then to cannabis business and then disappeared into the abyss. I became naturally redundant somewhere between those transitions. They fired me one day, and the next day changed their mind but I’d already got an offer from another place, and proudly left anyway. This is the 0.5 firing.
So we’re at 4.5.
Another firm, a medical device start-up, had me as their only software engineer. Once the software had been ready and stable for a couple of long and mostly vain years (more on this later), they let me go too, leaving the QA person whom I hired to support my (well-written and bug-free) code. She’d be enjoying looking at this thing of beauty for the next long and vain four or five years.
All in all, the majority of the layoffs were not due to the fact that I did something wrong or didn’t do something right, they would happen regardless. This is the nature of this business. Well, the nature that you do have a say in. Which leads us to the following lesson.
Lesson #2. Choose whom to work for. It is your biggest decision.
Retrospectively, this was my mistake over and over again. 7 times out of 8 I wasn’t too picky in choosing my employer. The last one I was. Having an offer from someplace, I insisted on finishing the hiring process at the second one, got an offer too, and eventually chose it over the former. Guess what? The first place has recently laid off 20% of its people, including my intended team lead. Probably I’d be on the streets now too if I had jumped on that first opportunity that came my way. I used to do that, but now I most definitely won’t.
If it is a start-up or a mid-sized company, do your research. Go to Crunchbase, Glassdoor, and LinkedIn, explore their website, and talk to people. If it’s a tech giant, well… There’s not much you can do, I guess. Still, perform due diligence to the best of your ability. Do not sell yourself to the first person throwing you a bone. No matter how tasty this bone looks at that moment. If you lack skills or knowledge or think you lack those to get into a better company — spend your time and energy to obtain them. It pays off twice — you lower the risk of being stuck in mediocrity now and you increase your market value later.
For the largest part of my career, I wasn’t doing that. Being between jobs (the fancy term for ‘unemployed’), I was scared, stressed, and imposter syndrome susceptible. I wasn’t sure about my worth. This is the lesson that took me the most time to learn. Once you realize that you do not have to know everything, to be on the very edge of every possible technology, and to nail every interview and every test, — it frees, empowers, and enables you to choose a better workplace than you would otherwise. Do not sell yourself short, it never pays off. Whether it’s your first job or the fifth one.
Lesson #2.5. Do not be afraid to leave. It is your biggest decision too.
It is another angle from the previous lesson. You are free to choose whom to work for while working too. I never left a company willingly except for one time, with my first serious job — a web developer in a very small start-up company. Super nice people. Ridiculously low pay. $16,000 a year. Yes, sixteen. No, not a month. A year. I shouldn’t have agreed to that but I did. Six months into the job, I got a raise. A huge one. The whole 10%. That was too much, i.e. too little, to bear. So I left. The one and only time.
I should have done it a few more times but I didn’t. Those same fears, that same imposter syndrome, plus the comfort and false security of being rooted at any soil, no matter how dry and bearing no fruit it is. I used to fool myself and call it loyalty. It is not. Loyalty is doing your job properly; the fear of getting up and leaving a place that is bad for you is not loyalty. It’s a weakness.
I have never really believed in “just business, nothing personal” when it came to working. I still don’t. Because it is personal. Everything is. But it is just business, too. Everything is. They hire you for business, they fire you for the same reason. Once it sinks in, you become free from your own fetters. They have every right to let you go any given day, you have every right to go any given day. They act in their best interests, you should act in your best interests. The trick is to recognize and acknowledge those interests. Do not be a hostage to your own misconceptions which are driven mostly by fear or inertia.
Lesson #3. Be the best you can be. It is the best you can do.
Self-confidence and courage to change your path are not the byproducts of state of the mind only. Their main fuel is ability. You do have to bring value to your employer and present a positive ROI for them. It seems obvious and kinda stupid to articulate this, right? Nevertheless, way too often I see people who at some point start taking their job for granted. They cannot resist the temptation to do the bare minimum that keeps their heads above the water. Do not fall for it.
Quiet quitting, they call it now. I call it shooting your own leg. It is wrong on so many levels, for so many reasons. Not only that you hurt your employer by not providing extra value for them, but first and foremost you hurt yourself by passing on dividends that are there to reap. Lucrum cessans is the term in Latin, meaning — loss of profits. When you hold yourself back, no matter what excuse you come up with, it’s a loss-loss. You deprive yourself of knowledge, skills, satisfaction, excitement, respect, promotion, money, and whatnot. Work-life balance is not about working less or making a lesser effort, it’s about being balanced in what you do while still doing it to the best of your ability.
Earlier I mentioned that everyone should act in their best interest. The thing is that once you have learned lesson #2, the chances are that the interests of both sides — employer and employee — will be aligned. In this lucky case, the more you do and the better you do, the more and the better you eventually are, from all standpoints. It becomes more of a horizontal partnership than a vertical hierarchy. They are still in the power position, make no mistake, they can cut you loose whenever they want but it doesn’t bother you that much if you know how to excel. Worst case — you’ll do it all over again at another place. With more experience, better tools, deeper understanding. Best case — you’ll live happily ever after. I know a guy who’s been working for the same start-up for 23 years. Fairy tales do exist.
Lesson #4. Get the right perspective. Keep your eyes up high.
To lose your job sucks big time. Even if it is a shitty one. A regular paycheck, social acceptance, even daily schedule stability — all these make you feel safe. To lose this basic essential feeling brings tons of stress and worry. People are different and they react to stressful situations differently. However, some things are universal. Let me remind you of those. I’ll play Captain Obvious here but bear with me.
Your job is not you. Not your life, not your health, not the life and health of your close ones. However stressful it may be, it is not a life-or-death kind of stress. I know this first hand. If you haven’t read my story, do it right after you finish this one. You made it this far — it means you’ve got what it takes to keep reading more than 140 symbols. Or is it 280 now? Or 140 again, after Elon cut 50%? Anyway, being worried about my mom’s life for my entire adulthood, made me accept career bumps with ease. My life doesn’t depend on being employed every single day, nor the lives of those whom I’m responsible for.
We are privileged to live in a world where it doesn’t take much to make a decent living if you put in enough effort. Physical, intellectual, mental, emotional, behavioral, you name it. All sorts of effort. The vast majority of the world’s population does not possess the resources that an average reader of this piece has at their disposal. If you could land a job in {Tech-Company-Of-Your-Choice}, you’ll be able to get another one, sooner or later. Recessions come and go, the demand for skilled workers fluctuates but stays. It is highly unlikely that you’ll have to wash dishes or clean the streets in order to put food on the table. It may take time and there’s a chance you’d have to walk through trials and tribulations, but eventually, you’ll set your feet on some stable ground again. Just keep walking.
