CAREER - On layoffs and career compatibility
A story about layoffs, how to cope with them, and an approach to finding new opportunities.
One Monday at 8:12 am, I received a calendar invite for a company-wide Zoom call. No one said it, but everyone was expecting it. Our company over-hired and set astronomical growth targets, resulting in a panic like most other venture capital-backed, high-growth startups in the tech industry.
In the call, at 2:06 pm, we were told there would be a “restructuring” of the company. People weren’t being laid off or made redundant but rather impacted. The impacted employees would receive a calendar invite by the end of the day.
Like the asteroid that impacted the earth, I thought, while sipping cheap office coffee.
A week before, my manager promised that the restructure would be the agent for my “well-deserved promotion”. Naive, maybe, but I never expected restructuring to mean redundancies. The thought made me sick. The messages rolled in: “Omg no way”, “How long have they known?”, “It’ll probably be the guy who never hits his sales target.”
The afternoon stretched like a time warp. I made myself more cheap office coffee. The kettle boiled in 4K resolution, each bubble filling and dissipating as it did when the Earth boiled billions of years ago. 3:27 pm. I wondered whether coffee beans existed in the Cenozoic era after the asteroid hit our planet, annihilating the dinosaurs 60 million years ago. Would the heat of the blast roast the coffee beans? Did an early mammal eat them and start an independent chain of boutique coffee shops in Mexico? Maybe my love of coffee is so evolutionarily conserved that I never truly chose to drink coffee and this addiction was inevitable.
At 4:37 pm I spotted a 15-minute calendar invite with HR, nestled between client calls, training sessions and chats with colleagues about that event in September. Two days later, I was gone. Impacted.
With silence comes contemplation. Am I not good enough for an entry-level sales job? That was my first thought. Inadequacy and self-doubt. But I remembered a Physiology lecture from university.
A patient will die without a new liver. So, they get a liver transplant from a donor. The liver isn’t compatible with the patient. The patient’s immune system attacks the foreign organ, both are now on the verge of death. Patient worse off, liver donation wasted.
Similarly, we are like patients and jobs are like organs.
The message of redundancies is not that you are not good enough. The message is that you are meant to be somewhere else, where your strengths are amplified, and you feel challenged and valued, not attacked, corroded and rejected. Take the liver that’ll save your life.
A doctor would never transplant a liver into someone without first knowing their blood type, and whether it’s the same as the donated liver. We can’t take that risk either. Knowing ourselves clarifies the careers suitable for us.
We are imperfect, sure, but that doesn’t mean we should deny ourselves self-respect. Despite the difficulty of change.
Taking one day at a time should do the trick. Being realistic about where you belong will never fail you. There is no replacement for exceptional coffee.
Thanks for coming to the second newsletter from Mindfork, you are the wheel that keeps my heart spinning and pen dancing.