I was so nervous as I finished typing out my resignation letter. I looked up resign in Chinese, 辭職, prepared what I'd say, and trembled as I walked over to my manager. He initially refused to accept it, telling me to think about it til the end of the day. Had I considered a different team? Transferring to London? Arup had been my home for over 4 years, and neither side took the idea of splitting lightly. When he did accept it, I followed through with the standard one month of notice and worked as hard as ever to wrap up and document my projects. The phrase "好頭好尾", literally "good head good tail" but idiomatically start well and end well, rang through me as I felt an obligation to coworkers and clients to leave everything in good standing. On my last day, my colleagues surprised me with a cake and a sweet card with a fold-out Hong Kong junk boat which I've kept to this day. That was the last time I left a company with good vibes. Since then I've had four layoffs and one ignominious resignation.
This time, it was the Microsoft Teams App that foreshadowed something might be wrong. Teams lets you know when someone starts a meeting, and at 9am when my 1 on 1 with my boss was set to begin, it was my boss' boss who instead started the call. This unprecedented gatecrash couldn't be good. He got right into it, delivering in his business-like manner how my role had been eliminated in a non-performance based restructuring across the organization. He refused to tell me who else was affected, although he said it affected a lot of product managers and not data scientists. Ironically I had switched from data science to take a product role but had been coding data science work for the last month. I asked if I could just be a data scientist here. The director was initially stymied, then replied, "that option isn't on the table, but you can reapply for those roles." I had to suppress a laugh. There was no need for "好頭好尾" - within an hour my accounts were disabled.
Layoffs expose the transactional nature of jobs. With system accesses revoked, suddenly you have no ability to message your colleagues, no way to retrieve old emails or other important documents you'd inadvertently saved on the work computer on which you'd spent so much time. You find your phone left with useless apps which you just delete. You've still got loads of activity in your brain space concerning project details, or a to-do item, or how to access a particular dashboard. These all go from being critical to your livelihood to complete irrelevance. People whom you used to speak to weekly or daily soon get forgotten. One second this company needed you, the next it doesn't.
Reactions come in waves. The initial event delivers somberness and shock, even in the cases when I knew it was coming. The tone of the conversation is so unnatural. In my first layoff, my boss had been too ashamed to look me in the eyes, and read corporate speak from a script. In my second, a seasoned HR professional sent me off as one of many in a sequence, able to show perfunctory sympathy but clearly eager to get everything over with. In my third, my boss read a script then immediately signed off, displaying the backbone of a jellyfish as a young HR leader talked through the details. This past one was actually the most pleasant experience of the four.
There's the horror when you reflexively try to access your email and find yourself locked out. There's the indulgent joy slacking off from all the work you'd thought you'd have to do. There's the sharing of the news, and the steady outcry of support from friends. There are offers of free drinks and plenty of reasons to accept them, and lots of laughter, mirth and sympathy. The criticism of the company or coworkers that you'd held in come gushing out. Layoff day is a hell of a holiday.
Then there's the next day when you wake up and realize that you have nothing to do. No commute, no first meeting, no reports to review. There's seeing your company's posts on social media, marketing posts with trite descriptions of business problems that now induce vomit. There's freedom, the perks of exploring areas and venues in broad daylight. There's the shame, the self-doubt, the retrospective analysis of assignments and meetings and wondering if there's anyway you could have done better with the people who made this decision, if you're truly unlucky or just bad or somewhere in between. There are trickles of emails and LinkedIn messages from coworkers revealing which of these transactional relationships might have evolved in something slightly more. There's the updating of the resume, the responses to recruiters even as you figure out what next steps might possibly be. As the days go by, a new normal starts to establish itself, but small memorandums of the lost life creep back in - a business card, a bookmarked article, a conference badge.
Work does not need to be so transactional. In previous generations, many people worked for the same company their whole lives. Single factories could provide a sense of community for an entire town, and their closings were often devastating. But in 2022 America, the tech industry has reached a state where rapid growth and reactive pullbacks have become standard. Several companies have demonstrated success by faking it until you make it, operating at losses for many years, doubling down on unbridled blitzscaling, and reaped staggering financial rewards for their efforts. Despite plenty of examples of burst bubbles and failed startups, human nature fixates on the winners. Investors and entrepreneurs buy in on these dreams together and an entire system emerges upon an unrealistic foundation. Employees took a back seat to shareholders. Since the pandemic began and upset society's preexisting rhythms, the economy has seemed extremely kneejerk-y. Stocks collapsed with the first lockdown, then soared disproportionate to fundamentals. Tech companies entered into an arms race that they couldn't sustain, and pawns like me got caught up in it.
Personally, this layoff caught me at a terrible time. I was already struggling, and this layoff isn't even the major negative event in my life. While I do see some potential upside as I didn't exactly love this job, I don't feel confident entering a tight job market alongside tens of thousands of Meta, Twitter, Amazon and other tech employees. What hurts worse though is the time and effort I spent at this last job, now seemingly wasted. I've worked in so many industries - buildings, manufacturing, agriculture, gas utilities, electric utilities, trucking. I know about the silking phase in corn growth, the operations of 811 call centers, and the seasonality of truck prices Florida inbound. All the effort to grasp a new industry seem for naught.
Intellectually I know that this is not my fault, that none of these layoffs were my fault. Never have I been fired for underperforming, never have I compromised my integrity. I know that I'm a badass data scientist and product leader who's fun to work with and valuable to society. But it's hard to justify how you can have this much bad luck without wondering if you are the problem.
I don't think it's healthy when work becomes too great a part of one's life. Companies are not families, and work will not love you back. But there is a balance, and the degree to which my last few jobs have felt so transactional is not healthy either. With remote work and camera-off cultures, lots of coworkers feel like faceless mercenaries. It makes me resentful of the number of hours I spend with them, without a relationship growing, instead of with my friends. Ideally coworkers can reach a state of mutual respect if not mutual admiration. It hurt so much when my boss ghosted me after my recent layoff - it made me question his intentionality in any of our previous transactions. I had learned his kids names, his high school track times and we had joked about sports. Suddenly he did not need me to drive a product roadmap and any desire to talk to me vanishes.
I believe there is room for human connection and basic decency even in competitive corporate cultures. We are all here on earth trying to do the best we can.
