I was on the list. It had been nearly a year since the company I was at had gone through a major layoff, And I happened to leave almost exactly at the same time.
I had seen the layoff coming perhaps because I had the benefit of being a manager although the managers were not notified.
And the day that I chose to give notice was about a week before the layoffs happened.
And so on the day that the layoffs happened, I was informed that that day should probably be my last day.
I didn't get the benefits that the others who were laid off received, but I certainly felt like I was being laid off.
I was leaving a job with a plan to go to another one, And so I wasn't sure how I should be feeling.
The emotions of leaving a job behind can be pretty complex. They can be complex especially when you know that what you're leaving behind is kind of exploding behind you.
Think like a Michael Bay movie.
And I felt a sense of maybe pride.
Maybe it was a sense of complex talent that I had figured out how to determine when a layoff was about to happen, so I could avoid it.
And so I felt like I had gotten out just in time that I had extracted all of the value that I could out of the experience and I avoided the layoff.
And this almost became a common refrain for me.
I was able to sniff out a layoff again in the future after this experience.
Of course, I'm not going to tell you the companies that I was at, but in both cases, the situation felt very similar.
But it was about a year after this close brush with the knife, I guess, that I found out that I was on the list. Had I not given my notice when I did, I would have been laid off.
I found out from another person who also was laid off, as it turned out my boss at the time.
And for some reason, some part of me felt vulnerable.
It's sort of like finding out that somebody traveling on the same road that you were on 10 minutes earlier got in a car crash.
The close brush with the threat that I fear so deeply.
The feeling that I could have been in that seat.
And that feeling made me revisit a lot of my previous notions of safety and security and a lot of my previously -held beliefs about the industry and about my job in the industry.
The truth is you will hear a lot of advice on this show, for example.
But you're going to hear it from your boss, from your peers.
You're going to hear feedback.
You're going to hear platitudes.
You're going to hear anecdotes.
You're going to be presented with data.
You're going to hear people tell you that AI is replacing your job, and then you're going to hear another set of people tell you that AI is going to accelerate your job and yet another set of people who say that AI is just a fad.
You'll hear opinions and you'll hear facts.
You'll hear opinions based on facts.
And then you'll hear people who are trying to create facts based on their opinions.
The truth is that the complex landscape of all of the advice that you're going to receive over your career.
It's going to shape the way you think.
And sometimes the people that you trust the most the people that you think are most authoritative.
live, they're gonna give you advice that you shouldn't listen to.
It's kind of paradoxical that I sit here and I try to give you advice about advice.
Perhaps you should turn off this podcast now, lest I somehow infect your brain with critical thinking, because if you continue, if you take what I say to heart here, it's very possible that you're going to feel a little less safe wherever you're sitting.
I've heard many stories of people who were laid off after hearing great feedback from their boss, hearing great feedback from their peers.
I've heard many stories and it's not just about layoffs.
I've heard many stories where people were judged harshly or didn't get the promotion, some kind of negative event occurred in their careers even though all of the signals they were receiving from people, all of the advice, all of the feedback would not have given them that picture.
So what is there to do in this world where the feedback we receive may not be as reliable or useful as we may have thought it was?
Well first of all I want you to hear me very clearly, don't stop listening.
Don't stop listening to that feedback.
Just because some of it is invalid or will become invalidated doesn't necessarily mean all of it is.
Listen for themes. Listen for common threads, things that resonate with what your gut is telling you.
Try to contextualize people's assertions.
Test them. Put them through the ringer.
But also recognize that even when you are following all of the great advice, testing it, evaluating it, that doesn't mean that things will go your way.
That doesn't mean that you won't experience the layoff.
Just because you're doing everything right or controlling all of the variables in your career and in your personal life doesn't mean that luck will always go your way.
there are chaos agents at the helm in many situations and those agents are not under your control you don't get to tell everybody what to do and even if you could perhaps your own assertions are going to be wrong so where does this leave us of course we're gonna continue listening to that feedback we're going to test it we're going to do the best we can with what we have when luck does strike, hopefully we will be ready to take advantage of it.
But my advice is to not only prepare for luck, but to prepare for failure, prepare for failure modes, situations that go poorly regardless of your actions upfront.
Consider yourself lucky for the positive feedback because it's probably correlated with success.
But remember that everything is a distribution of probabilities.
There is some chance, there is some world where all of this feedback comes your way.
All of this advice comes your way.
You follow it, you do your best and still some serious negative event occurs.
In resilience, your preparation, your ability to absorb these impacts, to even become anti -fragile in the words of Nassim Taleb, to become better from the impacts.
That's unlikely to happen because of the good advice you receive.
Instead, it's likely to happen because of your ability to recognize what happens in the margins, preparing for eventualities that you may not think are likely.
In my situation, I had no expectation of being laid off.
I had no expectation that my role was up on the chopping block.
I thought that I was in control.
That I was taking the wheel by leaving early.
Interestingly, from an objective standpoint, the outcome for me was actually worse.
By leaving before the layoff, I missed out on a potential for a fairly sizable severance package.
So even when I was following my own gut and the advice from many people that I trusted to take control and leave the situation I was in because I felt like it was the right thing to do and I didn't feel like I was in the right role.
I ultimately experienced a minor negative impact from that relative to the alternative.
Had I stuck it out, I would have received that severance package.
And truthfully, I don't know that I came out with advice in that situation.
Perhaps the synthesis of that situation, the advice that I would give is to try to be ready for if and when that happens, but to stick it out, to try to stay until you are laid off.
We all have hindsight.
We all can look back and try to synthesize what we would do again in the same scenario.
But so much of our lives is unpredictable.
So much of this advice is dependent on specifics of circumstances that may never happen to you.
Ultimately, the advice that I'll leave you with that I hope you will at least consider Is that we can only make decisions in our limited context?
The best strategies are usually the ones that are alive, that are applying the advice in a dynamic way.
How does that advice change given the changes in the environment?
How does that advice play out for the unlucky scenario?
What are the maximum and minimum utility values of a particular pathway?
Now, do you have to work all this out on paper?
Probably not. But if you walk away a little bit more skeptical of the advice that you believe the most, and a little more accepting of advice that might seem counterintuitive to you, or perhaps on the fringes, then I think you're going to ultimately become a more well -rounded person.
And hopefully learn that most of these things that you learn from other people, these moments of wisdom that somebody might share with you, or just a snapshot, a snapshot of one experience.
And that there are no real silver bullets.
There's no secret answer.
No one piece of advice that if you stumble on it, your whole life will flip upside down.
Instead, all of this is just experiences that we share with one another.
In this case, I was able to learn from it.
In some way, the negative experience of finding out that I was on the list has given me the opportunity to share this with you today.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea.
I hope you enjoyed this episode.
I hope that this gives you a new way of thinking about advice that you will be more open to advice that Maybe you previously were not open to and you'll question the advice that you've taken to be ironclad, that you'll run that back through the wringer.
Thank you so much for listening.
If you enjoyed this episode, please join us on the DeveloperT Discord community.
Head over to developert .com slash discord. Another way that you can help the show out is to leave a review in whatever platform that you listen to.
The most impactful is iTunes.
But we just now finally, I can't believe I didn't do this before, but we finally have launched Developer Tea on YouTube as a podcast. We've had some videos in the past that we put up, but we kind of let that fall by the wayside.
Now it is officially on YouTube as a podcast. It will track the feed.
We've also increased the feed itself, the RSS feed to have more items rather than limiting.
I think it was limiting like 500 items. So now it's showing all the items from the beginning of the podcast. So if you are an RSS subscriber, you may have seen some of those episodes show back up.
Hopefully that will make those episodes a little more accessible to all of you.
Thank you so much for listening.
And until next time, enjoy your tea.
