Navigating layoffs

It’s been two months since I was let go.

The saying “time flies when you’re having fun” is true, I guess.

Obviously I write that as a “tongue-in-cheek” comment because even though things have worked out for the best, I won’t lie that wounds are still open and it stings. I won’t go into it publicly for the interest of ex-colleagues and close friends, but you can imagine.

It all resembles a nasty break-up that just takes time to heal. I’m sure that in a few months, we’ll all be laughing about this. 🤭

What have I been up to?

I’ve been busy since being let go, here are some highlights:

• Turned 28 in Andros
• Travelled to six Greek Islands with Milos being my favourite
• Spent time with friends and family
• Re-focused on my health and changed up my fitness routine with a new weight training split
• Published hit tweets by accident
• Talked to so many inspiring founders during my job search.
  • Before my job search came to a close, I counted 63 companies reach out to me to work with them.
  • For the first time in months, I felt valued and it reignited my excitement for my career trajectory.
  • As I (painfully, in some cases) turned down opportunities, I redirected them to ex-colleagues and have been excited to see some magic come from those introductions.
• I found that I love connecting folks like this – very community of me – and even joked about side-hustling as a recruiter 😆
• Supported fellow ex-colleagues from my “layoff cohort” find their next opportunity
• Spread good vibes, job opportunities and connections in the ex-redacted community
• Started my new job at Vercel as Staff Community Manager!
  • I just crossed my 1 month which I celebrated with a soft-launch of our community platform and a totally-not-planned triangle on my GitHub contributions graph.
  • So far, it’s been an extremely rewarding challenge and I’m excited to continue building upon what my team and I have now started. Watch this space!

Overall, life has been good!

I know the list looks busy, but I did have calmer moments of reflection which was needed.

I feel like I could write multiple posts random musings of how companies should still be bullish in community building, how certain technologies are still too early and how unintentionally prepared I was for a layoff.

And how lucky are you, reader, to land on the latter today. 😄

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How to navigate layoffs

Tech layoffs seem to have declined from 2023 to 2024, but they are still happening.

If you’re facing a layoff or want to be prepared for one, here are three points that helped me navigate through this period:

1. Take time

Receiving news that you’re no longer part of a team you poured your heart and soul to isn’t pleasant. People react in different ways but it goes without saying that taking time to express emotions is important to do.

Discussing in depth with close friends and mentors and writing are always my go-to. I wrote 2 posts: one publicly that thousands of people read and one privately for myself. That second one was where I truly let it all out — I recommend doing it!

After the initial emotional burst, I channeled my energies into finding my next challenge and supporting those affected.

Take. Your. Time.

2. Capture your work

I know that this isn’t the case for everyone, but I feel “lucky” in a way that my layoff experience wasn’t immediate. It gave me enough time to gather any work before being completely locked out of my accounts.

Although with that said, I didn’t actually gather much. This is mostly because my obsession with keeping my public work up-to-date, as a side effect of being … me, I guess, paid off.

I recommend this to everyone, but if you haven’t already, have an online space handy to share links of work you’ve done. It’d be preferred before you get to the position of being let go, so that you can focus on job hunting. I personally found that this made the whole process easier.

Want to see if we can collaborate? Look at my work; here’s the link.

If you don’t want to create a whole website for yourself, there are options like simply creating a Notion page and sharing the link. The point is to make it easy for others to see the value you could add from the get-go!

I also recently added a “work with me” page that covers how I like to work, inspired by GitLab’s READMEs. Michael Friedrich (Senior Developer Advocate at GitLab) created his recently—take a look.

Note: I recognise that 90% of my work is in public, so it’s “easier” but the underlying principle is the same. Putting yourself and your work out there helps make job hunting processes easier and could be the reason you’re picked over someone else. True story.

Putting yourself out there can be scary.

Over the years, I’ve written about how I slowly got over the fear of judgement from posting online – including all of you reading this right now. 😆

But as one of my mentors said in the past:

You are the driver of your career. No one else will advocate for you more than you advocate for yourself.

Truth.

3. Build your network

I used to roll my eyes when people told me how important it was to “build my network”.

That is until of course it became my job to create connections with people where “building my network” organically happened.

My network became my community.

When times got tough, my community showed up for me again and again.

Now I’ve become the person that says the same advice: build your network. Don’t wait, do it today! Go to a local tech meet-up, even an online meet-up, join communities, contribute to open source projects and help others in community forums.

It all comes back. Your network will organically form.

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Although I wrote the last two points as something you should do “to navigate a layoff“, I believe that these are things that you should be doing before the layoff even comes.

The best time to prepare for a layoff is before it happens.

To conclude this post, if you’re going through a layoff right now, remember this is hardly ever a reflection of who you are or your capabilities.

It is simply a failure in leadership.

Also, what will be…will be.

I’ll leave you with a video I recorded back in 2021 where I shared the story of my unconventional tech career.

Despite the bumps in the early days of figuring it out, all roads led back to where I was supposed to be: in community.

My story today is no different— so thanK you aIMee.