I’m still brokenhearted for those in Israel & Gaza and praying for a fast resolution to the bloodshed. For those with family on either side, I wish you and your family safety and peace.

Happy Halloween! This is one of my favorite holidays. Getting out and saying hello to neighbors. Kids playing outside. Costumes. Candy. Cooler air. What’s not to love? I hope everyone has had a great time and got to raid the candy bowl just a bit tonight. 

But let me tell you the one part of Halloween I don’t care for. I’m not into spooky or scary stuff. I hate jump scares (especially right now as I wrap up healing this broken rib.) Sure, I enjoy a few corny decorations, but the thought of going through a haunted house holds absolutely no appeal to me. I think I understand why some people enjoy it, but it’s just not for me. I’m a big fan of knowing what’s coming, planning for it, and moving on. That’s at least partially a reason the layoff hit me so hard initially.

Now that we’re months removed from the layoff, I have come to a place where I can see some more true silver lining. I’m not sure I would have ever willingly made the jump to start my own business. However, consulting for a variety of startups as a fractional CTO (developer, product manager, junior UX designer, leadership coach, or even janitor if needed, I suppose) has given me opportunities to learn more about “The World of Work™” than 20+ years in the industry ever did. I know I still have a lot to learn, but I know from having read so many of the terrible layoff stories that it will be the rest of my life’s goal to run and lead companies that can be transparent, honest, and working to avoid layoffs like this if at all possible. 

Some Scary Numbers and One Less Scary Number

6,996 people were laid off in October (per Layoffs.fyi) (an increase over September.) Source

7% of Splunk employees being laid off before the Cisco acquisition (approximately 500 more people) source

34% → 57% of CFOs surveyed by Deloitte believe the current economic conditions are good or very good (up from the low point of 34% in Q2 ‘22). source

Scary Deadlines

With the end of the year rapidly approaching (hello, November!), many companies will be hunkering down for the holidays. We all expect hiring to slow from November through January. The good news is that layoffs were much lower in December last year than in the surrounding months, but the bad news is that November was the second highest (beaten only by January ‘23.) So, we’re quickly approaching a deadline for finding a new role this year. A hard push in the next few weeks to send out more applications is sound advice I’ve heard several times. Let me jot a few quick notes on services I’ve used to keep myself sane as I sent out all of those applications:

• LinkedIn – core to my job search and alerts, but there were lots of applicants by the time I found a role there.
• Otta – good for finding new jobs to apply to sometimes before they appear on LinkedIn.
• Ramped – Good AI tools for reviewing resumes and writing customized cover letters using AI
• ResumeWorded – Also a good tool for an AI resume review.
• Google Alerts – Setting up job alerts for sites/titles to try to catch them first

I’m Fearing The Reaper…More Cowbell

I know for the months leading up to the layoff at Indeed, there was a lot of fear about the possibility of layoffs, and from a glance at Blind, it’s clear that hasn’t gone anywhere yet. It probably won’t until companies go back into hiring again. Unfortunately, so much of that energy could be better spent on critical initiatives: reducing costs, increasing efficiency and productivity, and innovating to come out of the downturn stronger. This read in Forbes (5m read time) had a line that jumped off the page for me: 

McKinsey & Company research shows that during the last recession, innovative enterprises outperformed the market average by over 30% and had accelerated growth over the following three to five years.

That’s an incredible business advantage. Plus, the new muscles built by constraining costs and tracking efficiency/productivity will make the whole organization more lean and nimble, too. This is now a part of my research when considering new companies/roles. I want to understand their approach to the downturn.

Scary Fun

ChatGPT had some fun helping me find fun memes for today’s newsletter. Not bad robots. Not bad.

Layoff Journal Week 31 – Scarcity

The scarcity of jobs for senior engineering leaders like myself, recruiters, and so many others has been palpable all year. For many, myself included, this is the first time in their career they’ve experienced an economy like this. Other industries are used to the boom-bust cycle, but tech has long been resilient. The zero interest rate policy phenomenon (7m read time if you’re unfamiliar) created a hyper-growth cycle with easy money combined with high leverage opportunities in software that was not sustainable, and we’re experiencing a correction. We’re seeing scarcity in money, job openings, and access to resources like AI for the first time in many years.

Scarcity can create an impulse for change, see layoffs, budgets, and reorgs focused on efficiency. But scarcity can also create a negative mindset, focusing the mind on what it doesn’t have and driving lower-quality decisions or distracting from important long-term planning with short-term needs. As a job seeker in this environment, it’s easy to slip into a scarcity mentality, focusing on your finances, job prospects, skills, and more. We’ll dig into ways to overcome and leverage this personally and professionally below.

Scarcity in the Numbers

9,000 – 14,000 Nokia employees to be laid off, up to 16% of their workforce, from their Mobile Networks, Cloud, and Network Services divisions. Source

100% of employees of Convoy to be let go as the company shuts down due to drops in the freight market and monetary tightening. Source

8.9 million tech workers according to the CompTIA “State of the Tech Workforce” report, of which around 250,000 have been laid off in 2023 – source, source

Work Scarcity

A lot of the advice for dealing with and overcoming a scarcity mindset can be very self-help-y, so these seven tips (3m read time for just the tips, or 14m for a deeper exploration into scarcity mindset’s causes and impact for anyone looking for a more profound read,) are a quick reminder of the ways to be taking care of ourselves. Thinking of those of you still on the full-time job hunt, knowing your budget, and remembering to take time for yourself amongst all the job applications and (hopefully) interviews is the key. Connecting with others who will encourage and lift you is excellent. I know the market still stinks for many folks, but please remember this isn’t about your skills and abilities; it’s a business cycle, and you will be in demand again (hopefully soon!).

Scarcity at Work

While a deep-seated scarcity mentality is a negative, as a manager, creating some sense of scarcity at work can be helpful. Let me give an example. By forcing teams to work with fewer engineers, QA, or DevOps support than they believe they need, they are forced to prioritize the features they take on ruthlessly. Teams will automate tedious tasks to reduce their impact on the team’s time. Taking on only the most essential or impactful product features and reducing the overhead of running the team means a much higher return on investment (ROI) from the team (especially when you factor in that employees are often the top cost for organizations.)

Now, you can take this too far and create too much scarcity. The team, starved of the resources it needs to invest for the future, makes only short-term decisions. Or, feeling that they’re not in the growth and profit center for the organization, employees begin to look for other roles, teams, or companies where they are empowered to have more impact.

You can see it’s a balancing act of supporting teams and challenging them to drive a healthy ROI from each team. Of course, how you measure ROI for teams is as varied as the teams you manage. Customer-facing teams will be able to track customer experience and impact quickly. Internal platform teams must track their value based on enabling others or reducing risk. You get the idea.

Fun

Final Words

If I can help with your search, please contact me. Please give me feedback on what you like or don’t care for in this newsletter, and I’ll adjust. For total transparency, I have no affiliation with any of the tools, companies, or resources I share. These are my impressions, not colored by any outside influences.

Time is the most precious commodity in the world. Money can be earned and spent, but we can earn money, gain love, find enjoyment, or fulfill our purpose with time. And yet, we all have experienced the feeling of having too little time. I’ve felt it several times throughout my job search and feel it especially acutely right now as I am starting back into (contract) work.

I was reminded recently of 15five.com in a discussion with other engineering leaders. 15five was a tool I used at Indeed nearly every week over the seven years I was there. Planning each week’s goals and documenting my progress towards them (as well as larger quarterly projects) gave me a clear sense of progress. I haven’t been nearly as regular about documenting my progress or goals throughout the job search, and now fractional work. I have a growing feeling that I’m not delivering enough, that I’m not doing enough, and that the work world is passing me by. I want to bring back some of that rigor to my day and my weeks as we wrap up the end of the year.

Time to think about the numbers

660, 50%, 28% – LinkedIn employees, percent of Bandcamp employees, and percent of StackOverflow employees laid off in the last few days. Source, source, source

4,744 people laid off, as tracked on layoffs.fyi, to date in October, exceeding September, with still almost half the month to go. source

Time Sensitive Tip

For those who received Texas unemployment (other states may have similar processes,) as I understand it, they withheld your first week of unemployment payment, also known as a “waiting week.” Once you have received two times your weekly benefit and return to work or have exhausted your benefits, you can request the “waiting week” payment. So, if you benefits have run out or you have returned to work, take a look.

Time Management

There are countless articles on the internet about time management. The “Getting Things Done” (GTD) methodology has always been a favorite of mine, but the thing it never helped me manage was calendar creep. In the seven years I was with Indeed I had to declare calendar bankruptcy (4 min read, or: deleting or declining all recurring meetings and re-adding only those that were truly necessary) multiple times. Part of that was due to my increasing scope within the organization as my team grew from four to over 80, but part of it is the proliferation of calendars as the arbiter of our attention. I’m about to institute a no-meetings day for my own personal benefit. Thankfully I don’t really have many recurring meetings at this point to clean out.

Fun

If I can help with your search, please contact me. Please give me feedback on what you like or don’t care for in this newsletter, and I’ll adjust. For total transparency, I have no affiliation with any of the tools, companies, or resources I share. These are my impressions, not colored by any outside influences.

My heart is breaking for all of those hurting across Israel & Gaza today. I’m praying that your families are safe, stay safe, and for a fast resolution to the conflict.

Baseball started the post-season this week, and it has some striking similarities for folks who’ve been laid off several weeks (or more). The stakes continue to increase, the losses are more crushing, and it has to end eventually. Personally, the long-term job search continues even as I balance a consulting job and an equity-only (for now) startup role. It is a bit of short-term relief and a chance to grow some skills, which is good but takes up a lot of time that would otherwise be spent networking and job searching. It’s still a balancing act, as I don’t see myself staying a long-term consultant. 

Just like in baseball, we’re all just trying to get home. We’re trying to find the next great job we can lean into, which will reward us for our hard work. My job search strategy has been like my favorite baseball strategy: small ball. Rather than swinging for the fences and hoping for a home run (or a strikeout) every time, my goal has been to have lots of things going simultaneously. Networking with laid-off coworkers and those currently working to stay aware of opportunities. Job searches on LinkedIn, Indeed, Otta, Google, and more each day. Applying to roles quickly after finding them. Polishing my resume. Each of these things feels like a single, a swing, or a bunt. Enough to keep momentum going to find the next role. 

The consulting, the startup, and the training course I’m developing are more like home run swings. They have the chance to dramatically change the course of the next few years of my career. But I’m not banking on them (yet). They’re enabling me to develop new skills while I keep the job search running. 

Post-Season Blues

3X more mentions of reassignment (or similar terms) in earnings calls year over year (signs of companies quiet cutting) source

Round 2+ of layoffs for some tech companies are showing some traction (Meta, Amazon/Twitch, Block, and others are named) source

300,000+ people laid off in the last 12 months, but tech employment is still above the pre-pandemic trendline source

Post-Season Parties

I missed this when it came out in June, but some laid-off people have taken to throwing parties to celebrate, commiserate, reconnect, and enjoy life in general (7 min read). This sounds like a ton of fun, and while I’m late to the game, having a small get-together sounds very cathartic. Let me know if you’re in the Austin area and up for a small soiree sometime, and I’ll see what I can do. At the very least, it’s an excuse to get out and drink with a few friends for an evening.

Playoff Level Loyalty is Earned Through Change Management

One of the biggest accomplishments I had the privilege of taking part in while at Indeed was rolling out updates to the performance management system for all of Product, Technology, and Engineering (approximately 4,000 people.) I could speak at length about the design and implementation of performance management systems, but I wanted to spend a few words on change management today. Performance management affects promotions, bonuses, compensation, and much more, so getting the communication right on the change was critical. I’ll dive deeper into this topic in a future post, but here’s the headline version on general concepts for change management.

The first thing you must clarify is the purpose of the change. If leadership is unclear on the “why,” there’s a significant risk of losing steam, going off the rails, or a million other failure scenarios. Writing down the goals and the non-goals and wrestling with leaders’ concerns will drive clarity and alignment on the purpose.

Once the vision and motivation are locked in, it’s time to plan and execute the communication. This is the time to think about “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you told them.” Multiple communications, in multiple formats, and from multiple leaders will be necessary (of course, depending on the size of the team and change.) 

Lastly, you’ve got to lock in the people side of the change. You’ll have promoters and detractors. Getting ahead of the detractors and working closely with them to resolve or reduce their concerns helps speed the transition. Identifying your promoters and keeping them aligned with the goals and communication amplifies your message and reduces the workload of your leadership team. Lastly, empowering managers throughout your organization to answer questions, share the messages, and execute the change cements the change as the “new normal.”

Getting the purpose, communication, and people right in change management gives you the best chance of successfully rolling out organizational change and growing the trust and loyalty of your team.

Fun

Final Words

If I can help with your search, please contact me. Please give me feedback on what you like or don’t care for in this newsletter, and I’ll adjust. For total transparency, I have no affiliation with any of the tools, companies, or resources I share. These are my impressions, not colored by any outside influences.

Welcome to the holiday season. For those still searching for a job, it’s bittersweet. Thankfully, the holiday season is more stretched than ever, and we’re only starting the Halloween season, so it is still very early. Still, the thought of not having a full-time role lined up before Christmas has been looming over my head for a few weeks. I’m thankful to have the opportunity to take up a contract role and I recognize that not everyone has that opportunity, but the holidays are still in the back of my mind. My advice is to keep the holiday plan as normal as possible. Those traditions are the baseline for memories, and while this has been a dark year for many, having a bit of light at the end of the year can be a lift.

I love this time of year. The weather finally starts to cool off, baseball is into the post-season (even if my team didn’t make it this year), and the joy of kids anticipating the costumes, candy, and presents is a great way to wrap up each year. Expect more sentimentality than usual from me here for the next few months.

Non-traditional Numbers

4,632 more people were laid off in September, down from the high of nearly 90,000 back in January. source

83,328 job ads for software engineering jobs were posted on LinkedIn last week, a weakening number but still better than the low point in Q2. source

45% of those laid off were women, while women only represent 39% of the workforce overall (thus they were overrepresented in layoffs) source

Busy, Busyness, Business

“The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.”

— Michael Altshuler

Talking with laid-off teammates, they mention being busier than ever, even without a full-time job. I have had the same experience. Between job searching, filing for unemployment, networking, interviewing, exploring contract work, and all the daily life work of raising a family, the days are long, but the weeks are short. It’s critical to pay attention to where the time is going and look for ways to a) stay busy on things that progress my knowledge or career, b) avoid being overly committed and too busy to be available, and c) keep looking for the new opportunities on the horizon and cultivating them.

I’ve enjoyed more time for family life and getting my hands deep into code again for the first time in years. Starting a consulting business provides excellent opportunities to learn the broader parts of running a company I’ve only ever brushed up against previously. The trick has been choosing which events and activities to say no to. It’s still a real struggle and an area for improvement.

Focus Fuels Velocity

Staying in the theme of team principles that we operated the Indeed Incubator under, we had an unrelenting focus on delivering new products as efficiently and as effectively as we could. We very rarely allowed teams to have multiple distinct product bets going at the same time, instead focusing them on the one they thought was most likely to produce the outsized outcome we were looking for.

Having one key thing to work on helps teams to be laser focused on the most important thing. It also helps leaders as they lay out the priorities. Having only one thing to change at a time is clarifying to the team. It makes it clear that anything else is, at best, second priority. When we set a clear focus we clear away the cobwebs of the other things that could be distracting us.

This doesn’t have to be hard (but often it is). Establishing a clear objective and the key results you’re going to use to measure the success isn’t difficult on its own. It becomes difficult when you see that you have 10 objectives and an average of seven key results for each. First, you’ve got to narrow down the objectives. Three at the most per team and generally these are rolling up to higher level objectives, each time increasing in breadth & depth, but still only around three in total per level. 

Next the key results have to be reduced. Again, to avoid the problem of too many things to track, you reduce the number of measures to approximately three as well. This will give you approximately nine key metrics per team feeding into three overall objectives. The other important part here is to avoid vanity metrics. Each of these results should be a measure of how your business or product is improving, not just a number that’s moving or a feature that’s delivered.

Fun

Final Words

If I can help with your search, please contact me. Please give me feedback on what you like or don’t care for in this newsletter, and I’ll adjust. For total transparency, I have no affiliation with any of the tools, companies, or resources I share. These are my impressions, not colored by any outside influences.