You’re being let go, your department’s being downsized, you’re part of an outplacement, we’re going in a different direction, we’re not picking up your option… - Emperor Kuzco and Yzma, Emperor’s New Groove
I should have known something was up this morning when I got a meeting invite from our recently-hired CIO (with whom I’ve not had a single productive word) bearing the word “Update” and nothing else.
It was confirmed not long after when Mark asked if I had a similar meeting. His meeting was first, which only confirmed my suspicions. It was time for layoffs. And for the first time in my career, I was one of them.
I’m caught in between surprised and not surprised. I’m surprised that it’s taken this long for me to be caught in a layoff, despite having been through the aftermath of about a dozen of them. But I wasn’t surprised to be caught this time. There are a long list of reasons why, none of which I’m going to get into as I’m sure there will be a lengthy and imposing set of conditions in my severance letter.
And without question, this was a numbers game: find the area with the lowest productivity, dispose of the most expensive people in that area. That’s how layoffs are done: pure math. It’s rare that companies will take the time to assure that they’re not inadvertently causing issues by carving off people they need.
And I suppose that’s a mild irony for me. Or possibly an expected outcome, now that I think of it. One of my goals last year – and it was a biggie – was to “make myself redundant”. No, I’m not kidding. There was a good reason for it.
I was either directly responsible for or heavily involved with the set up of our services and processes: make sure we had consistency, control, backups, redundancies, and coverage. We shouldn’t ever be in a situation where the words “I don’t know” are uttered because someone was out sick or on vacation. (That’s not to say we didn’t have that happen, but we developed processes to avoid a second occurrence.) And that’s a lot of information in one’s head. It’s a huge operational risk.
Hence the Runbook. Well, not an actual “runbook”, more like a “here’s how to do X, these are the resources, and here’s where we had to bury a few bodies” manual so that anyone could pick up the pieces and keep going. It’s a form of Disaster Recovery Planning, as well as operations: don’t hold the keys that keep things going, ‘cuz you never know when that bus is going to hop a curb.
And when you transfer all of that knowledge, suddenly the operational risk of you not being present drops dramatically, and your total compensation becomes a glaring liability. From a mathematical perspective, I totally understand. But it still felt personal, because the signs had been showing for a while, and it was clear the list had been prepared a week or two in advance with a inner circle group of people already in the know before the hammer dropped.
And the hammer hit hard. There were 17 of us. Halifax lost two of its most senior people, Calgary lost five (four of us OG Venture), with Toronto taking the remainder. There were a couple of names on the list I didn’t know at all. I was relieved that half of our team was spared – all but one of them in Toronto – and a bit miffed that none of the people I thought should have long since been let go for sheer incompetence remained. But hey, what could I possibly know after 30 years in this industry…
I was not told whom to transfer things to. (And if that doesn’t clearly spell out that there was only math in this equation, I don’t know what would.) Once I figured out that a couple of key people were spared, I followed up with an email with a few key notes, transferred my “how to contact me on the outside”, cleared off my personal junk from the decrepit laptop and handed it to poor Paola (another OG Venture) who had to bear witness to all of this, and went for a long lunch.
It’s been a ride. When I started with VenturePlay (aka Venture Communications) back in October 2021, I had been tasked with rebuilding the digital team. We were making some progress, then got embroiled in a six-way merger. I think I learned more about having to adapt from local-to-national, from one to many, from small to immediately large than I ever could have at any other organization. And for that, it was worth the wild ride. And I can safely say that if I am ever asked to go through a “merger of equals” again, I will politely decline.
The problem now is … where do I go? I’m almost 54. I’ve been in senior roles for a long time, but not “senior enough” to warrant some of the postings out here. I know a lot of this is “fake it until you make it” but between AI ATS scanners and a market flooded with people who have also been tossed to the curb (it’s a lot, I assure you), I’m concerned. I’ve not been out of work without a direction since 2000 (and that was for very different reasons). I’ve got a family to support. And the technology industry had been inherently ageist for a very long time, never mind the “let’s have AI do it” mentality polluting everything.
I think I’m going to take the rest of the week to chill out, talk to some friends, reassess my lot in life.
This isn’t exactly the mid-life crisis I expected.
