Catching up

On December 2nd, I logged in to work as usual, did about half an hour of my usual Monday catch up routine, and then got a message from my then-new-manager, asking me to join a conference call. I held out hope until about 15 seconds into the meeting that this was about the project that I'd been trying to get resources to get off the ground, but instead I was laid off.

Backing up a bit to catch everyone up...

I was laid of from my tiny security startup in August of 2022, it was just the beginning of the drop into recession, and only a few weeks after the contractor who'd been doing our foundation raised his prices by (what ended up being) about a quarter of a million dollars. To say I was Not Okay was an understatement; it's hard to look back on that time and understand how I kept putting one foot in front of the other. I went to Burning Man, and threw myself into the job search full time, while also desperately doing as much of the house-repair work as I possibly could myself. I was exhausted and tense and stressed, working every shred of scarcity-mindset skill as hard as I possibly could. For example, skimping on groceries to pay for $2k of insulation we could install ourselves, to save ourselves huge amounts of money on the monthly gas bill throughout the winter.

In October of 2022 I landed what felt like the perfect job. But it was hard being onboarded, looking at the box of goodies and thinking how much that "welcome" swag and those fancy noise canceling headphones had cost, and thinking what else I could've done with that money. I would've rather had the money. Two weeks later, I got what ended up being effectively a small but not insignificant pay cut, as the company liquidated the in-person offices I'd been so looking forward to working from. And there was a RIF - a layoff, and suddenly the reporting chain I'd been hired into compressed itself. Things were in chaos, okay, so, it's a startup right? But it was a well leveled job, with a supportive boss who I really enjoyed working with, and a teammate who was experienced and capable. 

We set about our work, which was an excruciating combination of catching up after months of there being no docs team at all, building an API doc system, and simultaneously hashing out a process we could follow with first eng, then PM, to make sure that everyone was on the same page about what was getting released. I did a lot of work to make everyone agree on terminology, which I found out later both raised a lot of friction when we realized that teams had been agreeing-but-disagreeing, and helped drive clarity as I forced them to prune back the infinite weasel-y terms for release phases. We started the lead up to a new major revision of our software, and got to work. We had an offsite in Vegas to "drive togetherness".

And then my teammate broke the news that she was pregnant, and would be out on leave for a full year, starting in only a few months. I picked up the pieces and continued working, but quickly got snowed under. We opened a req for a writer, and after months of the recruiting team providing unhelpful leads, I took over the process and landed us an incredibly talented junior writer. We got to work, and we shipped near-complete docs for the open beta, and started in on - surprise! - GA which was supposed to drop a few months later. The sprint was real! We were getting stuff done! I took a week off  to give a talk at a conference in Austin on API docs, and spent the rest of the time organizing our engineering resources to write sample code for the release, and fighting to improve the quality of the AI chatbot that had been shoehorned into the product

And then the GA version dropped in early 2024, and we had two full months of frantic patch frenzy. In that time, it became apparent that a lot of the assumptions that went into the new version were actively harming paying customers, so we began untangling these things, painstakingly, one at a time. I was pulled into emergency project after emergency project and then, suddenly, we were in a month-long bugfix limbo. It was like the first peak of a roller coaster, when you suddenly feel the loss of gravity. There was no product momentum, and there would be none, because, I was horrified to find out, there was no future product development roadmap. 

There was another layoff. I put my team to work doing massive doc quality work, burning down the bug backlogs, writing tools and timesavers and quality of life enhancements for our day to day work. A few more releases dribbled out. Talented people began to leave. My lead who I really liked came to our meetings tired and defeated, and tired and defeated, put me on a project to propose, get buy-in, and start replatforming the docs. I got pretty far! But eventually got stonewalled from all of the stakeholders who I needed to get buy-in from. Everyone was enthusiastic about the project, but nobody was willing to sign off. 

I went to Burning Man, and came back, and continued working doggedly on the proposal. It became pretty clear that something was going on, and it was not something good.

Around this time, we started deconstruction on the back room of our house, which had started falling in properly in 2022, and which we'd had to board up, tarp over, and start removing falling glass from. We tore off wood that was little more than standing compost. We salvaged hardware and wooden parts and marveled at how something so entirely rotten had stood for so long. My anxiety was through the roof, because here we were, starting a new project when it felt like my job was incredibly tenuous.

Back at work, I made a proof of concept using a new platform. I booked meetings with people to talk through the process, ask for concerns and questions. I kept getting evasions. There was almost no dev work coming through, and I was put solely on this proposal process. I could see the target painted on my back in giant letters, and started making sure I documented and explained everything I did, with the secret goal of making sure my team was stable in the event I was let go. 

My boss who I loved left. We were shoved back under the organization at whose feet I laid most of the blame for the troubles, which was... not great. Friction was high. The director had strong opinions about how docs should be done, and none of us agreed with them. I broke it to my team that I was likely to be laid off soon, it was just a matter of when. My anxiety peaked, and I fitfully applied for job listing after job listing that were quite frankly wildly under market rate, and which never replied anyway, and I realized - I was just going to have to stick it out.

And I just kept going to work, and watching the back room disappear, then watching the back room slowly reappear, and the construction bills roll in.

And then the layoff. 

It was... a relief? "Definitively not performance related, just a cost saving measure." Two months of my salary, and an offer to pay COBRA fees for two months. I would get all of December off, guilt-free. No more dealing with toxic leadership, with dwindling engineering capacity, with the problems I saw, and that I saw solutions to if someone would listen to me, if someone would make a decision, if someone would let me make a decision. I felt incredibly justified in my prior actions to prepare my team.

As my corp access cut out, I started to get shocked texts from my now-former colleagues, who couldn't believe I was let go. The head of Support wrote me a recommendation, unasked for, that very day. The next day I set up meetings with my therapist, psychiatrist, doctor, acupuncturist, and financial advisor, and wrote a long post on LinkedIn talking about the bittersweet RIF, and all the interesting projects I'd worked on with all the different people. By the end of the day, I had two people contacting me about potentially coming to interview. By the end of the week, I had four.

I spent my first week unemployed taking care of self-care tasks that had fallen by the wayside, and planning some strategy. I was invited to a former colleague's office to "hang out" and ended up having hours long geek sessions with the founders. I got bagels. I did my usual full-moon reflections. I went to Dickens Fair.

(I got a sinus infection, but hey at least it's not covid?)

I'm spending this whole time looking back at the downward spiral that the company marked right from the start, and I'm flexing my self-worth, realizing that while that was two years protected from being un-employed, I was under-employed and unappreciated. The utter and absolute scarcity mindset that the company espoused was damaging both to itself and to my mental health. My financial advisor even commented that I'd pointed out problems six months ago, he'd thought at the time that perhaps I was being a little dramatic, but I was spot on the money. I'm unwinding layers of mental bandages and realizing that a lot of my sense of unease the last few months has been due to the fruitless, pointless penny-pinching that was being done at work. And the sense of learned helplessness of that company... I just... wow.

I'm coming out of this feeling grateful both for the two years of shelter the company provided from the deepening recession, but also gratitude for the amount of stuff I learned, leadership I had to take, and for the eventual graceful (if abrupt) exit.

And now you're caught up.

Whew.