And now, fast forward to 2023, they are laying me off, along with another 99 people.
In a way I’m relieved because I was planning to change jobs due to burnout (burnout that my manager referred to during my layoff meeting as being “a little bit stressed”).
However, due to the same said burnout, I couldn’t do much job searching and needed a long vacation.
I got laid off while on vacation, a vacation I took late because of the deadlines set by the company, also a vacation which I spent recovering from burnout (and doing other fun things, don’t get me wrong.)
Mainly I blame their obsession with “growth hacking”. Now this company is a TV company and have canceled a large list of programs viewers like because they aren’t making enough revenue.
And everyone does it with a smile on their face, under the guise of ‘efficiency’.
How does one increase efficiency by reducing the number of workers and not really coming up with any tools so that less workers could do the same job?
The negotiations with the union ended in disagreement about my team’s layoffs but I got the boot anyway.
So what did I get myself burnt out for? Absolutely nothing worth it. I should have just quit-quitted. This didn’t come easy to me because I place a lot of importance on product ownership. I’m early in my career and wanted to build cool stuff that people use and enjoy.
Ah yes, the good ol’ product ownership.
I once built a product from scratch, put my heart and soul into it, watched it grew from pretty much nothing to a full-featured thing. It almost got canceled a few times, but I fought nail and tooth each time (my some colleagues’ help) to keep the development running.
At some point, we hit a whale, a high profile one, that is. Our sales was working them for at least a couple years. My boss even pitched in, lowering the price more than we would’ve just to get the project going.
Yet, I had to pretty much had to make it work by myself, with some part-time help from colleagues who’s doing other projects. The whole development team (which includes this colleagues) were running on skeleton crew.
I asked my boss to recruit some more people, but he refused, due to budget. At some point we ran into an issue that I couldn’t solve. Weeks went by with our product pretty much being unusable. The whale were losing trust in us every moment, but there’s nothing I could do. The first solution my boss could come up with: for me to try and ask around and find a friend who could help me.
Finally my boss caved in and asked some freelance with whom he had worked with previously. We were able to come up with a working solution, but by then, the whale had lost too much trust. One of the top brass there even told us straight up that it’s pointless. This was after we deployed our solution.
As the project was crumbling beneath our feet, I was able to find a new job and got out of that company. Later of, I heard that this project got terminated.
Although I was somewhat bummed, I was also relieved I wasn’t there by the time shit hit the fan. That thing was my baby, but whatever. Now I got paid much more for doing less work that I did.