It's Not Me. It's Them
The difference between a layoff that breaks you and one that doesn't
I’m facing another layoff, but this time I was ready for it, even if I wasn’t ready for how it would play out.
It started in May, when talk of reorganizing our AI group surfaced. No one knew what a reorg would look like, but right before Memorial Day, we found out. A mid-level executive put in charge of building a new AI organization joined our weekly call and announced that new job reqs were being opened for us to apply for. We were being reorganized into new AI pods aligned with specific verticals and sales teams.
I scrambled, just like everyone else, and applied for a Solutions Architect role, something I’m vastly familiar with and have done for years. However, this one was more hardware-focused, which, candidly, isn’t my strongest area, but I knew I could pick it up if given the chance.
Then on June 29, our collective new boss invited about twenty of us to a thirty-minute meeting. I knew something was up when HR joined the call. During that meeting, we were informed that all our roles were eliminated. We needed to apply to the new job reqs, or find something else internally. We’d get offboarded by mid-August if we didn’t.
Someone on the call asked about the roles we’d already applied to; when would we hear about that? The response?
“I’ll talk to you all individually this week,” he said.
