Maybe Depressed, Not Discouraged

A year in the life of someone who was laid off from the best job ever.

I need a damn job.

A little over a year ago, I and about 7,000 of my Salesforce colleagues were caught in the boardroom crossfire between a founding CEO and some #ActivistInvestors, and…well, let’s just say we received generous severance packages.?

To add extra spice to the situation, I got the news two hours earlier than the rest of my West Coast-based crew. It was the loneliest two hours. And the end to the best job of my life.

When I first saw the “Important information about your role” subject line at 6 a.m., my knees buckled. And then I read “As we announced earlier today, we’re reducing our workforce by about 10 percent, mostly over the coming weeks. Unfortunately, as part of this reduction your role is being eliminated.” I almost threw up on the kitchen floor.?

After a couple of deep breaths, I made some coffee and sat down at my desk and waited to hear from the rest of the crew, hoping that some vestiges of our team and our remit were still standing.?

Let me start at the beginning. Salesforce provides a massive infrastructure of customer relationship management software products that help marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT teams connect with their customers. The Salesforce Design remit was to scale design excellence to drive business outcomes through education, community, and thought leadership.

In late 2020, I was brought in as a learning designer, and it didn’t take too long for my "keep it moving" generalist capabilities to become useful to the team. I proved to be a good thought partner for our leaders – I've always had an affinity for strong creative personalities, and I enjoy encouraging and managing big ideas. My project manager inclinations (thanks OCD) proved useful as we built and launched several blended learning initiatives from the ground up. I spent a lot of time thinking about signal-to-noise. I often found myself reminding the team to make sure we were still asking the right questions and then using those answers to build something actually useful for actual humans. After a couple of years of contracting, I was offered a full time position in 2022, and it was the most satisfying job of my entire career.?

OK, back to D-Day. As the West Coasters woke up, the news started to trickle in, and we learned the team was gone. It was more sweet than bitter to learn that a couple of our folks got shuffled around and were still “safe” – whatever that meant in this context. We virtually mourned together for a couple hours, folks sliding into and out of the Zoom, all of us with rueful smiles and disbelief in our eyes. I love that crew, and I still actively miss working with those people.

I’m not going to lie, 2023 was pretty rough. After two months of unemployment, a former co-worker from a different era of my life recommended me for a role at his current company. It felt nice to be wanted. But my spidey-sense was tingling and, after a couple of back and forths, I sensed that we weren’t aligned on what the business challenge was and how to fix it. I declined the offer two separate times. They countered with a salary that I just couldn’t ignore — and did I mention it felt nice to be wanted?

So I took a job that didn’t sing to me and did the best I could for four months. And finally, the truth of our mismatch was proven out and they let me go. That was really hard. Despite the fact that I knew better, I let it impact my confidence.

Then I just sat still and licked my wounds for a while. Lots of quiet time, doing projects around the house and staring into the fire pit. This happened to be right at the same moment I was watching some of my old Salesforce friends, who had been more patient, get cool new gigs. Again, more sweet than bitter, and now with a trace of personal regret.

So, I’m lacking confidence and actively depressed, which is a hard way to conduct a job search. Almost 50 applications and only three interviews later, it takes active effort to not be discouraged.

Part of that active effort has been articulating what I’m good at at this stage in my career. So I sat down and reworked all my professional collateral. When I realized that I’m experienced enough that my resume is five plus pages, as a design experiment, I created a cool one-pager. (It’s interesting to contemplate how professional development happens even when we’re not working, isn’t it?) This process forced me to pare it all down to the essentials, and here’s where it’s landed for the moment: ??

• I’m a Designer, Writer, Builder, and Project Manager.
• I build teams and strategic programs that enable talented people to create new value for businesses.
• I bring deep expertise in design leadership, learning, people development, and operations.
• I’m a disciplined, methodical thinker and a versatile maker and accomplished craftsperson.
• I thrive where there’s a need for both innovative thinking and operational excellence.

It’s taken a couple of months to start feeling like myself again, and it takes consistent energy to stay positive. Walking the dog helps, picking up freelance projects helps, my loving friends and family help. I’ve got good energy. I’m ready to be useful. And I need a job.

I know there’s a ton of us mid-career folks out there who are currently experiencing this exact crisis of confidence – and I’m simply sharing my story to remind us all – we aren’t alone. Stay the course.

And for anyone that’s responsible for hiring at this moment in time – I know you have an incredible pool of talent to choose from right now, and that it's harder to find obvious fits for people with wildly varied experiences, but please give us a chance. It might take some imagination to find someone who can handle just about anything thrown at them and can make a team hum – and it’s worth the chance.

h/t to Hsiao-Ching Chou for the inspiration and editorial assist.?

h/t to Denise Burchell and Teddy Zmrhal and Victor Saad for being with me every step of the way.?