What it's like to be a Silicon Valley Dropout.

It's time for me to come clean.

Yesterday was May 4th, 2020 and I have officially been unemployed for 5 whole months.

A little less than 6 months ago, I was let go from my Business Development role with VMware after failing to meet my monthly sales quota consistently. I had been with the company for a year and 10 months, almost 2 years.

I had never aspired to go into sales or business development, but graduating from a university without widespread brand name recognition had left me with limited options after completing undergrad in 2017. After an insights and analytics marketing internship with Intel Corporation the summer before graduation (a summer spent using lots of Excel and Tableau), I'd found my true passion lay in marketing analytics.

When it was time to put my name in the hat for jobs, I'd excitedly applied for Business Analyst, Marketing Analyst, User Acquisition roles, and many others of the like. I even learned how to code in basic to intermediate SQL after seeing that many of the roles called for experience with the language.

For 3 months after graduation, I continued on like this before finally conceding. I decided I'd get into a business development role and try to maneuver towards something I was more interested in a little later on. I figured experience in a more sales-oriented position couldn't hurt either. It might come in handy for working with sales stakeholders in projects further down the road, I thought to myself. In March 2018, I packed up my things and left the borderlands of deep South Texas for the heart of Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, California.

While business development had never been my first choice, I set out to master my new role with the type of fervor only a new grad “out to change the world” could muster. I studied our team's handbook religiously and made it a point to learn everything about the role in as few weeks as possible. I wanted to learn everything I didn't know about and everything I didn't know that I didn't know about.

After a few months, I'd gotten the hang of things. I was able to speak to the technical components of our product, without much of a technical background, address network engineers with at least a fair degree of competency, and craft email campaigns that could yield both higher open and click-through-rates. Some months were great, others I fell beneath our quota.

For a year and 10 months I did this. Adapting to changes as the company went from start-up to larger VMware business unit, restructuring and reorganization were the only constant. The employee churn rate for our business development team was also the highest among all the teams in our BU, so leads would get shifted around and we became used to this as a common occurrence. It was obvious that there were many challenges the wider marketing and sales orgs for our BU were experiencing which our team bore the burden of.

Still, in what some might call my honeymoon phase in the role, I brought up a potential change of direction for my career path about 6 months in. I was told in so many words to wait for my year or year and a half mark before diving into that a little further. The months wore on and I grew more tired and dispassionate with the role each day. It was emotionally depleting. Somewhere along the way, I studied for my GMAT when I got home every day, just to keep things interesting. After several months of studying, I took the test in December of 2018. At my year and a half mark, I was told to show more consistent results before discussing my future interests.

I put my head down and tried to bring in customer meetings, but in the end, market volatility and about 2 years of cumulative distaste for the job had their way. On December 4th 2019, I was let go. I was conflicted at first. A small part of me felt sad I'd been "terminated." I felt expendable, like I hadn't meant much more to the team than the number of phone calls I'd made or emails I'd sent each day. I'd given two years of my life to a team that had treated me as an employeeID number, a black and white integer value some database administrator would see transfer columns in a matter of days. A small part of me.

On the other hand, this was one of the single most celebrated moments in my life up to this point. "FINALLY! Thank God" I had thought to myself. I was free. Now I could get to the things that really mattered. I had more time to travel and visit friends and family for the holidays. I applied and got into grad school; a Masters of Science program in Business Analytics online with the The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley where I'd attended undergrad. I started sitting at local coffee shops in downtown Mountain View or Sunnyvale every day, applying to the kinds of jobs I was really passionate about doing, and learning skills from my classes, like the more advanced data analysis features within Excel and how to use R.

Socially though, up 'til this point I've been very private about my professional life.

I didn't want to tell my parents I'd been let go because I was more than 100% certain I would receive one of their TED Talks about how I should get into the next "bizdev" role that would have me, just to maintain financial stability. It just wouldn't make sense for me to continue setting the resume framework for something I didn't enjoy doing. Nor did I have any interest in lying about my ambitions to any hiring sales managers who wanted to get on the phone with me.

I didn't want to tell my girlfriend's family, for fear of them thinking she was dating a bum on unemployment benefits (though I now know they would never be so severe and judgmental).

5 months is too long to keep everything to oneself though. Since December, I have been applying to the kind of roles I have aspired to, trying to make some time for classes and the gym as well. Usually, I won't receive so much as a word from another human being, for anyone familiar with the cursed "no-reply" emails.

I'd actually been gaining some traction with a few companies just before the Coronavirus hit, which grinded everything to a halt. "That role has been suspended/halted/paused" I was told time and again. And with the Coronavirus forcing many others into the same difficult position as myself, I decided to write this article as a vehicle to make public my circumstances and encourage others to do the same. Unemployment claims have spiked more than 3000% in many places across the country. However, if this pandemic has shown us anything, it's that network effects are not to be underestimated, good or bad.

Though our economy is gradually beginning to creep back up to speed, I feel it may be a while yet before life returns to normal, especially if recommended and quantitatively sound precautions are taken. Ever the optimist though, I believe LinkedIn can help us to leverage the good in network effects and to get people back on their feet. Our workforce is reeling. The events of late have left many households financially devastated, and even though mine may only be a modest room rental of 1, perhaps you can consider beginning to help by giving this resume a share today...