Because YEESH
Hi friend,
How are you? Hopefully employed, if you were and still want to be. As Pavel hilariously noted on LinkedIn recently, the layoffs are coming faster and faster.
Many managers and directors who’ve escaped tech layoff axes these past several years have found themselves sharing so many thoughts and prayers in the form of broken-hearted LinkedIn missives or afterthought-flavored links to spreadsheets of contact info for the people who no longer work for them. “Great folks! So solid! Anyone would be lucky to have them!”
You! You were lucky to have them.
Even if the realities of capitalism and shareholder-driven design are primarily to blame for all of these UX, design, research, and content layoffs, that doesn't leave everyone else's hands clean. It doesn't mean that some voices in product, design, and/or content haven't actively been making it easier for executives to explain away the choices they're making now, and the specific roles, teams, or even entire disciplines those executives are choosing to eliminate. It doesn’t mean that some people haven’t been consistently enriching themselves with top-of-market comp and juicy stock options for years or decades as they’ve watched IC after IC after low-level-manager get axed underneath them.
According to feedback I got on LinkedIn a while back, we—well me, anyway—are not allowed to call out individuals about this. Sure, fine. “Don’t suggest a good person in your field might have done a not good thing because criticism of an individual’s actions and choices is equivalent to saying that the PERSON is bad, which actually makes YOU the bad person, because that’s MEAN. Mean people are always the worst people! Uno reverse!”
Maybe calling out individuals isn’t the most productive possible course of action. Why I’m responsible for taking the most productive course of action every time escapes me, but I want to be a good boy, so I’ll try. I’d like to offer a suggestion for our collective consideration: We have to tell people that this is all part of it.
Rugs get pulled. Rivers flood. Bubbles pop.
One reason—not the main reason, but one bubbling underneath—that tech and UX salaries have been so obscene (sorry, “competitive”) compared to most of the rest of the working world is because there’s a greater-than-in-other-industries chance that your key card won’t work when you come back from lunch. Poof! This is, in part, because the valuation of tech companies, and the amounts of money flying through and around them, make absolutely no goddamn sense relative to the actual value of that company.
That’s not, you know, good, but it has pretty much always been true.
Other things that can go poof overnight: the feature you’re building, the team you’re on, the discipline you’re part of, the company you work for, the values your employer pretended to have, the free snacks, culture and vibe, the software you’ve become an expert in, the methodology you ply as your primary trade, the publisher that sells your book (ahem).
These aren’t things that many recruiters, hiring managers, conference organizers, or even some educators want to say. But perhaps they should. Perhaps managers should remind their people more often that the good times won’t (can’t) last. And, if I may selfishly interject, perhaps they should be cross-training their people through professional development workshops and courses from adjacent disciplines and skillsets.
The more uncomfortable truth is not just that these things can go poof, but that they tend to go poof not because of actually measurable business realities, but because of the whims of executives who do not and never will give a fuck about people.
In other words: They don’t care about you.
They don’t care that you moved your family across the country (or the ocean) for this job. They don’t care that you haven’t been part of a team that actually shipped anything of value to the world in your entire career, and it’s destroying your soul. They don’t care if the options don’t pan out, if your pride is wounded, if the way they frame the layoffs puts you under the bus. They don’t care. They are wealthy psychopaths. Nearly everyone in tech is working for a wealthy psychopath, and if they’re not, that person is beholden to wealthy psychopaths—the board, Wall Street, whomever.
No one in charge cares about the thing that you care about, the thing that made the company interesting or at least not boring to you. Daniel Elk of Spotify does not give two fucks about music or musicians. Mark Zuckerberg hates corporeal human beings and wishes he could upload your consciousness into an avatar attached to a bank account. Employees are cannon fodder for their war on friction between people and their money. The second they identify a tactic in that war that doesn’t require employing you—whether or not that tactic has actually been proven to work—you’re done for.
Talking like this can make you a pariah in some professional circles. (Nobody wants to hear it from the stage, I can tell you that much!) God forbid you acknowledge how shitty all of this is, or that while it might be good for you personally it’s not actually a good or cool thing to make more money in a year than some families will in their entire lives designing things for wealthy psychopaths that make the world a worse place. I’m not blaming you. I, once, ever so briefly, also made an obscene amount of money helping a wealthy psychopath make money. That doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. Can we please stop pretending otherwise?
I’m moving away from career coaching work in part because it’s hard to market in an ethical way. Bootcamps and their ilk paint incredibly rosy pictures. They talk up six-figure salaries and 6-week career transitions. They talk up all the “cool” companies you might get to work for, like the gambling empire that masquerades as an investment app, or the “ride-sharing app” built on the grave of public transit, or the “travel and lifestyle app” that makes cities unaffordable to live in for people who don’t work for the travel and lifestyle app.
This isn’t unique to tech, but at least college is fun. I haven’t had a ton of success pitching myself with promises like “there’s a very good chance this program will show that this is the wrong path for you” or “even if I help you get the job title people might not respect you or your skills” or “the only place you might be able to get work will be an active and conscious party to making the planet unlivable”.
I feel like an absolute crazy person when I’m in an actual or metaphorical room full of people gushing about big tech and startups. No thank you. So I’m also moving, more slowly but no less intentionally, as I think I’ve said before, away from tech and UX in general because YEESH. I’m not quite sure how I got invited to this party, but I know I’m not alone in feeling like it’s time to leave.
This wasn’t going to be a pitch but I’ll take your help anyway: Please help me GTFO. I am going to weep with joy the day I can finally delete my LinkedIn profile.
Three things you could do:
Give me your employer’s money, by signing someone up for a course or workshop, or booking me in for a training. (I’m going to try to make as much money from my current expertise in the next 18 months as I can and then, god willing, I’m outie. So get it while the gettin’s good.)
Connect me with literally any interesting project opportunity in the arts, media, or education that sounds like it might be up my alley. I’m still very interested in topics like writing, design thinking, concept modeling, information architecture, and similar…I just want to engage with them in more enriching and perhaps less ethically-dubious contexts than product design and big tech. Teaching, collaborations, part-time work, whatever.
I’m here if you need to commiserate, and as always, let me know if I can help you with anything. Stay frosty.
Until next time,
Scott