It
sucks.
The runway they give you is generous, sure. I got two and a half months on payroll and another six of severance and COBRA. I got the same spiel: not about merit, bosses shocked and surprised, free to apply to internal roles…
It still sucks, because the very first thing you do, the thing we’re all trained to do, is to think: “What did I do wrong?” And in the weeks ahead, you’re going to look back at the body of your work, the output you created, and you’re going to realize that you did nothing wrong.
Rather, you were just inconvenient to keep. It was little more than a decision of personal politics, not objective merit. An inconvenient line on a spreadsheet to a leader somewhere who wanted to steal your ideas for themselves, or who couldn’t stand sharing power with an undesirable element within the company. Or maybe they remembered that time you shot down their idea, or have a report showing you were active in the “wrong” chat channels. Maybe you weren’t in the hub they wanted to prioritize, or maybe you were too involved in politics for their liking.
Or maybe they just felt that your premium wages would be better spent on a fleet of underpaid, overworked Indian professionals with tenuous contracts.
It could be any of those. It could be all of those. But you’ll know, deep down, that the decision made wasn’t remotely objective, and therefore had no place in an objective institution like a business. Your leaders gave into vibes, and felt you were an acceptable casualty.
At some point you’re likely to feel rage. Hang onto that, and use it to temper your future. A future where you won’t make such petty decisions. Where you’ll stand up for your workers. Where you’ll build a better working environment that treats humans with dignity and respect, where layoffs are a last resort after a reorg, after everyone whose role actually got eliminated had their skills and output shifted to new, valuable roles instead of shown the door.
The rage is acknowledgement that you deserved better, and by extension your colleagues, peers, family, and friends.
Realizing no current business is any different than the others because they’re all run by MBA bros from consulting firms who lack any original thoughts for themselves is, in a sense, liberating. You finally see that there is no “better” out there, and certainly no objectivity or meritocracy. That everything thus far has been a temporary illusory reprieve from that reality.
But once you see it, once you acknowledge it, you can finally join others in building such a future together.