😰 7 Tips For Dealing With Layoff Anxiety

2014 was one of the worse years for my mental health. I was about to graduate and looking for a job. I had a toddler and a newborn. My postdoc grants were denied. I aced the governments job contests but never got a single call. I wrote a novel. It got rejected everywhere. I applied for around 50 teaching gigs. Got rejected for all of them. The worse was being part of a group interview of 30 applicants for teaching a single course as part of maternity leave replacement.

All this to say: I know firsthand how much job insecurity sucks.

Twitter laid off half of its staff. Apple and Amazon made their hiring freezes official. Online payments giant Stripe slashed 14% of workers. Zendesk, 5%. Varonis, Lyft, Pleo, DeliveryHero, CloudKitchens, OpenDoor, Chime, Dapper Labs, MessageBird, Kry, and the list goes on. Meta is slated for the biggest layoff in high-tech history this week. Salesforce announced layoffs as well.

The first wave of cuts felt in some way like a just correction: companies guzzled on cheap cash, overspent, and had to steer clear ahead of the post-pandemic world. This second one hurts deeper. Capital has vanished, and tech companies attempt to stay afloat.

If you work in tech, it is normal to feel anxious. The sector is indeed in crisis, and a tough 2023 awaits.

My mission with this newsletter is to help you unpack the complexity of the digital world so you feel mentally healthier. As somebody who experienced similar despair before, I hope I can help with my little tips on how to NOT let social media worsen your mental state when feeling stressed about your job status.

1. It's Not Just a Question of Money and It's Ok 🪙

Studies linked unemployment in men to "severe depressive symptoms". The cause identified is the social pressure on men to "provide". Other surveys suggest unemployed men are "less attractive" to women, likely due to social status loss.

My point is, these days, a job is not just your take-home. It's also a social signifier.

A lot of advice I see for people to prep in case of layoffs is money-driven. Get rid of credit card debt first, put off replacing your dishwasher, do you really need Pokemon cards, etc. All of them forget to address the psychological side of it.

I work in tech myself. In computer sciences, working in high tech carries an aura. Going from tech to manufacturing is a status loss. The biggest reason why I was rejected as a college teacher was because deep down I felt it was a "step down" from academia and it showed.

Tweak your social media. Try to shape your online identity around skills rather than status. You're not a "Shopify Engineer". You're an "Engineer who scales a worldwide eCommerce platform". You're not a "Meta Talent recruiter". You're "helping build the most-talented, worldwide team in tech". Even if you keep your job, this will be beneficial for your identity.  

2. Social Nets Matter 👩‍💻

Work is also where we meet people and build relationships. Such friendships can and will last. There were numerous reports of solidarity amongst ex-Twitter workers pulling together their resources and networks to help fellow laid-off employees that were on expiring visas.

Try to assess your real-world friends versus the social media audience you have. One thing that hurt me in 2014 was not having any peers. Be helpful to them. They will want to give back.

3. No Drama and No Rose-Colored Glasses  👓

I found this thread by the Pragmatic Engineer on how the layoffs process works in tech. The main takeaway is that for directors and VPs, we are dollar signs. The most at-risk employees are high-earning individuals who had mediocre annual evaluations. Employees in cost centers, in redundant roles or that have been recently hired, are also at risk.  It doesn't matter how much you are well-respected by your peers or whether you are part of a minority group. Assessing your risk with a level-headed approach will likely relieve you, even if you are in a tough spot.

Being at risk sucks. We are often powerless against the situation as well. Your best bet is to ensure your manager, director and VP know exactly what you bring to the table: note all your successes and tout them.

4. The Blame Game is Worthless 🤑

This Tech Crisis has two very convenient culprits: governments who printed money as part of Covid relief and venture capitalists who spent said money carelessly. Whether you're Left or Right, you have your "Big Bad" to blame!

There are forces at play that we do not control. Governments and capitalists messed up. Accept it. Letting go of anger lifts a weight off your shoulders.

By the way, I'm not a saint. In 2014, I blamed the government's austerity policies. I saw the former minister on a panel the other day and yelled "YOU DIPSHIT" at the TV in front of my kids. I wouldn't want you screaming expletives at a washed-up politician in front of your family.

5. People Will Prey On Your Anxiety ⭐

There is this Star Wars meme going around with Yoda quoting: "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering". The blame can be weaponized. This is where social media algorithms can crush your spirit. This is how struggling people turn to conspiracy echo chambers.

The cutest pup ever, this is

If you find yourself angrier or depressed after consuming social media, now is the time to take a pause. It's called "doomscrolling". Log out of the apps. Remove them from your home screen. It will require you a few extra steps before checking them. It will be enough to deter you. Challenge yourself to do this for a few days.

Remember, the algorithms are optimized for engagement, and what drives engagement is an extreme emotional response. Fear is the most extreme of all.

6. Be Weary of the "Sunshine and Rainbow People" ☀️🌈

I quit Facebook in 2014. I felt upset by everybody else posting pictures of their latest job success and I couldn't bear it anymore. The worse was people who landed cool gigs that I knew were due to them having connections. I was miserable.

So I quit and never looked back.

I wasn't on LinkedIn at the time, but I can only imagine how awful this place must be for unemployed people. All you see there is the highlight of people's job lives. Everybody getting promoted and going to conferences high-fiving CEOs on jet skis like they're hot shit. Nobody's posting their average performance review! Worse, you have to stay there to look at job postings.

In that sense, the most important tip to remember is this is a fabrication. This is people marketing themselves. The person writing that amazing motivational speech about their layoff is showing off their "resiliency skills". It is a game. They likely feel as awful as you do!

7. Find What's at Stake for You 🥩

With a toddler and a newborn, I could not double down on my dream of becoming a writer. I needed income right now. So I switched to IT.

I actually made a physical list of all my career plans at the time. IT was somewhere between plan E and plan G.

Are you single and debt-free? It may be the kick in the butt you need to build that dog breeding app you've dreamed of.

Assess your situation and how much financial risk you can take. Then based on those risks, I recommend building the same list. It may not be for you. Plotting like that can lead to analysis paralysis or rabbit holes.

In the end, all I can think to say is that you are valuable. The economy is a brittle castle of glass whose shards can cut deep (told you I could write worth a damn).

And if I gave you worthwhile advice and you want to discuss it, follow me on social media. I promise I won't make you miserable.

🥊 Quick Hits

• Advances in blockchain-related cryptographic techniques are enabling a new discipline, "privacy-enhancing technologies", or "pets". The Callisto company has begun using secure multi-party computation ("sMPC") to help sexual abuse victims share the perpetrator's identity with lawyers without disclosing their own identity (Full Story).  
• Google Hangouts is no more. Imagine how better off Google would be if they had figured out instant messaging and social media (remember the Google+ flop?) instead of leaving it to Meta's WhatsApp and Instagram. (Full Story).
• The EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) will force Apple to allow third-party apps on the iPhone. The law will also require Apple to make its iMessage app interoperable with WhatsApp and Messenger. I call BS on Apple using privacy and security as a defence here. (Full Story).
• OpenSSL is a cryptography library used by all developers. It revealed what was considered a critical vulnerability, only to be downgraded. I lost my week prepping for an over-hyped mess!  (Full Story).

🗣️ Elon Musk and Twitter: Beyond the Snark

Let's get this out of the way: Elon Musk laid off half of Twitter in classless fashion, then forced engineers to sleep in the office to deliver the new paid checkmark feature, mocking his deniers while doing it.

And I'm here to tell you all that drama doesn't really matter to you.

This is the world's richest man trolling. Let it go.

Big picture, one thing has become very clear to me thanks to this vaudeville, and I think it could inform how we consume social media in the future.

⛓ Social Media is Crypto's Killer App

Binance, the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, invested $500 million in the Twitter acquisition. Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX, arguably the most influential company in the crypto sphere, asked Musk to purchase Twitter. Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter and friend of Musk, has founded Bluesky, a decentralized web3 social media platform. Even Instagram will now offer NFT support, which made the storage system's token surge 60%. This is after Reddit ran out of NFTs in its initial rollout.

A minority of upset users are migrating to Mastodon, an open-source decentralized server, in protest of the acquisition. Mashable thinks it is an alternative. Think of it like a Discord for techies instead of gamers.

Users are discovering how those big social media companies hold so much power over them, and they are taking ownership of their online identity and content.

Whatever the future holds, the Musk deal could become a historical event in how we shifted the tides on "traditional" social media. The question remains whether the paradigm shift will be due to Musk making web3 features mainstream in his Twitter-verse, or if it will be disillusioned users creating that New World elsewhere.

🎧 Quote of the Week