Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Lately I've been driving past gas stations more often. Without stopping. That fact struck me today as I engaged in a little habit of taking a slight detour on the way home from lunch to swing past a few gas stations and observe what their prices are.

"Wait, why do I care what the prices are?" I asked myself. Of course I like to know so I can buy the cheapest gas... but neither of our cars need gas right now, and likely neither will for upwards of two weeks. We just aren't burning that much gas anymore.

What's the change? No, we didn't buy a more fuel efficient vehicle. The change is that we're driving our current vehicles a lot fewer miles. And the big change there is Hawk being out of work.

Dropping a commute means a lot fewer miles traveled each week. Along with me working remotely (as I have for the past many years) it means our two cars are used mostly just for quick trips around town during the week. So now, unless we happen to drive somewhere further away on the weekend, one of our cars can go weeks between fill-ups. And it just feels... weird... not to fill a gas tank (or battery) for 2-3 weeks at a time. It's, like, un-American or something! 🤣

Friday midday I walked out on a meeting with my boss and a colleague. The colleague was being disrespectful toward me, even after I told him I found his behavior disrespectful and asked him to stop. My boss had acknowledged the problem beforehand (it's part of a widening pattern) and offered to help address it. But in the meeting he did nothing as it happened again. I told both of them, "I'm done with this [disrespect] for today. Find someone else for this task if you have to," and then walked out. I took a few minutes to convince myself I'd done the right thing with some help from my spouse then circled back around to talk to my boss 1:1 to tell him I need to see significant improvement soon. I didn't explicitly say "Or I will quit" but IMO only a fool would fail to see that was clearly implied.

After that I left for the airport. I had been in Austin for a day and a half of technical training. I was glad I had a built-in excuse not to have to be around my offending colleague or my boss... though I did see my boss briefly outside while we were both waiting for Ubers. I remarked on something he said among a group of us who were waiting there that was unrelated to personnel issues. He didn't engage with me. That made it seem more awkward. Thus I was glad I would have some alone time for the next few hours to process things.

It turned out I had more processing time than I expected. The wifi on my flight back to SJC was busted. With little entertainment to occupy my mind I found myself mulling the situation over again and again. Like I wrote in my previous blog, it was a case of "shots fired". A shot, once fired, can't be taken back. And the shots I fired basically put me on a path of having to leave this company soon. As I considered the prospect of leaving this job in a messy breakup after almost 7 years together I found myself... surprisingly at peace with the situation.

I've written for years now that I've been planning an early retirement. The goal line to cross to get there hasn't been a date but rather a target amount of money in my portfolio. I'm not at my target yet— among other reasons, I've moved the goalposts twice due to inflation— but I'm getting close. And while leaving my job on a sour note isn't how I envisioned starting retirement, neither is having a totally upbeat going-away party with cake and streamers and everybody clapping. Walking out the door by myself while singing the chorus to "Take This Job and Shove It" (Wikipedia link) is perfectly adequate.

Realizing that I already have a post-job (or at least post-this-job) mentality was striking. And it was striking how refreshed I felt. Suddenly none of the things that have been bothering me about the job for... frankly, years... bothered me anymore. Even the most recent problems suddenly stopped bothering me.

• I won't be prepared to deliver an in-person seminar on Wednesday because it was scheduled too soon against my recommendation and the material isn't ready? Fuck it, I don't care if I stand up there and look like an idiot as things fall apart around me. Soon it won't be my problem.


• Getting pushed into starting an evaluation project with a customer prematurely, with expected delivery dates I've advised are almost impossible to meet but have been ignored repeatedly on? Fuck it, I don't care either if the sale slips and people yell at me.


• Another (really weak) deal slips further out because coworkers keep trying to go around me instead of listening to me and believing me when I say what technical things we need to do? Fuck that, too. Their success is no longer my concern.

It's amazing how many problems just roll off like water on a duck's back when you just don't fucking care anymore.

There was a small round of layoffs at my company today. No, I was not impacted. But ironically I was thinking about the prospect of layoffs over the weekend. While many stories in the news the past several months have been about record employment and rare leverage in hiring favoring job seekers, articles in just that past few days have begun talking about layoffs. Meta, for example, which has apparently never had a layoff, just announced one.

The fact the tide of the business cycle is turning to layoffs now is unsurprising. Just over two months ago it was announced the technical definition of a recession, two consecutive quarters of economic contraction, had started earlier this year. (One of the problems with this definition is it only recognizes a recession ~8 months after it starts.) Perhaps even more important than that is the practical definition: most people believe we are in a recession. Since I wrote that two months ago the stock market has dropped further. Friday it closed down 25% YTD. Furthermore, bears are in the majority. Investor sentiment is that it will get worse before it gets better.

Fortunately for my company and those remaining with it, this was a small layoff. Company-wide, fewer than 10% of the staff were let go. Within my department of ~30 people, only 2 were dismissed. Both were people who've been with the company about 6 months.

Update: with more perspective a day later the layoff decision looks worse. 😨

Last week Better.com CEO Vishal Garg fired 900 employees over Zoom. "If you're on this call, you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off," he said. "Your employment here is terminated effective immediately." Employees found their access to company software systems shut off shortly thereafter. Example news coverage: Better.com CEO fires 900 employees over Zoom, CNN.com article updated 6 Dec 2021.

Much of the media coverage I've read about this in the past few days has had a breathless nature to it. Breathless, as in reporters not understanding which parts of the story are actually unusual so they emphasize everything. Like, "A CEO fired people over Zoom! 900 people! Fired! Over Zoom!" That failure to understand happens, BTW, because most business articles are written by young 20-something writers. They lack the professional experience, and even the life experience, to put things in perspective.

From my perspective getting fired over Zoom would be nothing new. I've had remote managers, and thus remote employment reviews, for 10 years. I resigned from a job by telephone (we weren't really doing Zoom back then) 8 years ago. I was fired from a job (laid off) by phone 6 years ago. 4½ years ago I had a contentious performance review via phone. I tendered a resignation with 2 weeks notice, then the company dismissing me summarily. This was all via phone, not even Zoom. But the point is, getting fired (or quitting) without walking into the boss's office is hardly news.

What is news is how poorly Better.com CEO Garg handled this. A better approach would've been to convene a company all-hands meeting to announce there would be layoffs, followed by 1:1 conversations between employees and managers to confirm their status. That's basically a remote-working adaptation of the process I've gone through twice in major corporate layoffs that booted 30% of the companies. Better.com's layoff was 9% of its workforce.

Why didn't they do this? Almost certainly the answer is because it's expensive. It takes time. And Garg has a history of being a total jerkwad when it comes to cheaping out with employees. He's hounded them as "stealing" from their colleagues by only working "2 hours a day".

Another question is why nobody at the company, particularly nobody from HR, averted this disaster. There's 2 parts to the answer to that one, and basically both of them boil down to, because HR protects the company, not the employees. The first part is that a CEO like Garg with strong (stupid) beliefs is not going to hire/retain an HR exec who challenges him. He'll hire a toadie. And second, there are plenty of toadies out there. In Corporate America it's referred to as "Aligning with the business". That's a euphemism for supporting whatever the boss wants, whether it's fair, just, ethical, etc., or not. In HR that means things like sweeping sexual harassment allegations against key executives under the rug, as documenting and reporting them would be bad for the business. That's why sexual harassment is still such a problem in Corporate America even 30 years after HR started lecturing the rest of us on why it's wrong!

In the past few days a few Better.com executives have resigned. It looks like 2 PR heads and the VP Communication. Example news coverage: 3 Better.com executives resign after CEO lays off 900 over Zoom, CNN.com article 8 Dec 2021. Notably these are not HR leaders. They're external-facing PR people— people who, presumably, who don't want their PR careers tarnished as being the tools who defended Garg's ass-hat behavior. The tools in HR who approved it, supported it coordinated it, or at the very least enabled it, are still there.

Whew. This story about my first experience with a corporate layoff has grown to 6 entries. Well, that's really not surprising as it was an eventful and formative time for me. Really the biggest surprise is that I didn't set down in writing, except for a few emails to friends at the time, my thoughts about it until now, so many years later!

At the end of The Day of Truth, after The Aftermath, my colleagues and I went our separate ways. We did plan a lunch date to get back together a week or two later.

Our spirits were still high when we met back up for lunch. As I cast my memory back upon that time from my perspective today I still marvel at how optimistic we all were, at how optimistic I was. Of course, it wasn't just optimism. The job market was good, and our particular sector was hot. I'd interviewed with at least 5 companies and had verbal or written offers from two already.

Where to Go Next— or Not 

My former manager, a former colleagues, and I all had written offers from the same company. It's another major, name-brand tech company you'd recognize the name of today... though back then it was not yet a household name. The three of us met to discuss the prospect of working there. We agreed, "No." 

Why no? For me it was a stonewalling answer from the VP Engineering I'd be working under. "How do you manage a project that falls behind schedule?" I asked during our interview. He gave a blanket denial that projects ever run late. "That doesn't happen," he repeated as he refused to answer the question. That struck me as a) gross incompetence, b) outright dishonesty, or c) both.

My colleagues had observed an interaction between the CEO and his executive assistant... she flinched when he seemed upset, like she expected him to scream at her... or worse. FWIW I saw that interaction, too. I didn't realize, "OMG, she's afraid he's going to hit her!" until my colleagues challenged me to think about it again.

"Bert", the manager in our department who quit in protest on The Day of Truth, already had a job offer from a company in Chicago. They Fed-Exed him a deep dish pizza packed in dry ice with his offer letter to say, "Welcome to the team."

Bert also had one of our former colleagues practically sitting on his lap at lunch. They were dating. They had actually been dating several months but keeping it quiet since he was her manager and it was against company policy. Now they were "out" publicly and moving in together. She was still working at the company but planning to quit. The new department was in chaos.

Most of us took a bit of time to ourselves between jobs... except Bert, whose new employer wanted him to start right away. That was just as well for him, as he didn't get a severance package. Those of us laid off were given reasonably generous severance. I'd worked there less than a year, and my payout totaled to nearly 4 months salary.

I used that money to take two weeks to choose the right job offer (I chose wrong anyway— but that's another story!) and then relax two weeks before starting my new position. The rest I used, with a bit of existing savings once I got situated in my new job, to buy a new car.