Twenty years ago this month...

Twenty years ago this month, a "guest editorial" I wrote appeared in Midnight Engineering magazine. It was about my then-recent experience of having been laid off at Borland. Over the months following its appearance, I received quite a bit of positive feedback for the piece. I am taking the liberty of quoting it below.

Layoff

For me, the toughest part about getting laid off was the first two minutes or so. Upon being told the news, I felt an immediate, crushing psychic pressure that forced me to turn away from my now-former boss, look out the window, and spit out a pithy, Anglo-Saxon expletive or two. I did not stop to catalog my reactions at the moment, but I recall feeling a range of emotions that included rage, betrayal, and helplessness. Then I felt a kind of uncanny calm, despite the nagging voice in my head that was urging me to panic, asking: "Okay, so what are you going to do now?" I'm no hero; the calm I felt was the odd sort of high that hits when the adrenaline kicks in, triggered by the fight-or-flight reaction.

I was, after all, no stranger to layoffs, having worked as an engineer for nearly 15 years prior to coming to work in Silicon Valley. The engineering industry is notorious for rumors of layoffs that are spawned anytime work gets slow. Such rumors give everyone in a company, from janitor to vice president, the jitters. Sometimes, the rumors turn out to be true, and people are laid off. Yet I was never let go, because I always had work to do, and I and my colleagues were secure in the knowledge that, as long as there was work to be done, we need have no fear of the pink slip. Humbug, as it turns out. Security is, at best, a mirage; at worst, a superstition. The idea that your job can be somehow "secure" is as goofy as the idea that a college degree can somehow "guarantee" a good job upon graduation.

At the "exit interview" (who dreams up these terms, anyhow?), I realized I faced a very basic choice. I could either accept this "exit" as a total fiasco, as conclusive evidence of failure, or I could look at this as a kind of liberation, as opportunity merely disguised as defeat. There was no percentage in accepting the former interpretation, so I took a closer look at the latter.

I had always secretly harbored the vision of offering my services as a consultant. Despite having done a number of small freelance writing and consulting assignments over the years, I never took the plunge, because the time was never "right," or there wasn't enough money in the bank to tide me over a possible dry spell, or whatever. I had, in the words of Francis Bacon, given "hostages to fortune" by getting married and starting a family. I couldn't risk not having a job with a secure future. And yet, here I was, smack up against the realization that there really aren't any jobs with a secure future; you can think of it as everyone working on a two-week long "contract." During a chance reunion with an old college friend, who's been an independent consultant for years, I learned, paradoxically, that he felt he actually had more job security as a consultant to multiple clients, since his income was not dependent on one, single source. So I took inventory of my skill set, and of my prospects for working on my own. As you may have guessed, I decided I had the skills and the prospects to make a go of the consulting life.

In the first few weeks of my new career, my judgment appears to have been vindicated. I've picked up a number of consulting assignments and, reluctantly, passed over some others. My new challenge is to do the best job I can with my current assignments, and then to figure out how to cope with the opportunities I've had to leave on the table, perhaps even employing some people to help me get it all done. The hours are no fewer and no crazier, but there is the comfort of knowing that whatever the hours, I'm still the boss.

Getting laid off led to the realization that there is no security in life, but only opportunity. This realization shifted my focus from the realm of the theoretical, where there is nothing at stake, to that of the practical, where not having a "regular" job means having to make the most of opportunity. Indeed, I'm tempted to view getting laid off as true liberation.

By the time a year had passed since this piece was published, revenue from translation had increased to almost half my income, and by 1995, consulting had taken a solid second place to translation and interpretation. In 1996, I put up my free lance for what would be a five-year stint working for a regular paycheck before returning to take the blessed thing down and dust it off for service. The rest, as they say, is history...

Career direction aside, the essentials of the piece still stand.

Here's to another twenty!