FROM THE ARCHIVES OF PRAGPUB MAGAZINE APRIL 2016
You Just Lost Your Job
By Johanna Rothman and Andy Lester
Managing your career is a job in itself. Fortunately, Johanna and Andy have seen all the career mistakes people make and can steer you past the hidden rocks. This month they talk about what to do when you lose your job.
💭 Andy
In our last column, we discussed the problems when you survive a layoff or a firing in your organization. What if you were the one who lost your job?
It may have hit you by surprise. You got called into HR with a dozen other employees from different departments and were told that the company was eliminating your positions. Or maybe your work wasn’t up to snuff and finally your boss calls you in to let you know that you’re being let go for performance. What do you do?
First, and most important: Don’t panic. You’re going to be flooded with emotions like anger, fear, and embarrassment. You’re going to feel like you don’t know what to do next. That’s natural. What you don’t want to do is do anything rash.
Don’t take out your anger on anyone. Don’t tell your boss off. Don’t threaten to sue every damn one of the dirty sons-of-bitches. And don’t try to talk your way out of it. The decision has been made, and has been for a while, and now you’re just riding out the results.
💬 Johanna
One thing your previous manager or HR person might ask you is to sign a document that says you won’t sue. Or, that you were fired for cause. Or, that you weren’t fired for cause. You are in no condition to make legal decisions at that point, and signing those papers is a legal decision.
Don’t sign anything until you know exactly what you are signing, even if they pressure you or imply that they won’t give you your final paycheck including accrued vacation time until you do. They cannot legally withhold your pay from you for a signature, at least in the United States.
Sometimes companies try this. I was once pregnant, a middle manager, and my company laid me off. They wanted to pay me a small severance package and have me sign documents that said I wouldn’t sue them. I took the documents, found a lawyer, and they paid me a much larger severance. They dithered, and still had to pay me my last check and outstanding vacation accrual before they paid the severance.
I hope you don’t have the same experience I had. On the other hand, my experience shows how keeping your head helps.
💭 Andy
Once you’ve gone home, take some time to decompress. Don’t go home and start calling people right away. Take a little time to sit back and let yourself assess the situation.
What is your financial situation like? If you were laid off, what kind of severance package did you get? How many weeks or months of savings do you have? You don’t want to assume that everything is time-critical. This will feed into your assessment of what your next move is.
Do you need a job right away? Or do you have some time to be a little choosy? Do you want to get another job like the one you had? Or is it time to branch out into a different part of your career? These are questions you need to look at any time you start a job hunt, but this may be a different frame of reference than you’ve looked at before.
💬 Johanna
Take the time to be able to say, “I’m no longer working there,” and “here’s what I’m considering.” You have an opportunity to think about the work you want in your next job. Or, the kind of project or the kind of company you want.
When you take this time to think about what you are working toward, you have a different perspective on this job search. Think about what would make you happy in a new job. Andy and I both provide guidance about this in our books.
💭 Andy
You need to understand whether you were laid off or fired. “Laid off” could mean that business was down and they had to reduce headcount, or your job was no longer necessary, or they shipped the programming work to an offshore consultancy. It means that it wasn’t because of something you did. “Fired” means that you were let go for cause, for unsatisfactory performance, or something else about you personally. It’s a huge difference.
If you were laid off, then use that term. You may feel bitter and it might feel good to grumble that, “they fired me,” but that’s not accurate, and it puts you in an unnecessary negative light.
If you were fired for cause, you need to be able to talk about it in an interview, because it will come up.
If you were let go because of performance, make sure you know what that performance was, and then talk about how you’re dealing with it, or avoiding it. You might tell an interviewer something like this, “It turned out that my knowledge of JavaScript wasn’t at the level of what they needed, and I was always falling behind on projects. That’s why I’m looking to work on more server-side projects at this company.”
💬 Johanna
If you were let go because of the way you interacted with people, explain what the problem was. “I thought we had an understanding that we could call designs we disagreed with ‘brain-dead.’ I did in my previous job. Here, they wanted to call them disagreements. Which they were! I thought my description was okay.”
If you broke a rule, admit it. If your potential employer calls your previous employer for a reference, it will come out. “I had a Facebook addiction. I realize that now, and I’m timeboxing the time I spend on Facebook. I only check it on the weekends and at night.”
💭 Andy
No matter the reason for your firing, never speak badly of a former employer. You might have come from the worst company in the world, but if you say, “They didn’t know how to work effectively with programmers, and always made unreasonable demands, and that’s why I never hit deadlines,” it does NOT make you look better. You’ll be seen as a complainer, which no manager wants.
💬 Johanna
The first thing I recommend is to select a few people to call. You’ll want to contact many more people, but start with a few selected people first.
These people are your references, good friends, possibly colleagues who have openings. They are people who already support you, who are part of your network.
You can tell them what happened — never bad-mouthing your previous employer. You tell them you’re looking for a job and the kinds of roles you prefer.
Why call instead of email? Calling helps you:
- Show people you are emotionally in a good place. It’s hard for them to recommend you to someone if they think you’re still angry with your previous employer. You might be able to put on a show in email, but your phone voice will say more about your emotions than email will.
- Help you explain what you want. You might be introverted, where you prefer to think before you speak. In that case, practice what you will say. You might be more extroverted, where you need to speak in order to think. In that case, speaking will help you decide what to look for.
- It also helps you with the first part of networking, where you tell people you are looking for a job.
💭 Andy
“Emotionally in a good place” is important both for the job hunt, and for your own state of mind. You’ve been let go and things can get pretty depressing. Treat your day-to-day life as a normal 9-to-5 job, complete with working hours and tasks to be done. Set a schedule for yourself and stick to it. Get up like normal, take a shower, get dressed, and go to work, even if the “office” is just your living room. Define tasks for yourself like, “make at least four phone calls to potential contacts before lunch and four more after lunch.” Otherwise, it’s all too easy to get into the cycle of depression -> getting nothing done -> depression.
💬 Johanna
When you have a daily schedule, one of the things to add is “meet with people outside the house.” It’s tempting to want to network electronically. However, your best networking is when you meet people face-to-face.
You might participate in networking groups. You might go to user group meetings. Or, some kind of developer/tester/project manager kind of meeting. Many larger cities have more meetings and meet-ups than you can imagine.
Choose two each week and leave the house. Meet people for coffee or lunch. Make sure you meet people at least three days a week. These people will help you learn about openings in organizations that are not advertising.
When you build your network, you help yourself learn what’s out there and what might fit you.
💭 Andy
You might also want to visit places in person rather than making phone calls. For example, your local Chamber of Commerce is an excellent source of information on businesses in your area. Rather than calling them up to talk to someone, pay a visit to their office and talk to someone in person. You’ll get better information, and you’ll keep that human interaction going to help keep you out of the dumps.
Losing a job is a tough situation. It’s one of the most stressful events that can happen in your life. It sucks, and that’s okay to acknowledge. Just don’t let it overwhelm you.
Remember that you’re not the first person to lose a job, and that many people have lost jobs before and have made it through just fine.
💬 Johanna
You can make this an opportunity. Every time I was laid off, I got a better job for more money. We can’t guarantee that will happen to you. We hope it does.
If you are looking for a job when you read this, you have our best wishes. This column will start you on a path. We have more specific advice in our books, Land the Tech Job You Love and Manage Your Job Search.
About the Authors
Johanna Rothman provides frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams see problems and resolve risks and manage their product development. She is the author of 10 books, including Manage Your Job Search. She writes the Pragmatic Manager email newsletter and blogs on www.jrothman.com and www.createadaptablelife.com.
Andy Lester has developed software for more than twenty years in the business world and on the Web in the open source community. Years of sifting through résumés, interviewing unprepared candidates, and even some unwise career choices of his own spurred him to write his nontraditional book Land The Tech Job You Love on the new guidelines for tech job hunting. Andy is an active member of the open source community, and lives in the Chicago area. He blogs at petdance.com and tweets at @petdance.
