Post-layoff advice: “Diversify your career like you would a stock portfolio”
A former tech-worker-turned-advocate for employees aged 40+ tells us what laid-off workers are telling her, and what they can do to protect themselves.
Ahead of Meta’s layoffs, I read an interview with an anonymous Meta worker about the “horrors” of working there. She spoke of the company surveilling its employees and logging key strokes, and she spoke of the frequent mental health leaves. She even proposed a sort of severance package for employees building the AI to replace themselves, while alluding to a sense of relief at the thought of being laid off.
That bittersweet relief came this week: the woman interviewed for the piece was impacted by the 8,000-person layoffs.
While such a release is the overarching emotion right now, once that relief subsides, finding a new job isn’t easy. In one post I saw, ironically on Threads, an engineer interviewed for 53 companies and made it to final interviews with three of them before finally landing a job. As he writes: the jobs exist; the market just doesn’t care about you because 500 engineers are applying for a single role.
In the wake of these cascading layoffs—made even more depraved by the fact that the employees were trained, tracked, and paid to make themselves obsolete—I thought of no better person to talk to than former tech worker Maureen Clough.
Maureen is the Seattle-based founder of It Gets Early Late, a podcast that interviews knowledge workers about their careers and identities. She’s gathered a community mainly focused on people above 40, with the recognition that 56% of people over 50 are laid off or forced out of their jobs before they choose to retire.
I’ve included an abridged version of our conversation here, in which she discusses age discrimination, breaking free of corporate ladder narratives, and the devaluation of full-time work from experienced workers to cheaper contract work.
Ariella Steinhorn: For the people who have just been laid off: what would your advice be to them?
Maureen Clough: People over 40 have a special set of legal circumstances. If you’re over 40 and part of a layoff, you must be provided with a document clarifying the anonymized titles and ages of people who were laid off. Companies can always shift personnel to make the layoff demographics look less suspicious. But you can still request this documentation.
Generally, it’s important that people know they have a period of time to carefully review their severance agreements. While companies may make you feel like you have to sign immediately, you don’t have to.
Before signing, you can always consult an employment lawyer. There’s power in having an attorney look, and even saying the words “lawyer” in an email can be a helpful posturing. And while yes, companies have massive legal departments, they also count on you not knowing your rights or not seeking legal counsel elsewhere.
Lastly, if you’re having a problematic experience at work or with layoffs, always document what’s happening, especially if it relates to your age.
AS: On the age piece: you focus on workers who are over 40 years old. Is the 40+ demographic being hit especially hard in these layoffs?
MC: Older people are getting decimated. It’s a systematic dismantling of middle management; involuntary exits of people who are likely to be over 40.
That’s in part because any time organizations are looking to cost-cut, managers and independent contributors are hit hard—and especially higher-paid ones with more experience. For instance, someone in their 50s with more experience and making more money looks the same on a spreadsheet as someone else far younger with less of a salary.
AS: Do you think that at some point, companies will find that they fired too aggressively? And could the pendulum swing back the other way?
MC: This has happened before with the fin-tech company Klarna. They let go of 700 people, citing AI—and then they realized their mistake, and hired them back.
But the bigger issue is that companies realize they can aggressively fire and then have no problem rehiring. Labor is cheaper, so you can fire and then bring people back at steep discounts. As a result, experienced talent is coming back for pennies on the dollar.
This systematic reset of the labor market has also led full-time roles to turn into contract roles; many people have told me that their old jobs are being outsourced to cheaper places.
And the whole tech industry is benefiting from the ghost workforce of contract labor. Full-time jobs are disappearing, but the work isn’t. The difference is that the work is more on your shoulders without much of a safety net.
I’ve heard some people say: well, the good thing about the freelance economy is that only 10% of freelancers don’t have health insurance. But do we know how many freelancers are on their spouse’s corporate insurance? When you factor that in, the data is going to look different.
Speaking of that, so many people only want a corporate job for health insurance—and so much of the world would be opened up if this weren’t the case.
Because now, when it comes to a lot of benefits, many CEOs don’t give a damn. Zoom and Deloitte are saying no thanks to parental leave policies. All the benefits they used to champion to attract talent are gone. The leverage is so far on the employer side, that employers can just tell their employees: screw you, good luck finding another job.
We’ve seen displacement of workers, and now it’s coming for white collar work, which is going to cause a huge amount of upheaval in our society. The people who you thought would be safe are no longer safe. And what does that do to towns built on these industries?
It reverberates beyond individuals, to families and other systems. Children are going to feel the burden of these layoffs. The housing market will be affected.
AS: What are the best career pivots you’ve heard about away from tech?
MC: One person wanted to be a florist at a grocery store rather than deal with this bullshit.
And a potential silver lining in all of this is that we’ll see a lot of entrepreneurs—people going out to hang a shingle as contract workers or freelancers. That’s now a necessity, because companies are forcing people’s hands.
AS: What have you heard from people who have come to you seeking guidance or counsel, before or after a layoff?
MC: Everyone is freaked out, and no one is feeling secure or safe. There’s an intense amount of anxiety under the surface; people are even afraid to like my satirical posts on social media because they don’t want their bosses to see it.
In general, people are not well. Many of the employees being impacted by layoffs had bought into the system of ascending the corporate ladder. So now they’re in this career stability crisis, and it’s an absolute emotional roller coaster. What you thought was true about yourself has slipped away. And this has left a lot of people feeling vulnerable, questioning who am I without this?
Some people take stock and recognize: I got all the accolades, I’ve been the high-achiever. Now I’ve reached this point, is this all there is? It feels hollow. We place less value in this thing we’ve previously been seeking.
For example, I have a friend who is one of the highest achievers I know. She recently had two competing job offers: one at a super prestigious firm with a lot of work that’s super stressful, the other at a lesser entity that provided more work-life balance.
I would have never seen her choosing the latter, but she did. It’s this feeling of, I’m going to redefine what success looks like on my own terms, I’m only here for so long.
And many are recognizing that the girlboss stuff we’ve been sold—the idea that we need to keep climbing and climbing—now falls flat. But what do people do when the thing they poured their heart and soul into has been taken away? You get into the day-to-day—and how do you motivate, while continually facing rejection after rejection? How do you keep going when your savings dwindle and the stress kicks in?
AS: Layoffs and cost-cutting measures happened in the 20th century, but obviously it’s much different now.
MC: In the past, loyalty was rewarded. People were given the possibility to spend their lives at a job, they expected 401Ks and retirement parties. Today, if you stay with a company for a long time, you will be seen as dead weight.
The higher-up you are, the more you earn—and especially if you’re not taking on a leadership opportunity, you’re at risk. If you’re looking to make the most amount of money, you’re at risk if you don’t leave your org. The only way to make more money is to leave now.
AS: What can we do in the face of all of this, a time when workers and labor feel a bit helpless and without leverage?
MC: We overinvested in the corporate path. Now, we need to look at careers like a stock portfolio—and diversify.
Thanks for reading, and see you all next week!