Unemployee
My reflections on a difficult time in my career
This is my recollection of what was one of the most difficult times in my career. Why write about it now? As Gergely Orosz has well-documented, apart from Apple, there are layoffs happening everywhere - not just in Tech. I hope my story can encourage some people who are struggling at the moment.
I had spent a long part of my career in a Private Equity acquired FinTech and had got to a point where I’d built my first data team (labelled as a pricing team). We’d had a great deal of success and made a real impact in our business. I had great line management who had invested in me and put their trust in me.
Then it all went wrong… my next two levels of line management were moved to a central part of the organisation. I was left reporting into a C-level executive, who saw me as being associated with my previous line management, whom they despised. My future at the company, which was once bright, (to the point that I hadn’t considered leaving despite approaches from competitors) was looking anything but. I tried to work with my new line management for six months, but it was clear there wasn’t any point. I wished by the end of the time that I hadn’t bothered staying.
Lesson learned: I would advise anyone in this position, where they find themselves unexpectedly under hostile line management, to immediately look for work elsewhere. There is no point in trying to win them round - you’ll spend months or years doing so, with no guarantee of success… if you find a new role instead, you won’t have to do this and will probably make more money to boot. Life’s too short… wipe the dirt off your shoulder and move on. In a way, you’re doing your new line manager a favour: they get to have a fresh start in hiring who they want and some leeway, as they lost some experience from the team. You get to choose a new org and team that want you under your terms. That’s called a win win.
If you’re an employee, you have a contract that says you owe the company your labour, whilst they pay you, according to those terms until you’ve served your notice period or otherwise agreed a leaving date - you don’t owe an employer anything more than that. They won’t offer you any loyalty beyond this, as you can see in this climate of layoffs. Employment is designed to end - that’s why it has these provisions.
It’s easier to find work when you’re in work, as you have more leverage and don’t typically feel desperate, especially if you’ve decided to leave in good time.
I didn’t want to leave the team I had built, but felt I was too unhappy and stressed to stay. In the end, I left it too long and got to a point where I was desperate to leave. I didn’t really have a good idea of what I wanted to do next. I believe that subconsciously, I knew I wanted to work in data again, but I didn’t know what this looked like - I ended up working for an ML software company as a Sales Engineer. At the time, this felt like a natural progression towards being even more commercially impactful, having worked alongside sales teams for years. However, I had always been a data person working alongside them… the jump to Sales Engineer, which was mostly a technical sales role, was a step too far. Soon after starting my new role, both my employer and I realised it wasn’t a good fit and we parted ways.
Some personal context around this time was that we had recently welcomed a new addition to our family and it was important for me to be in work, as this was our sole household income. You can imagine the difficult conversation I had with my wife upon finishing my last day at a new role… I was out of work and at the very worst time!
I realised, after finding I was in the wrong role, that I was an out and out data person and wanted to find a new data role. I began my hunt that day. Part of my problem was that, over time at the FinTech, I had started in a data role but then gradually specialised in job title until my final job title there didn’t sound like a data role any more. The skills I applied were mostly similar throughout my time there, but it’s difficult to explain that when most of the time recruiters or algorithms are looking for keywords in your job titles to sift through CVs. So, I was not only trying to find a role whilst out of work, but I was also trying to pivot to what was effectively a new space in the minds of recruiters and hiring managers - at least until I had the chance to speak to them and explain what I had been doing.
Lesson learned: stay generic in your job titles. If your company wants to give you a strange job title that fits its org structure but isn’t particularly good for your CV and career, ask that the title be more generic like “Lead Data Analyst -” with some hyphenated specialty tacked on the end that’s related to the org structure. There was a time that I thought I wanted to go into pricing as a specialism, but you can find that these specialisms stop you progressing the way you would want, and also make it difficult to find new roles - try to have as generic a job title as possible for the work you do and skills you apply.
I know that last week I talked about how this pricing role was the last time I felt consistently impactful in a data role, but that wasn’t to do with the role title as such: it was to do with being right in the thick of how the business made money.
At that point, the economy in the UK was still recovering from the Great Recession that had begun 8 years earlier. There wasn’t as many roles in data around, it wasn’t as big a priority for as many companies as it is today - even with most companies knowing there is a recession coming, there are still many data roles open, showing that it’s still a high priority for many companies today.
In the three months I was out of work (that may not sound long, but believe me it felt it), I realised that finding work was a job in itself. I had to build a routine and practices in making a machine to find my new role. Just like all other selective processes, finding a job is also a funnel - from applications through to being hired.
Application » Application reviewed » Recruiter Reach Out » Recruiter Call » 1st Interview … n-1 Interviews » Final Interviews » Offers » Hired
When I thought about it like this, as another optimisation problem, it helped me to be more clinical about it.
I read that it was better to spend about 5 hours each weekday on your job search and to leave the rest of your time to recharge, otherwise you can become too enveloped in your job search and the inevitable ghosting and rejections can become overly important to you. It has to remain at arm’s length: you have to be able to enjoy the rest of your life at the same time, as otherwise this overall “lack of success” bleeds into the way you apply and interview for roles. I was pretty fortunate to have the time with my two kids, who were very young and not in school at the time - they were a great reminder that there were much more important things in life than my job, or lack of one.
The whole of a job search is failure until the end, where you will have one or more job offers in your inbox.
Despite these precautions, self-doubt can creep in. You can start to wonder if you’re actually any good at what you do. Perhaps there are LOADS of people out there who are better than you for any given position, so you’ll never even be interviewed… All of these sorts of nasty thoughts can creep in over a protracted job hunt. During the worst moments, you start to wonder whether you should aim lower, or if your time in your field is over.
Building that funnel and having good routines helps keep you focused. I used to have job alerts on LinkedIn that would show me all the new roles for my search terms each day. I’d go through all the new LinkedIn easy applies first - the earlier your application goes into a job ad, the more likely it is for your CV to be seen. Then I’d select the roles which didn’t have the easy apply feature, and choose which ones were the most attractive to me and new that day and spend about 20 minutes on each application. Finally, I’d look at older roles that I was particularly well-suited to, and interested in, and apply. The chance of you being spoken to about a role that has been open for a while, without knowing someone in the company, is very low. Recruiters get CV fatigue for a role and once about 25 to 50 CVs have come in, providing there are some decent ones in the stack, the ones that come in afterwards are unlikely to be looked at.
Eventually the funnel will yield a conversion…
I had two final interviews about a week apart. One was for a role local to me as a Senior Analyst - it felt a bit like I was quitting on what I wanted to do, which was to lead another data team in a more general context. The second role was exactly this kind of role: Head of BI & Analytics at a FinTech in London. I was offered the first role earlier, but I knew the second role was what I wanted and was capable of doing… I held my nerve and waited to see if I would get offered the second role. I remember being out with my family when I got the call with the offer - it felt like a wave of relief.
This period was over 5 years ago now - hybrid working wasn’t a term talked about. Being allowed to work from home one or two days a week was seen as very progressive. Things have moved on a lot after Covid, enabling new possibilities.
Quite a few remote roles will say US or EU only, but often the main concern is time zone and if you’re willing to be flexible, the employer may be too. With Deel/Remote/Oyster, it’s becoming increasingly easy for any company to hire anywhere. Build up your freelance work, so that losing a main job isn’t such a problem. If you can contribute to open source or have projects in your Github portfolio, this helps you stand out and show what you’re capable of to technical interviewers, once you’re past screening. Join slack communities with jobs channels (dbt/LO/Dagster).
It was a stark contrast when I came to look for my next similar role during a boom and whilst in work. I had a job the day after I took voluntary redundancy (if you get a chance to do this it’s pretty lucrative) and chose to take the summer off to spend with my kids.
Even though it may be harder now that it was a year or two ago, it won’t always be this hard. Economic conditions change cyclically at increasing frequency - now it’s a slowdown… it could be a boom again by this time next year!
For all of you who are in a difficult place, I wish you the best of luck in whatever it is you want to do next. Reach out to the community on data-folks.masto.host and between us, we may be able to help you!
Thank you for sharing your experience, much appreciated.