My employer just cut 1,600 jobs. Unlike past reductions which were targeted towards certain business areas, this one reached across the company including a lot of very good people I worked with. I still have a job.
I worked for Tilt from September 2014 until the whole company shuttered in early 2017. About halfway through my tenure, we went through a 50% “reduction in force”. I already was out of my mind with stress before the layoffs, and post-layoffs brought a whole “future of the company” angle to every product conversation. The whole thing really messed me up.
Unfortunately, nothing we really did in that last year really mattered for the business. Tilt had taken too much money for what was basically an application layer on top of Stripe; the valuation that it had raised Series A and B at couldn’t be fulfilled, no matter how great an application layer we built.
Funnily enough, the time after the layoffs was great for my professional development. I can draw a straight line from that year to what I do today. I learned how to program for the iPhone (including a “QuickReturn” UX for our app’s feed), did some non-trivial backend programming in Perl, and discovered a lot of edge conditions that prevented people from being payed out from Stripe. I wrote a lot of code and had a lot of fun.
I’m not sure that Atlassian is in that same place (what do I even know about business, anyways?) but I draw solace in the fact that even though businesses can fail, the work we do can still be pretty interesting.
My lesson from Tilt was to take less personal investment in the fate of the company and focus on what’s right in front of me. Maybe this is an easy take to have given that my role continues, but given how easily businesses can shed their employees, it feels like all we can do.