Lessons from My Layoff

In defence of lousy things done right

Depending who you ask (or when you ask me), I stopped working at Shopify after a long and illustrious seven years swinging around on the company’s career jungle gym and found some pretty neat little corners of it along the way. What amounted to a nice set of monkey bars and a really cool, twisty slide, was discovering a massive niche (yea, paradox, I know) of exec strategy offsites that needed design, facilitation, and follow-through. That was me. Or concocting a strategy of how a 10,000-person organization would start to gather again, post-COVID, with our clever Burst strategy. Again, that was me. Or, launching seventy episodes of Dr J’s Pirate Radio, which offered me the bizarre & amazing role of Shopify’s internal resident DJ, and co-host of internal event broadcasts for three years. I had a solid run at a solid company.

And then I was laid off.

It was November 7, 2023. My fourth kid’s third birthday, and I had a hell of a new reality to come to terms with, very quickly. Was it a surprise? To the blind, all things happen suddenly.

Knowing the odds that you, my dear reader, either work – or have worked –for Shopify, you may be reading this with bated breath that I’m about to slander the company or divulge a trove of secrets. That is not what’s about to happen. The truth is, I netted out strong positive in my time there, did a bunch of amazing work, met a ton of incredible people, and matured significantly in my career.

This also isn’t one of those pollyanna posts where I’m going to drawl on about how I’m so grateful for these changes and everything happens for a reason and all that canned optimism.

No, this is a much simpler, far less romantic post about how even though I found myself on the butt end of a shitty situation that some vast mechanism inside Shopify had dropped me into, they still included a few important touches that I give them respect for.

Chiefly, the company bought me (and anyone in a similar situation) a package of outplacement services, which included consultation on bringing my then-dusty résumé into an illustrious sheen, and a handful of sessions with a coach who was equally helpful at sharing tactics for interviewing better, as well as talking me off the ledge when I was in some of my more hopeless moments.

I might have been in a less common situation, where I was able to hit the ground running within a few days of being laid off. I’d been forming the idea of building a business for some time, and suddenly had a fire under my ass of needing to generate an income quickly so people like my recently-turned three-year-old and his three older sisters could do things like eat. So, action came quickly, but action and inspiration aren’t the same as focus, and having a person to check in with every week or two was crucial, in keeping my eye on the prize, and even ensuring that I could prioritize what I needed to. At a time when financial uncertainty was looming, having to pay $0 for these sessions was a support that showed some real class from the company I’d just stopped working for. I mean, a company who’d laid me off.

Having worked closely with senior leaders around some of the company’s newsworthy mass layoffs, I don’t envy anyone involved in making or executing these decisions. They suck. In mid-May 2023 I spent a few days with a large leadership team and the gloom, guilt, and burden in the group was palpable. Like, really heavy.

(Predicting this heaviness before the May 2023 leadership summit, I built The Burn Box. I wrapped a cardboard box in very flammable-looking craft paper, and walked around with slips of paper and sharpies, inviting leaders to write anything [privately] that might interfere with them getting back in the saddle and doing their best work. They could drop it in the box, and I promised to burn it at the end of the week. I didn’t know how it would be received, but was pleasantly surprised by everyone else’s gratitude, which in some cases included tears. As promised, I burned it at the end of the week, and filmed the whole affair.)

Back to the point – being laid off isn’t fun, but needing to do the layoff is no fun either. A friend who used to play NCAA football told me a lot more injuries happen for the person doing the tackle, than the person being tackled. None of you HR pros will appreciate me comparing a RIF or “exiting” or “downsizing” or “outplacing” to tackling someone in football, but hey. The point is actually in your defence. Whether we love our jobs or hate them, we pour massive effort and energy into our work, and when the work relationship comes to an end because a company needs to lay someone off, it can feel terrible for everyone.

Having endured this storm, I can speak to how valuable it is when someone makes it less bad, even if it can’t be made good. Having the company I worked for buy an outplacement package made a difference for me. It’s not nothing, but its cost amounts to a sliver of my former salary, and if work isn’t just about a cold transaction of energy/intelligence/experience-for-cash, Shopify showed care after the point I was any of their responsibility.

In 2018, that company was making money hand over fist and every morning I’d show up to work in a former whiskey distillery in Waterloo, Canada with a hot breakfast waiting for me. Life was pretty great. But when the going’s good, flattery isn’t hard to come by; character emerges in the hard moments. Tales of generosity in times of famine. Kindness amidst injustice. Granted, one person being laid off by a tech company during a time when tech companies lay people off isn’t historically significant, but it was a hard moment, and the company’s character came through in an investment they made in a former employee’s transition.