When the Promised Land seems less promising

There’s a new normal when it comes to working at a vaunted company: Enjoy the pay, the benefits, the upward career mobility ... while they last.

Shutterstock + AI

Google’s recent round of layoffs comes as a shock to us all … 

I’m just kidding. None of the rounds of layoffs in tech over the past two years have come as a surprise to anyone anymore, least of all those of us in tech, who once took our company-issued fobs as symbols of our immortality. Now deactivated, they are landfilling reminders of a bygone era, when the future seemed hazy, perhaps, but bright, and it always moved up and to the right. Now we feel uncertain, like the land is shifting beneath our feet. 

The mass bloodletting at Big Tech companies (Amazon, Meta, Google) over the past two years has had an impact, not just on longer wait times at Philz Coffee, but on FTEs and 1099 mortals alike. Even if you never scored an interview at these organizations, just knowing that they existed gave us an occupational idyll to emulate. 

Having worked at several media companies and a tech behemoth not the big G, I can attest that I and my peers admired Google as a bastion of interesting work, innovation, great benefits and job security. Amazon was Sparta in comparison to this Athens of enlightened growth hacking. Once you got in you could forge a career and be done with looking for opportunities elsewhere. One of my friends, who came to Google via acquisition, jumped to numerous leadership roles in new divisions of three businesses, including the investing arm. While he was never without some cool new professional challenge from within, chances were, for any future opportunities outside the company, recruiters would likely come to him. 

But now there’s a new normal when it comes to working at a vaunted company like Google: Enjoy the pay, the benefits, the upward career mobility while they last. We employees took a bet with employers that made some of us wealthy and most of us expendable. For every veteran who left with an exit package and moved to his own island to make boogie boards, 1,000 were managed out, laid off, or stuck in benefitless contractor purgatory. 

I worked with someone who came to work on my team at Amazon from Google after what appeared to be (on LinkedIn anyway) a dream 11-year run at the big G. I had to ask him, why did he come to Amazon, even taking a less-sexy title and presumably less money, for the opportunity? 

Everyone has their real reasons for their career choices, but I took him at his word: He told me his time at Google was life-changing, career-making, but then he stagnated and wanted a new challenge. For him, a needed career shift meant getting cattle-prodded back into appreciation for his lot in life. 

And he wasn’t the only one. I witnessed other friends with double-digit-year careers at the big G call it to do hard things like work for early-stage startups, start their own company, or go into the public sector.

As one of my Google ex-pat friends explained to me, “Money is no longer a consideration; I can go and pursue what I want.”

THAT was the promise of the vaunted tech career: If done right, it offered the freedom to do other meaningful, even hard, things. Getting stuck there was never the point.

So what, then, is the point of all this post-RIF navel-gazing? Schadenfreude? Probably.

But it’s also a rethinking of the so-called risk-free career. We’re all at risk now, not just financially, but of trading time we could have spent pursuing our best work for false professional safety.

While it can be difficult feeling compassion for disillusioned tech ex-pats making their last commute from Mountain View with seven figures in RSUs in their brokerage accounts, their struggle is very real.

I had a similar reorientation period when I exited my startup. I had enjoyed great occupational freedom as a founder, including the ability to explore any path that I found interesting, and then … KERPLUNK, I was talking to headhunters asking me if I was proficient in Hubspot.

Humbling, yes, but the experience also put into stark perspective all I was risking putting all of my career eggs – including my work identity – into a single, well-capitalized, basket. 

I suggest we write up a New Deal between work and ourselves. It has a mutual out, and should we part ways we still get to keep our identity.

This deal has admittedly fewer perks, but unlimited upside. 

---

Premium Members: For inspiration on how (and why!) to set up your portfolio life, tune into our “In the Trenches” podcast conversation with Optionality Advisory Committee member, Harvard Senior Lecturer, “Human Venn Diagram,” and author of The Portfolio Life Christina Wallace.