Losing your job
The most important story to get right
In my earlier article Mind the tales you tell, I talked about the importance of deliberately crafting the stories you tell about who you are. I want to focus today on a specific type of story: why you left your last job, if it wasn’t your choice (that is, you were fired, laid off, or managed out)1.
This is a pretty important story to nail down since it’ll come up in interviews, and it’s a common place where folks disqualify themselves. Your first draft of this story is probably a negative one. Maybe you’re angry at the manager who fired you, or maybe you completely blame yourself? Neither of those stories are worth repeating; not to yourself, and not to recruiters.
Before you try to tell that story, take some time and do some research.
Take some time
Don’t interview immediately2. Losing your job is a (small ‘t’) trauma, and trauma requires time to heal. Give your vitriol some time to drain.
Moreover, having some space from the event will make it easier to tell the right story about it. With a bit of distance, you might realize that you were already mentally checked out of the job, or that you had let inertia keep you there, or that you were bored or tired.
Heck, if you can afford it financially, take a few months! No one will so much as blink at a 6-month gap for a software engineer, and even a longer gap can be explained.
Do your research
During this break, let’s do some shopping for other perspectives.
Make sure to get contact info out of any and all coworkers you respect and enjoy3. Use this sudden windfall of time to schedule calls with them, and try to get their perspectives on what happened.
“What should I have done differently?”
“Have you seen a situation like this elsewhere?”
“Were there other factors behind the scenes that I wasn’t aware of?”
Your goal is to find a good story to tell recruiters, and better understand what kind of company/manager/role/team you want next. Your goal is not to enact vengeance, nor convince your contacts to follow you out the door.
In fact, if you left on good terms with your manager, they’re likely to be a great resource here! Use the same tools I discussed in my previous article to extract better feedback from them. Freed from the responsibility of managing you, they might be able to say things they couldn’t before4.
Before you hang up (and assuming you enjoyed the call), schedule a recurring call with them5. Even if you only talk once per year, you’ll forget they exist otherwise. This is how networks are formed!
Tell your story
Now that you’ve taken some time and shopped around for perspective, it’s time to work on your story. It might be helpful for you to try writing it out, but personally, I find these stories easier to speak than write6.
The ideal story describes a mix of contributing factors, such that no one factor would have been sufficient to condemn you.
Blame others
It’s safe to partially blame the circumstances: systems, random happenstance, macroeconomic conditions, etc. It’s also fine to partially blame other people, though you want to be careful to avoid anything even close to an ad hominem attack (trigger words are “incompetent”, “corrupt”, “greedy”). Focus on their incentives and their background.
“I refused to play politics so I was backstabbed by my teammate” is a bad story, but “I should have sought out and listened more closely to detractors before publicizing my plan, so I was caught off-guard by their pushback” is very reasonable.
Blame yourself
In most cases, you should also partially blame yourself. But as when you’re blaming other people, be sure to stay far away from ad hominem attacks against yourself. You aren’t incompetent, corrupt, or greedy either. Own your mistakes, and pivot the story around them, but cast yourself as a student, not a fool or villain.
“I’m bad at time estimates” is a bad story, but “I missed one deadline, so I took an even more aggressive deadline the next time in a misguided attempt to prove myself” is totally sympathetic. Follow it up with a learning, like “I should have spent time talking through the edge cases with the PM before making a commitment.”
Practice
The first few times you tell the story, it will be awkward. You’ll repeat and contradict yourself, and the listener will ask questions that you won’t know how to answer. Don’t be tricked into assuming, just because your story sounds bad, that the underlying truth is bad. Practice, rewrite, and find a different way to say it.
Tell only truths
Storytelling is not lying. There are a million different ways to accurately describe what happened, and none of them are exhaustive, and all of them are true7. It is OK to completely omit certain facts, as long as that omission does not fundamentally alter the story. It is not a good idea to fabricate anything whole cloth; that’s the sort of thing that tends to catch up to you in an enormously destructive way.
Hero’s journey
Ultimately, what you want to put together is an accurate story that casts you and your former employer in a generally positive light. Like any good protagonist, you are flawed, but you’re learning8, and you’re eager to learn more in your next role.
I guess all of this advice also applies if you chose to leave your last job. But since losing your job is likely to sour your story, those are the folks I wanted to target with this article.
If you like, you can schedule a few “practice” interviews for roles that you aren’t particularly excited about. But don’t do this if you think you’ll get discouraged by the likely rejection.
This is easiest before you get removed from Slack/Teams, but LinkedIn is fine if you miss that window. Get their personal email address, since work email addresses tend to expire!
Of course, in order for this to be an option, they also need to be confident that you won’t use what they say to sue the company. This is yet another benefit of building strong, trusting relationships.
Make it easy for them to push back and decrease the frequency. Some folks might want to meet once per month, others will prefer once per year. Don’t take it personally either way; we all have our own stuff going on.
Whenever I try to write anything, I end up agonizing about every word and punctuation mark. This has absolutely nothing to do with my inability to publish an article more than once per month.
Technically there does exist a completely exhaustive explanation, if you’re able describe the movement of all particles in the universe. Please let me know if you can do this, I have a lot of unrelated questions.
One practical thing you should always, always do, before taking time for anything, is to get set up with unemployment. It typically takes a few weeks for the process to complete and to start getting payments, so get it started ASAP even if you have severance pay coming in. These days, it's typically all done online, and direct deposit to your account. Once that's squared away, follow Simon's excellent advice and take some time to clear your head.
If you took time after losing the job, use it to cool down and think if it was net positive. if it was, don't use "I should have ..." if you actually shouldn't have. I lost my job multiple times and so far (in 30+ years career) it was NEVER net negative. I would've been worse within like 5-10 yr horizon if I stayed.
Especially don't say "I should have" if you shouldn't and the history proved you right. But be very careful trumping the fact that the history proved you right, you might be talking to someone who you will prove wrong next time and meanwhile it's better to keep them in the dark.