Surviving Your Tech Career

 Hey, it's Joe Taylor Jr. from the global headquarters of Johns & Taylor in beautiful New Jersey, and we've got six great new episodes of Marginally Better headed your way between now and the end of the year. But right now, got a very special bonus episode, and it's a very special recording that I made just this past weekend over the bridge at BarCamp Philly at Huntsman Hall at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Now, if you've never heard of a BarCamp, BarCamp is an unconference, and BarCamps have been going on in cities all around the world for a little over 20 years. And they're made by community members who feel that sometimes technology conferences can be a little restrictive, or they're about being performative for your boss, or maybe they're not as in- as inclusive or accommodating enough to people in the community.

I'm really proud to be a sponsor and a member of the organizing admin collective for BarCamp Philly. So I ended up putting together a talk that's about surviving your own tech career and what to do if you're facing PIPs, pivots, layoffs, and other things that can strike you usually without warning. So here's the recording of me giving that talk at BarCamp Philly 17 this past October 17th.

Welcome to the, the final session of the day. My name's Joe. I'm one of the admin organizers for BarCamp. This is the 16th time I've been to this BarCamp, and the first time I've actually done a talk, because this morning there was nobody in the 4:00 slot, and so I offered myself as tribute, and then I was delighted to see other people populate the 4:00 slot.

So this is a talk that's been kinda sitting in the back of my head for a little bit and it doesn't really fit with a lot of the other talks that I tend to give, but I thought this audience might be receptive to it. And for folks who haven't seen me give a talk before, I tend to be pretty loose. If you have a question, shout it out, talk back.

Th- this should be pretty loose, especially at this time of day, so that nobody's nodding off at any point. And a lot of these are anecdotal. A lot of this is based from my own life experience, but hopefully it'll resonate with you. And I hope that the back half of this talk will be opportunities for us to exchange some ideas, some Q&A, and to just share your own perspectives on what is going on with things.

A little background about me. My friends who've known me for a long time have told me that I turned 53 this year, and friends of mine from college have told me that I've always been 53, and or I've always acted 53. So I'm happily entering my internet uncle era and been a little looking back about stuff that I've accomplished over the past couple of decades, to the point that a project manager that I work with on a client project who's very much half my age, loves to put calendar invites out that say, "Story time with Joe" whenever they wanna talk about something about, like, "Why is this like this?

Why are we doing this?" So this is the danger of becoming the institutional knowledge inside an organization. So I'll start with story time only to frame up a little bit of the things that I've experienced, and maybe they resonate with you, maybe they echo some of the things that you've experienced. And it's very easy right now to feel a ton of anxiety.

Things feel very unsettled. Even just now, hearing folks like, "Hey, an entire SaaS can be reverse engineered at somebody's house." What does that do? I've seen three people try to completely upend Adobe in the last month. What is that gonna do to a place that looks like it's been dominant in a market?

What's going on with companies that completely owned- an entire situation in their corner of the industry, and then six months later they're laying people off, they're getting acquired, they're half of what they were. They're maybe now just one little tile on somebody else's app. I'm here to tell you that we've seen this stuff before.

These things happen in cycles. It doesn't make it any less scary, but at least we can take a little bit of comfort in understanding that it should feel a little bit more familiar. Things can look scary and weird at any time. Now, by training, I have zero formal technology training. I came up through radio, and specifically radio journalism.

Now, my first week on the job as an intern at KYW, where I thought that KYW, and at the time we were sharing space with WMMR, were indestructible in the Philadelphia market. And this was in the early 1990s. And then Howard Stern showed up on a simulcast on WYSP, and then the Howard Stern fans showed up outside the radio station en masse, hanging the air talent in effigy And I thought, that seems very scary and weird because we had seen things like radio station rivalries.

Radio, especially in the eighties and nineties, was extremely competitive. Folks would go to war with each other, literally. And so there were thousands of people out on Independence Mall screaming and hollering at the top of their lungs, demanding that my fairly new colleagues were... should be marched out of the building.

Okay? That was my introduction to the broadcasting industry. So what I learned from that is whatever career you're trying to have, it's never gonna look the way that it's supposed to. It's never gonna look the way that you think it is going to at the outset. And I will tell you, I just found out my college doesn't even offer my major anymore.

My degree, television slash radio, has long been replaced with visual arts and digital media. I can imagine the career counselor that I was having challenges with thirty some odd years ago having zero clue about how to make sense about what the market is like today. But I am here to tell you that if you're in this room, in this place, we all have enough relative privilege and safety to be able to tell ourselves that we get to control the definition of what's okay.

And I find that a lot of times when we get stressed about what's going on in our lives, in our careers, much of that is trying to figure out how we're trying to meet somebody else's expectations. And so I hope if you take one thing away from today, it's that if you can take back your expectations, if you can take back control of what okay means for you, you're gonna have a lot better time, especially as we're going through whatever the next few years have in store for us in terms of business and economy and careers and everything else in life.

Now, I've gone through A really radical career invention, not by choice, three times so far. And so I am here to tell you, again, from lived experience, it's something that you live through as opposed to you decide that you're gonna do. But I can tell you that each time it's led me to something that's been a little more rewarding and a little more enriching.

And so if something like that is going on with you right now, I'm here to tell you that I'm here for you. I hear you. I am sorry for the things that are going on that are making that happen. But I'm here to tell you that you can come out of it on the other side okay. So about thirty years ago or so, I'm in what I thought was my dream job, and we were just figuring out the internet.

And my team was making a whole bunch of content to the point that we had to figure out how to build a content management system so that we could store it all and share it all. And that was great. I was living the dream job. I was running editorial and engineering in the place where I was working. And then the CFO of our organization, who I'd become friends with, tipped me off that the board had met.

They decided they weren't really into this internet content thing. And my job, and my entire team was about to be laid off. My job was gonna be repurposed into just a financial technical engineer. So what was my job was gonna become the person in charge of the credit card form on the site, and that was it.

All of the content was just gonna go away. We were just gonna roll over and let that go because it was no longer important to the board. So I left because I got wind of what was going on. I got the call, "Come in, general manager wants to see you." Fifteen-minute conversation, and I thought, "You know what? I don't need to be here for this.

I can go do this for other folks." And that's when I decided I was gonna launch a startup because I had successfully created a really great content management system for the place where I worked. I had calls from other places that wanted me to come consult for them, build this stuff for them, and I thought, "This is great.

This can be my calling. Amazing. I am gonna go and launch the best content management startup that I can think of." I have not yet mentioned the year that this was. 2001 Not the best year in hindsight. Probably not the best year to try and start anything in 2001. And yet, one of the things that came out of that was understanding that I could start to embrace the idea of what some folks call a portfolio career.

Because I think about folks of my dad's generation who came up out, out of World War II, and the idea then was like, you went to work somewhere, and you would work there 30 or 40 years. My dad didn't have that. My dad worked just down the street at what is now Schuylkill Yards, used to be the headquarters of The Bulletin.

And so I, as a little kid, used to come in from our house in Darby on the Route 11 trolley, and I would come in every payday and hang with him and his colleagues. He worked in the press room. And so I got to meet... This is one of the reasons I got into journalism, 'cause I met all these great journalists, and he was down there working on these big machines that would turn this into a newspaper every single day.

And The Bulletin one day just stopped publishing. It just went away. So I think that was an early harbinger of some of the changes that I think we're seeing accelerate a lot right now, that you can have institutions that are super important one day and they're just gone the next. So I bopped around a little bit and I ended up doing some freelance work, moved into an agency role, started spending a lot of time at what, to avoid further connections with well-placed industry attorneys, I will tell you is a fruit-themed computer manufacturer.

And I was spending so much time there buying stuff for the agency where I was creative director, they said to me, "You could probably help us explain why this stuff is important to other businesses." And so I end up in what I think is another dream job. I'm working for this place. I am a solutions engineer.

I am a team leader. I'm running around showing folks... If you think back, there was a time when the, unless you were an advertising agency or a creative team, the only products that you could have in your shop were like IBM ThinkPads, right? Or Dells. You couldn't have Anything, and this didn't exist yet. So that was a really fantastic moment of time.

And then what happened is documented extremely well in a series of events, especially by an author named Trip Mickle. Because again, there are some people who are amazing leaders. There are people that you're gonna get to work with and work for. Someday, stuff just happens, right? And they decline or disappear, and all of the stuff that they built around them starts to shift and change.

So at a certain point, the team that I was leading got shifted around into a couple of different categories. The people who were my direct champions, the folks that I were, that I was working with day to day, decided they were gonna collectively go leave and go someplace else, and I did not wanna go with them to where they were going.

And so new folks start showing up, and new priorities get set, and suddenly I'm having weird conversations with folks about, "What are our actual goals? What are we trying to accomplish?" And the, kind of the last day of that particular gig, I was presenting at a recruiting event where we were trying to recruit new people into the organization.

And I ended up in the conversation with one of the new lead recruiters, and he said, "Hey, I wanna go over the notes with you, because we're gonna change up our strategy." And I was like, "Oh, yeah? What's going on?" 'Cause for years, and I was really excited to have been helping recruit people into this organization, we had a whole spiel, and they're like, "I don't want you to deliver any of that, because what we're looking for now are two and out."

What is a two and out? A two and out in this recruiting... You look like you might know what a two and out is. Have you...? Two and out is, we wanna hire people who are only gonna work here two years, and then they're out, because we never have to pay their bonuses. We never have to pay their kickers. We're gonna get their best energy.

We're gonna get them through one performance evaluation where they're d- gonna do okay, and we're gonna get them through a second performance evaluation where they're gonna be managed out. And that way we can get people in with fresh ideas, because we need those, but we're not gonna keep them around for very long, because we don't wanna commit to that financially.

And I went home that night. I could not believe that was what I had just heard. And so as I'm processing this and I say to myself, "This is... Okay, this is fine." I'm getting ready to go with my wife on the first actual vacation that we've taken in five years, because I've been so nose down on all these projects.

We're gonna go to Ireland for an entire week. We've never been. It's super great. And today is Thursday, and then I just have to get through Friday, and we're gonna leave on Saturday. And on Friday, I get that calendar invite, 15 minutes, middle of the day So the interesting thing with this one was my relatively new boss was trying to get away with eliminating an entire team of people without triggering a WARN notice.

Is that right? There's a lot of folks who aren't... Do folks know what a WARN notice is? In this country, if you're an organization of a certain size and you decide that you're going to lay off a group of people, you have to actually file a notice, and you have to state how many people you're separating, why you're doing it, and this gets filed, and it gets reported.

Your investors hear about it. It goes to agencies at the federal and state level, and it can be very calamitous, especially if you are running a kind of company that's a little bit secretive, and y-you don't wanna kinda tip folks off to what your plans are. It can also spook your investors. They can go, "Whoa, what is going on?

Why are they laying off these guys? What about their strategy is changing?" So there are some tricks that folks use to avoid this, and the most common one is called managing out. Okay, have anybody ever heard the managing out thing? Yes. So I was being managed out because suddenly the goals that our team had exceeded for years were being rewritten in the back.

Things that we had done were kinda being revised downward and saying, "No, it turns out you actually didn't hit that goal. Oh, ignore the fact that we threw you a pizza party for that. You didn't really hit your goal. You've not been performing well for a long time. It's time to go." Now, I was probably savvier than the average bear, and because I had been cross-trained with the HR department in that organization, I called up a colleague of mine at corporate and said, "Heck, I don't know if you've heard that this is what's going on."

And they were like, "No, we haven't." And sh- so within about an hour, I got a call back, and my access was reinstated. And it turned out that someone got some feedback that they couldn't really do the thing that they wanted to do. But that does not mean that none of that was gonna happen. It just changes the timeline because instead of A separation, it became a PIP, okay?

So suddenly, performance improvement plan, you have 90 days to get your act together, even though for the last five years you've gotten a meets, exceeds, or d- super exceeds your goals on your performance reviews, suddenly you have 90 days to get it together. And that, for me, at that moment, was really devastating, because I think I had wrapped up so much of my identity in that job and that organization, and especially that group of people that I was working with.

It was really hard to picture a future without them. It was very challenging to figure out what I was gonna do next. But the thing that I was absolutely gonna do next was go to Ireland, because it was already paid for. We weren't gonna get that money back. What else are you gonna do, right? And so in that moment...

This is a picture of my wife on that trip, reminding me that the world is a lot bigger than any one organization and any one group of people, and reminding me that I could take time away, reset, recalibrate. The App Store was really janky at that point. There wasn't a Calm app, there wasn't Headspace. The best that I could do on the floor of the hotel in Ireland where we were staying was download an audiobook by a guy who claimed to be the mentor of Dr.

Phil. And when my wife tells this story, she tells it in a way of saying, "All I remember of that night at the trip was that we were jet lagged, we were, like, super wonky, we were super stressed out, and you were playing something on your phone on speaker that was just a guy with a deep Texas accent yelling, 'Stop trying to win.

Stop trying to win,' over and over as a chant." So when we had a chance on that trip to, to unpack everything that was going on, we realized that with that inciting incident that had happened at the organization, from that moment, things were kind of sliding Here's what I took away from those two years.

It's rarely, if ever, about you, okay? One of the things that happens, too, is that if you're in this situation, you're gonna find yourself with one of two things: a really good empathetic manager who is trying their best to just execute a decision that they hate, or somebody who is just trying to check a box, get you out the door, so they can get quarterly bonuses out to whoever upstream of this decision benefits from this, okay?

It is rarely, if ever, about you, and if you, like me at that time, are the kind of person that thrived on really good performance reviews, really good feedback from superiors, it is jarring to suddenly hear, "You're not-- not only are you not needed around here, but we're actually gonna tell you that you were really terrible for the last year or so."

It's rarely about you. Now, if you're fortunate enough to be in that kind of situation where you can see it coming, you can build yourself an off-ramp. You can figure out what's going on. So for me, I knew at that point I had ninety days. Now, one of the proudest achievements that I've ever had as a manager is I've had people that I've had to put on actual PIPs because they needed them to improve, and they did.

Okay? So that is a thing that does exist rarely out in the universe. But if you know that you've got ninety days, know that you've got ninety days, and back time what you need to do to keep yourself stable in those ninety days. Start building that plan B as early as possible. And the other thing is leave well, okay?

Your other colleagues, unless you're in a completely toxic environment and you decide, "I'm never gonna see these people again," and you just trash the place, right? It doesn't benefit anybody for you to be the kind of person that starts flipping tables on the way out the door. This is not an episode of Kitchen Nightmares.

This is your life. These people are probably gonna come back into your life in some way, and I'm always surprised and delighted to encounter people from that time in my life who I couldn't even talk to in that moment that have since become really important parts of my life. And the most important thing is to make sure that you're keeping a network outside of work.

Who are you talking to that doesn't work where you work now? Who are you talking to that doesn't have the same kind of job that you have now? Because what happened for me in those ninety days was putting together what is now a consulting agency that my wife and I have been running for the past fourteen years.

And our first four clients were all people that we had networked with outside of our individual jobs. Okay? So that network outside of work is really what's gonna keep you going in that moment. So that's, that's my story. That's enough to... Way more than I like to talk about myself. I rarely tell any of this stuff to anybody.

But this section, I really wanna talk about the nuts and bolts of what happens if you find out that you're on a PIP? What happens if you find out your company's laying people off? What happens if you find out your company is pivoting? I have a company that I have loved buying shoes from for the last seven years, and they woke up the other day and said, "We're just gonna stop making shoes and become an AI company."

Which is now why I have a closet full of their stuff. Because they are never gonna make that stuff again, and these idiots are gonna be bankrupt in six months. So I have nothing but love for anybody that finds themselves in this situation, because again, there are forces going on that are beyond anybody's individual control, and there are a lot of people who are really good at what they do who are getting told that they suck because it's gonna benefit somebody's bottom line somewhere.

So if you get a PIP, the first thing I want you to do is do not panic. Do not buy the terrible Texan audiobook about how not to panic. This-- Understand that this is happening more frequently than anybody lets on, because we are spending so much time on LinkedIn especially, trying to show everybody that we are out here living our best lives and nothing bad ever happens, and we are amazing thought leaders, and no one would ever fire us from anything for any reason, right?

But the reality is this is happening all the time, so you don't have to panic. You also don't have to make it personal. I can tell you it's almost gutting to hear that the person making this decision is not making it about you, right? It's not even about your team. It is about something completely detached.

It's hard to hear that and hard to process it, but I will tell you it's a lot better, and with folks that I've coached in the years since my own experiences, you can get through it easier when you understand that that person is not trying to get you. That person is not even thinking about you. They are trying to get to a result that was determined independent of you and your existence.

And the most important thing is to get it in writing, because one of the tricks with PIPs is that, especially if you're in a state with really strong employee protections, they have to be really good at documenting what it is that they think they're telling you is wrong and what you have to do to, in their eyes, redeem yourselves.

Because even though, especially around here in the East Coast, we talk about that we are, we are an at-will state, or we are a state where we can hire anyone or fire anyone for any reason or no reason. That's something that we used to have to say a lot in HR meetings. But the reality is, even with that, there are a ton of protections, and there are also a ton of really talented employee attorneys who would love to hear if you're getting managed out unfairly or especially if you are being discriminated against, okay?

So what I want you to do if you're on a PIP, if you haven't done this stuff already, in general, it's a great time to decouple your work life from your personal life when it comes to your digital footprint. Keep personal info off of your work device, okay? Where this comes up, and I even hear-- heard some people tell stories to me about this today, is that there are some managers out there that do not have a clue about how hard they could potentially be sued for stuff like this.

But they can, if they have access to stuff about your personal life in your digital footprint because you've meshed those things together, that can become a reason why you might get targeted for a layoff or a PIP. You could be seen by, again, a terrible manager, as someone who is not as committed because you have kids, or not as available because you're caregiving for a parent.

All kinds of things that are going on weird. So keep your personal stuff off the work calendar, keep it off the work email. Set up separate places where you store all of that stuff. Fastmail, ProtonMail, stuff that's not the most typical platforms that you would use, those are really helpful because, again, at work, a lot of us end up in situations where you may be connecting stuff through a Google account or a Microsoft account, and that stuff hooks into each other in weird ways that you might not even realize because you hit yes one day to connect a work tool up to a projector or something.

So try to keep your most sensitive stuff in a silo that's outside of that usual stuff. Adjust your social profiles, right? Think about what it is that you're trying to project, and especially if you're trying to look for a new job, think about how you show up, right? Be your authentic self, but be your-- the most forward-looking, best foot forward version of that authentic self.

Look for some alternatives. Take advantage of the fact that right now, especially everything is in flux. It is not surprising anymore to hear stories about someone who decided to leave the C-suite of a Fortune five hundred company and start, no lie, in my town, there is a store where they just sell, like, bird seed stuff, right?

Fo-- people can follow passions, and people can make what would have looked like a wild left turn ten years ago. These days, no one's gonna question any of that. And the most important thing is really think about how hard you wanna fight in this PIP situation because If you're lucky to have a manager that you know that their manager has their back and they have yours, you may have a shot.

It is truly a delightful thing to see somebody achieve success on a PIP, but it is extremely rare because of how these get deployed. And so I wanna urge you to think about, you can fight this thing, you can get better at it, you can achieve those goals. It's entirely likely that on day ninety-one, they're just gonna come up with another version of something else to try and bust you out.

So I want you to have that in mind when you're thinking about what's next Decompressing. Get off social. Take some time, especially away from LinkedIn. Do-- get away from the LinkedIn brain. You do not have to protect that version of yourself. Stop comparing what you've got versus what other folks have.

Stop comparing what you have right now versus what you thought you would have by this point, and think about finding some small joys. One of the other things that has been going on in our society is that a lot of us are finding ways to plant deeper roots where we are. And instead of becoming a global thought leader, become the person that's known as one of the best volunteers in your community.

What are you doing to really enrich your life and the lives of the people that are around you, right? Now is a good time to be thinking about that. So layoffs, that fifteen-minute calendar invite from HR shows up. What do you do? The Prisoner is an amazing seventeen-episode series about the world's worst layoff.

If you haven't seen it, it's one of my favorite TV shows. Thank you to the four people in the room that I think got the reference . The, The Prisoner is a show about the world's best secret agent and what happens when his agency decides to deactivate him. The, the ball behind number six here is called Rover.

Rover is the HR department. Now, if my former employer would like to pay to send me for the rest of my life to Portmeirion, Wales, I would be all for that. But no, I did not get that. If you get laid off, do not sign a thing. Do not sign a thing. I will also tell you right now, I am not a lawyer, and I'm definitely not your lawyer.

This is not technically legal advice, but you should get legal advice. But every lawyer that I've ever talked to about this says the same thing. Do not sign anything in the room. If you are over the age of forty, you have additional rights that you might not even know about that give you longer than they are probably telling you to choose whether or not you're gonna sign whatever is in front of you, because whatever in front of you is probably gonna contain things like a non-disclosure agreement, a non-disparaging agreement, all kinds of other weird things that can come back to haunt you.

So you stop, you look up a really good employment attorney. Most of them will work on contingency based on what kind of deal they can help you negotiate. And remember that whatever deal is on the table right now, there's probably an even better deal available for the asking But whatever deal you have, rebudget now.

So take a step back, look at what cash you have, look at what cash flow is coming in based on what your savings are. And again, look, I grew up in Darby, the son of a mechanic. There are a lot of years of my life where everything I bought with my last dollar. So at times in my life it was like, "I guess I'll be broke tomorrow."

But budget based on what you need and what you need to spend. Do not budget based on whatever bill collector is calling you or whatever other obligation is out there. You need to circle the wagons, okay? Read that document carefully, get opinions, get options, and really understand what's gonna happen next once that separation happens.

Now, the other thing that's going on all over, places are pivoting. Companies are waking up and deciding that they want to chase AI, or they want to be a completely different kind of business, or the customer that they've been chasing for the last fifty years has died, and they need to find a completely new customer.

I like to think about a plan ladder from B all the way to Z. B is, hey, you could find the same exact job just someplace else. That is always an option. C, you could use that to do something that you'd like to try that's a little bit adjacent. Some folks are very good at doing this little dance where they can move out of one role and get themselves not just a lateral, but a promotion to something else.

Or try something else. Hop into entrepreneurship. Lots of things you can do. Plan Z is your floor. What is the absolute minimum that you need to live on, and what do you need to make, and how can you make it to get that in the door? And your floor is determined by your talent, your skill, and your ability to ignore anybody that's gonna think that it is completely inappropriate for you to start an OnlyFans at your age, okay?

There is no wrong answer, okay? There is no wrong answer. What is your floor? I want you to go and get that cash like no one cares, because nobody cares. One of the things that happens to a lot of people is they get in this situation, they think, "What will people think if I, the former VP of Widgets at Widget Co.,

were to show up working at Home Depot on a Sunday?" Guess what? No one cares. Because in my own experience, and with all the folks that I've coached over the years through things like this- No one has ever gone up to somebody and been like, "Man, you're super qualified for this role, but I see you took a job at Home Depot over the weekend."

I cannot possibly have someone that has ever sunk so low. My ass was in a call center in Athens, Georgia, answering completely weird calls about grill covers at 3:00 AM in the morning because that's what I needed to do to keep us going one year, right? So there is nobody that can dump on you for trying to keep things moving.

Rebecca Black has a career, okay? Rebecca Black, who the entire internet crapped on for a year, is successfully headlining festivals throughout the US and Europe. Nobody cares, okay? And whatever criticism you might find yourself having right now is going to go away. One thing I want you to do if you think things are getting shaky at work, keep an eye on your champions, right?

This is something that I missed the signs when it was happening to me, that all of a sudden people that I was-- who were mentors to me were suddenly deciding they were gonna go to completely different random jobs. And I just thought, "That seems weird," but I wasn't putting two and two together. Now we have LinkedIn.

We can see what people are doing, and if the people that are upstream from you in a big organization are suddenly all just vaporizing, that's a warning sign. Think about your plan B, your plan C, all the way to your plan Z. And get a go bag together. I want you to understand that when it happens these days, you are gonna just disappear digitally from that organization.

So A brag file, right? Go in and think about the things that you've actually accomplished. I did this exercise getting ready for this talk, and I was going through really old emails of mine and realizing there were a bunch of projects I completely forgot about that were really cool, and I can't believe I forgot about those.

So do that little exercise for yourself to get that brag file together. Get your network going. Pull samples out. Do all the things you need to do now because you will not have access to any of that work product later. Make sure that you're leveraging every single benefit that your current employer offers.

Do not leave anything on the table. Go after every bonus. If they are offering you a $25 gift card for confirming that you will eat an apple a day on their internal communications app, go get that gift card. It is there. People get excited about this stuff. So part four is taking care of yourself as well.

And it is very easy for us to forget that we are human beings. We are operating in this very tech-forward world where things are just going all the time, and you have to step back and take care of yourself. One of the most important things that a mentor said to me was, if you are working in a profession where you have to put a lot of your creative energy into things, and this is for my designers and my developers and my creative professionals here, think about this.

You do one for yourself, and you do one for them, okay? So you're working in an agency, you're doing a campaign, you're pouring your entire heart and soul into this campaign, and clients are gonna client all over it. But you use what you earn and what you learn from that to do a project just for you. And if you do that, you're never putting all your creative eggs into somebody else's basket.

You're keeping that creative energy for you. You find your people. This is one of the reasons that this event exists, right? So your people are in places like this. You haven't met half of them yet. So- Find them. And most importantly, get help. This was really crucial for me, and it's been really crucial for other people in my life.

I will tell you one thing, the employee assistance plan in most organizations, and get a vibe for your organization because yes, there, there are organizations that will use EAP data as retaliation against you, and that sucks, and it shouldn't happen. If your organization has a good EAP program that is siloed off from the record keeping, use it.

Take advantage of it. There are crisis lines that you can call that are local. There are also the national crisis lines. You can call nine eight eight anytime, right? It is completely normal to feel like things are falling apart when your employer has just decided that you're not worth anything to them.

Do not let them make you think that you're not worth anything to anybody else This is the part where I break down mentally, and I'm gonna vamp and let you fill up some time. What questions do you have? How does that resonate with you? I saw a lot of recognition in the room and a lot of nods. I feel like a lot of people have lived through similar things.

It's Joe popping in from the studio here. This is the point at which we stopped and opened up for Q&A. Now, at Bar Camp Philly, we have a policy where we don't ambiently record anybody without explicit approval, so I don't have the voices of the folks asking questions here. However, I did get a really good question about what happens in your professional network with people that you were working with when you received a warning, a PIP, or even a layoff.

I've run into people that were on the other side of mine, and mine got really weird because the culture in my organization was also such that if you were like... It was like The Traitors. If you were banished, you could never interact with anyone again. And I ran into somebody that was part of my PIP, like years later, and they were like-- And I was like, "Hey, am I allowed to talk to you now?"

Because about ninety days after I went through mine, their boss handed them theirs. And this person said to me like, "Yeah, I should have seen it coming when I had to do yours." Because it had nothing to do with you. It had everything to do with something that was bigger than us. But it was framed up as, "Yeah, you're holding us back.

You need to go." I wonder that one of the things that we're encountering culturally right now is that until fairly recently, I think it was really taboo to even talk about a lot of this stuff. And I think that it has happened so often and in s-so many widespread cases, that folks are just talking about it openly.

I also think it's a generational thing. I think it has a lot to do with Generation Z getting to the workplace, and one of the really great things about Gen Z, and I'm Gen X, so we're the generation that's not supposed to give a crap about things, and we're like very cynical. And Gen Z is just brutally, fiercely honest about things, and they do not care at all about keeping your secrets if y- if you're separating with them.

And so what I observe is that there's been a wave of stuff, especially on TikTok and on Instagram, with folks who are, like, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, who've been through this process two or three times at this point in their career, and realizing that it's not them. They're not a bad employee.

They're just at a bad juncture in this moment where our economy is K-shaped and very strange, and no one seems to have the answer for who's gonna actually buy stuff if AI takes everybody's jobs in a year? Who will be the customers, right? No one has a good answer to that yet. But they do know that if they lay off a bunch of twenty-five-year-olds, it makes the quarterly earnings look bigger, and the stock goes up.

So that's the cycle, and I think people are onto that. So even ten years ago, it was hard to find anybody acknowledging any of this, and I think that's the difference now is that we can call it out, and you start to see people now, and this was unheard of in my day, actually recording the conversation and posting the entire thing on TikTok.

So you actually can see people going through it and hearing the same language that you might have even heard in your situation and going, "Oh, they just bought the same book on, on Amazon about what language they're supposed to use here," and they're just going through it, which is astonishing, but that's kind of where we are right now culturally.

Some of the HR consultants that I've worked with over the years, and I have talked about this, and again, there's kind of two, like two flavors of this. You have the empathetic manager who's just got to do their job, and then you've got an actual sociopath. So sometimes you get the sociopath, and what's nice when you're dealing with them, they don't care.

So if you just go, "Oh, okay, I see the PIP, and I confirm that I have ninety days to improve my performance. Super. Great. Done." And they go, "Fantastic," and they go on to the next one. What happens, what-- Yeah. Then- That's a tough one. Because of what- My heart just went. But yeah, but here's the thing. One of the things about this strategy with the sociopath manager is they want you rattled.

And if you start putting up a fight, if you give in that meeting a reason that if you're acting out emotionally, if you snap, if you start going off, then they go, "Oh, you've already violated the PIP because you are now insubordinate, and you are now unstable, and I'm going to suspend you, and you're out."

You've given them something. So if you get that PIP, and if you're inclined to be like, "I will fight you, boss," that's the thing that's actually gonna trigger you going immediately. If you can just resist and just go, "All right. This is not the-- this is not what I expected. This is not the information I thought I was gonna get in this meeting.

I will take this under advisement," and you end the conversation. And at that point, you mu-- for it to stick, you must have it in writing, and it has to have a clear date with some clear, measurable goals. And it's fair for you to ask follow-up questions like, "What are my goals?" The HR consultants I've spoken to over the years have said that's the stuff that you get in writing after the meeting.

So right after you have that meeting, you send an email, you CC your manager, you CC HR, you CC a couple people so that it's now in the org that like, "Hey, just confirming that we had our meeting, you delivered my PIP, you told me that I had ninety days to improve this and this. I'm just confirming my receipt of this information, and I want to make sure that w-we set up time to discuss my progress going forward."

Now, what's interesting about that strategy is that if your manager has gone rogue and they're doing this without broader knowledge in the organization, somebody upstream of them is gonna be like, "Fred, what the hell? What are you doing?" Or They've just flagged you as the person that, okay, get the extra big package ready for them.

They're gonna be trouble. They're probably gonna bring in attorneys with them in 90 days. But either way, as long as everybody's playing by the rules, not everybody does all the time, but if they're giving you 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, you now know that's the clock. And then you realize that's why all the stuff in the break room's been missing.

Interjecting again from the studio, because we had a couple of really neat questions in a row about whether it's legal or ethical to record the conversation that you're having with your boss about your PIP. In many cases, it may not be. A lot of it has to do with your employment contract, but it also may have to do with whether that's delivered over the phone or on Zoom.

And so we got into a conversation about if you're getting this delivered to you as a phone call, there are legal rules that determine what you can do based on the state that you live in, in the United States. In other parts of the world, it may be different. Uh, but there's also a trend of people doing this even if it's not necessarily permitted, and turning it into social content.

There's rules. Different states have different rules about... I learned this as a journalist. Different states have different rules about whether you can record a phone call. So in Pennsylvania, for instance, if I call you and I'm recording, I have to tell you that I'm recording. That's why everybody anywhere, wherever you call, I can't even call my dentist and they're like, "We're recording this line."

Yeah, for it to be admissible, right? Now, people are recording and putting random stuff on TikTok. There's all kind- I don't-- There's a whole new case law emerging about that. But Pennsylvania's a two-party state. There are other states that are one party, which means just one person needs to know that it's recording.

So look up where you are in your state, and if you're in a one-party state, you could be recording everything completely fair, right? However, again, this is where I say I'm not a lawyer, and yeah, it's even in the slide so that my lawyer doesn't yell at me. None of this is legal, financial, or medical advice.

But get appropriate advice for your situation. Yeah. Yeah.

It's where you're-- It's always where you're physically located. Yeah.

Yeah All right, we got room for one or two, and then Mike and I are, and Harper are gonna yell at y'all from the stairs. Yeah, it's... A- and it's rough out there. I have clients all over the world who are all going through versions of... I have one client right now that's on round four, and it's tough. And there are a lot of companies that are doing it just out of we demand for a certain product just vaporized, and there's just not that thing anymore, which sucks.

So if you're in one, and if you're in one of those organizations where you can see in your management's eyes they do not want to be doing this, leverage that, because they are the ones who are gonna recommend you to other gigs and talk, give you a, a recommendation on LinkedIn, things like that. Next up, here's a question I got about what the interaction was like between me and my boss the first time I ended up quitting my job because I knew that layoffs were coming

Yeah

Yeah. The, the, this moment in time especially is a moment where you can determine if the people that you're working with are really good at being humans. And if you're fortunate there, even if it doesn't work out at that organization, that's the kind of person that you want on your team going forward.

And I'm really fortunate that people who were on my team were the ones that helped us get our agency off the ground, that continue to send us business because the... A- and the folks that weren't on my team are people that I now run into at events, and they tell me their stories of what happened to them after, and it's coincidentally never good, right?

So thank you all for giving me a space to be vulnerable today. You can find me on all the socials or on the Philly Barcamp Reddit. Thank you all so much for coming today. It means a lot to all of us who've put this together, and I hope to see you all again real soon.

So that again was my talk, Surviving Your Own Tech Career, delivered at the BarCamp Philly 17 conference at the Huntsman Hall at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, one of my former employers. We've got six more great episodes of Marginally Better left in this year, and that's what we're calling season one.

And then season two kicks off early in 2027, and we're gonna be making a couple changes around here, a little bit shift in focus. I've got more coming about that very soon. But thank you so much for getting all the way to the end of this bonus episode of Marginally Better. Marginally Better is a production of Calufrax Inc.

I'm Joe Taylor Jr. Have a great day