What if this is the last year you work here

“Tommy you look stressed.” I asked in my 1-on-1 session.

“Yeah. Did you read the news? Another round of layoff. Are we gonna be impacted?” , Tommy sighed.

“I know as much as you know from the same news.” I said, “We are a core service that offers essential value to AWS customers and human society at large. We only went through moderate head count growth so if I have to guess, I would say we should be ok. But nobody knows for sure.”

“Even if we are ok for this round, will there be another round soon? How do I work if I have to constantly think I will be laid off tomorrow?” Tommy was not in good mood for sure. “How do I live like this?”

“I hear you. In 2000-2010 I was with Nortel, from a world leader in Telcom industry, into nothingness. I heard I survived 26 rounds of layoffs. I never validated the number, I lost track, I didn’t care. At the end I resigned.

The never ending layoffs, the waiting, the anxiety had a toll on your soul. We went into distress, then depression, then psychosis individually and as a whole. People did horrible things during the depression. That was the darkest time of my life.

Now looking back, I wish I got out early instead of waiting. I also wish I didn’t spend so much time worrying and getting depressed. I could have used the time to live more, to learn more, to try new things…

So here is what I learned from my darkest time, imagine you have only one year at this job - after one year either you find a better opportunity or you are asked to leave.

With this assumption how would you work and live this one year?

You won’t pay much attention to office politics and gossip anymore, will you? Now that harsh comment on your design documents feels more bearable, right?

You will work your best because that is what you are paid for and how you get better at anything. But you will be very diligent to work on projects that bring real values to customers.

But you will also work deliberately on improving yourself for your next endeavor. You will learn as much as you can, by delivering the best work you can.

As this stage of your career, learning is through doing, reflecting on what you have done and transcending it. Your market value is not about how many degrees you have anymore, or how many big name companies you have worked for. It is about what you have experienced, and what value you have delivered. How many engineers get to work on a true distributed, large scale system where thousands of machines are interacting each other. The moment you ship your work, millions of customers benefit from it. Not many people can claim that!

So don’t think too faraway. Don’t worry about things we can’t control. You have only one year here, make every work minute counts towards your future success! If by the end of the year KMS is still your best career choice, treat the next year as your last. And start again.”

https://youtu.be/lq6XWfpUFzk