September 6, 2024 • 15 mins
Eleven million people have been let go in the US so far this year. And the job market they’re entering isn’t easy: the latest jobs report showed the economy added just 142,000 jobs in August. But ever since the pandemic, the way we experience — and process — getting laid off has fundamentally changed. It’s no longer just a source of shame. It’s become social media content.
Today on the show, host Sarah Holder speaks with a tech worker who’s at the forefront of the hottest new job market trend: posting publicly about your layoff. And Bloomberg reporter Jo Constantz explains what the shift in how we approach layoffs means for employees and employers everywhere.
Read more: Losing Your Job Used to Be Shameful. Now It’s a Whole Identity
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Last year, in January, Sylvia Duran woke up to something strange.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
It was a Friday, and I was going to have
a really busy day, so I immediately checked my phone
to see what meetings I had that day, and I
couldn't access my calendar.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Sylvia worked at Google. She had a high level role
on a YouTube marketing team and had been there for
nearly a decade. She assumed something was wrong with her phone.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Honestly, I thought that there was a bug, some kind
of bug on my phone. It's happened sometimes.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Sylvia mentioned the issue to her husband at the time,
who had a different take.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
He told me, WHOA, isn't that a sign? And I said,
a sign of what? And he said that you were
laid off.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
There had been some rumors about layoffs at YouTube, but
Sylvia wasn't too worried. After all, the company was doing
well money. Why would they lay people off?
Speaker 3 (01:02):
I laughed it off. I said, no, that's not what's happening.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
But that was exactly what was happening. Sylvia, along with
twelve thousand of her colleagues across Google, had been let go.
Sylvia says She was in shock.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
It felt unreal and at the same time like all
of my worst thoughts about myself had come true. That,
of course I was selected to be laid off because
I never belonged there in the first place.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Sylvia loved her job. She worked hard at it, and
being part of the company with such a central part
of her identity. Her mom even called her my mini Google.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
They were really really proud of me, and I think
that they were surprised because in theory, I was a
strong performer, and so why does a strong performer lose
their job.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
As she started to process what had happened, she began
cycling through emotions shock, sadness, shame.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
I started a question for myself, why am I feeling
this way? Why am I feeling so ashamed? And I
wanted to talk about it. I'm someone who processes verbally,
so I asked my brother, who has his own podcast.
I told him would he be gained to record an
episode where I just processed my feelings? Welcome to the
(02:17):
One of a Kind Podcast. I recorded the first episode
three days after I got laid off. I didn't think
I was going to share it with the world.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
But she did.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
In her very first episode where she talked about her
layoff and how it affected her.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
After like almost a decade of my life there and
the way that I went down, it was not a
good experience, and I'm trying to process that.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Used to be if you got laid off, you didn't
talk about it, You hit it, fibbed about it. Even
not anymore. Now you start a podcast today on the show,
the hottest new job market trend is posting publicly about
your layoff, owning it, sharing it, and feeling your feelings
(03:05):
in real time for the world to see what the
shift in how we approach layoffs means for employees and
employers everywhere. This is the big take from Bloomberg News.
I'm Sarah Holder. Getting laid off isn't a new phenomenon.
(03:26):
Bloomberg reporter Joe Constant says that's thanks to one very
famous American CEO.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Jack Welch, just kind of made the practice routine as
a way to meet quarterly earnings targets and for financial reasons.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Jack Welch became the CEO of General Electric in nineteen
eighty one, and when he started there, layoffs were pretty
much a last resort for most companies. They were seen
as a sign that a company was struggling or even failing.
For Welch, though, layoffs became part of a proactive strategy.
He would have all his employees ranked every year, and
(04:02):
every year he would fire the bottom ten percent. He
called it the vitality curve, and in his first few
years at GE he laid off more than one hundred
thousand workers. The practice caught on it became known as
the Jack Welch rule, and since then layoffs have been
seen as a good way to signal fiscal prudence for companies.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
The cost of labor is one of the highest costs
on their balance sheet, and so it's something that executives
are thinking about a lot in terms of how much
they're spending on their workforce.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Layoffs are now just a reality of the American corporate workplace.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
A professor that I talked to at Harvard Business School
mentioned that part of the point of some of the
layoffs now is to signal to investors that a company
is serious about their cost cutting. So in that sense,
they're signaling publicly as well, versus oftentimes in previous decades
it was less so the case.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
But how workers grappled with that reality change during COVID
when layoffs hit their highest level in decades.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
So, I mean the pandemic was a huge shift in
this dynamic. We saw millions of people who were thrown
out of work and it wasn't their fault, whereas you
know in the before times, there was always kind of
this idea that if you were laid off, it really
was your fault in some way, even if it was
(05:34):
a business driven decision and didn't have anything to do
with you directly as a person in your performance at work.
And so that I think was a massive change.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
There was also the way people got laid off during
the pandemic.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
In decades past, you were in an office, you had
to pack up your things, put them in a box,
kind of walk out of the building or be walked out.
It was public in a different way in front of
your coworkers. Now sperience is completely different. You know, often
it is on zoom and when you get that announcement
and you shut your laptop, it's over, and you kind
(06:11):
of don't have the same visceral feeling of closure that
you might have had if you were in a physical office.
It feels a little bit more surreal and removed.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
One way to combat that disembodied feeling was to share
the experience with others, not just with your former work
from home coworkers, but with the world. What were some
of the signs that we were thinking about layoffs differently
in the pandemic?
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Yeah, I think you know. On LinkedIn, we started to
see so many people posting about getting laid off, they
were looking for work. LinkedIn released their open to Work banner,
the kind of green banner that you see on people's profiles.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
LinkedIn introduced it's green open to Work banner in June
twenty twenty, and since then thirty three million people have
used it. Suddenly, what could have once been seen as
an embarrassment started to be publicly portrayed as something else entirely.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
It was more maybe a badge of solidarity. It was
we are all in this together, or so many of
us are in this together, and those of us who
are in that position. It became something that was collective
in a way.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
There it was the slim silver lining of all this
workplace blood letting. The stigma around being laid off was fading.
People weren't hiding it. They were talking about it, sharing struggles,
asking for advice and connections.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
It was just kind of showing what used to be
a very very private, shameful moment and putting it out
there to say, you know, this is what happened, and
you know, implicitly it says, this isn't my fall.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
The pandemic eventually ended and the economy came roaring back,
but layoffs haven't gone away. What's different now is that
layoff culture has been fundamentally changed. The stigma around layoffs
is largely gone, and laid off workers are now eagerly
bringing their stories and their frustration to social media. Workers
(08:10):
like Britney Peach.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Hi Brittany Hi.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
You may have seen Britney's video when it went viral
in January. It starts with a caption POV You're about
to get laid.
Speaker 4 (08:21):
Off, thanks for meeting with me.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
In the video, Brittany is sitting at home, leaning over
her computer, listening as an HR rep for cloud Flare,
the company where she worked, tells her she's being laid off.
But instead of just listening in shock the way some
people might do, Britney starts to push back.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
Yeah, I'm stay right there.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Brittany asks the HR rep some pretty direct questions, Well.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Yeah, no, can you explain for me why Britney Peach
is getting let go? Do you guys even know? Like why?
Speaker 3 (08:51):
Like who you're talking to?
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Each day?
Speaker 2 (08:53):
She posted the video online and it got millions of
us and thousands of comments, many cheering her on for
standing up to the man.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
So am I getting let go for no reason?
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Which Joe says is how a lot of these TikTok
layoff videos are getting received.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
There is kind of a power that's being taken back
there in terms of you know, I'm gonna own my story.
Speaker 4 (09:16):
This morning at eight am, I got a last minute
meeting invite titled business Update with my whole team, my manager,
my manager's manager, and someone from HR. So I think
we're all about to be laid off.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
And this is what happened. Hello, I just got laid off.
It wasn't anything personal, they said. It feels personal, and
I'm going to keep moving forward and you can follow
along on my journey and like and subscribe. Just overall
really grateful for this experience and wish you guys the best.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
Thank you guys. Guess I'm a full time influencer now.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Like, subscribe and maybe hire me? What employers think of
all this after the break. So far this year, more
than eleven million people have been laid off in the US,
(10:22):
and the job market they're entering isn't easy. Friday's jobs
report showed the economy added just one hundred and forty
two thousand jobs in August, and recently, when the New
York Fed asked workers if they expected to be unemployed
in the next four months, more people than at any
time in the last decade said yes. So I asked
(10:44):
Bloomberg's Joe Constance how employers are viewing this new genre
of layoff video.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Yeah, I mean, I think talking to recruiters, my sense
is that it really depends on the nature of the
things that you post. If you are posting about the
fact that you were laid off, but you were framing
it in a way, you know, this is what happened,
and I'm looking for new opportunities, kind of spinning it
(11:11):
in a positive way.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
It could be like a cover letter itself.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
It could be a cover letter. Yeah, you could use
it as an opportunity to re engage and connect with
your network and you know, just kind of showing this
is what I'm looking for.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
But Joe also says there's sometimes such a thing as
too much honesty, and not all hiring managers view pass
layoffs the same way.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
There are other recruiters who feel very strongly that you
should never admit that you've been laid off, that you
should come up with another story, and it should be
you know, I'm taking a career break, I'm taking a
break to travel, and just don't use the L word
at all.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
The other thing about layoffs is that for many companies,
it's not just a way to signal fiscal prudence to investors.
It's also a way to avoid firing people for cause.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Part of the reason some companies will kind of couch
it as a layoff is because there's a little bit
more legal protection. If you fire somebody, it's easier for
them to sue for you know, if they're part of
a protected class, that sort of thing, if they feel
like they've been discriminated against.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
But Joe says that there is some evidence that the
attitude towards letting go of workers for any reason is
starting to shift for companies too.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
There's research that says that companies that are quick to
lay people off for financial reasons don't do as well
as other companies that wait longer and do everything that
they can to keep people because it's very expensive to
replace people, especially folks who are trained, who are good
at their jobs. So are layoffs bad for business Oftentimes yes?
(12:47):
Oftentimes yes. I mean there are times, of course, when
business executives have no choice. They truly don't for whatever reason,
they've exhausted all options. And this is the only way
to say afloat. But I think there are a lot
of cases is where it's the first option in it
really shouldn't be. There are other ways to cut costs
that can be considered.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
And as for Sylvia, the former YouTube employee, she says
she was lucky enough to get a good severance package,
so she was able to take her time looking for
new gigs, and as she was sending out applications, she
kept making podcast episodes.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
I can't believe this marks twenty conversations with incredible people
in my life. Thank you to everyone who continues listening.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
When an executive at Into It came across Sylvia's resume,
he started listening.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
And so he said that at first he listened to
the first few to get to know me, but then
he enjoyed them, and then they became part of his routine.
I was concerned that it was going to be a
red flag. It ended up being a grain flag.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Sylvia went in for an interview in this past January.
She started in a new role at Into It, but
she's returning to the workforce with a slightly different mindset.
Did your layoff change the way you tie your identify
to work at all?
Speaker 3 (14:01):
First starters, my mom stopped calling me Mini Google felt
they definitely have. I have, Sarah. I try to be
very purposeful to say I have other identities outside of work.
Obviously a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend, and
I also have a relationship with myself right and I
now believe that by taking care of these other aspects
(14:23):
of my life, I will be a better employee overall.
So I have definitely.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
This episode was produced by Thomas lou and Jessica Beck.
It was mixed by Blake Maples. It was fact checked
by Adrian Atapia. It was edited by Stacy Vannicksmith and
Raehan harmanci. Our senior producers are Kim Gittlson and Naomi Shaven.
Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso, Nicole Beemsterbor is our
(14:55):
executive producer. Sat Bowman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. If
you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe and review
The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps
people find the show. Thanks so much for listening. We'll
be back on Monday.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Last year, in January, Sylvia Duran woke up to something strange.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
It was a Friday, and I was going to have
a really busy day, so I immediately checked my phone
to see what meetings I had that day, and I
couldn't access my calendar.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Sylvia worked at Google. She had a high level role
on a YouTube marketing team and had been there for
nearly a decade. She assumed something was wrong with her phone.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Honestly, I thought that there was a bug, some kind
of bug on my phone. It's happened sometimes.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Sylvia mentioned the issue to her husband at the time,
who had a different take.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
He told me, WHOA, isn't that a sign? And I said,
a sign of what? And he said that you were
laid off.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
There had been some rumors about layoffs at YouTube, but
Sylvia wasn't too worried. After all, the company was doing
well money. Why would they lay people off?
Speaker 3 (01:02):
I laughed it off. I said, no, that's not what's happening.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
But that was exactly what was happening. Sylvia, along with
twelve thousand of her colleagues across Google, had been let go.
Sylvia says She was in shock.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
It felt unreal and at the same time like all
of my worst thoughts about myself had come true. That,
of course I was selected to be laid off because
I never belonged there in the first place.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Sylvia loved her job. She worked hard at it, and
being part of the company with such a central part
of her identity. Her mom even called her my mini Google.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
They were really really proud of me, and I think
that they were surprised because in theory, I was a
strong performer, and so why does a strong performer lose
their job.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
As she started to process what had happened, she began
cycling through emotions shock, sadness, shame.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
I started a question for myself, why am I feeling
this way? Why am I feeling so ashamed? And I
wanted to talk about it. I'm someone who processes verbally,
so I asked my brother, who has his own podcast.
I told him would he be gained to record an
episode where I just processed my feelings? Welcome to the
(02:17):
One of a Kind Podcast. I recorded the first episode
three days after I got laid off. I didn't think
I was going to share it with the world.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
But she did.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
In her very first episode where she talked about her
layoff and how it affected her.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
After like almost a decade of my life there and
the way that I went down, it was not a
good experience, and I'm trying to process that.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Used to be if you got laid off, you didn't
talk about it, You hit it, fibbed about it. Even
not anymore. Now you start a podcast today on the show,
the hottest new job market trend is posting publicly about
your layoff, owning it, sharing it, and feeling your feelings
(03:05):
in real time for the world to see what the
shift in how we approach layoffs means for employees and
employers everywhere. This is the big take from Bloomberg News.
I'm Sarah Holder. Getting laid off isn't a new phenomenon.
(03:26):
Bloomberg reporter Joe Constant says that's thanks to one very
famous American CEO.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Jack Welch, just kind of made the practice routine as
a way to meet quarterly earnings targets and for financial reasons.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Jack Welch became the CEO of General Electric in nineteen
eighty one, and when he started there, layoffs were pretty
much a last resort for most companies. They were seen
as a sign that a company was struggling or even failing.
For Welch, though, layoffs became part of a proactive strategy.
He would have all his employees ranked every year, and
(04:02):
every year he would fire the bottom ten percent. He
called it the vitality curve, and in his first few
years at GE he laid off more than one hundred
thousand workers. The practice caught on it became known as
the Jack Welch rule, and since then layoffs have been
seen as a good way to signal fiscal prudence for companies.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
The cost of labor is one of the highest costs
on their balance sheet, and so it's something that executives
are thinking about a lot in terms of how much
they're spending on their workforce.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Layoffs are now just a reality of the American corporate workplace.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
A professor that I talked to at Harvard Business School
mentioned that part of the point of some of the
layoffs now is to signal to investors that a company
is serious about their cost cutting. So in that sense,
they're signaling publicly as well, versus oftentimes in previous decades
it was less so the case.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
But how workers grappled with that reality change during COVID
when layoffs hit their highest level in decades.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
So, I mean the pandemic was a huge shift in
this dynamic. We saw millions of people who were thrown
out of work and it wasn't their fault, whereas you
know in the before times, there was always kind of
this idea that if you were laid off, it really
was your fault in some way, even if it was
(05:34):
a business driven decision and didn't have anything to do
with you directly as a person in your performance at work.
And so that I think was a massive change.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
There was also the way people got laid off during
the pandemic.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
In decades past, you were in an office, you had
to pack up your things, put them in a box,
kind of walk out of the building or be walked out.
It was public in a different way in front of
your coworkers. Now sperience is completely different. You know, often
it is on zoom and when you get that announcement
and you shut your laptop, it's over, and you kind
(06:11):
of don't have the same visceral feeling of closure that
you might have had if you were in a physical office.
It feels a little bit more surreal and removed.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
One way to combat that disembodied feeling was to share
the experience with others, not just with your former work
from home coworkers, but with the world. What were some
of the signs that we were thinking about layoffs differently
in the pandemic?
Speaker 1 (06:36):
Yeah, I think you know. On LinkedIn, we started to
see so many people posting about getting laid off, they
were looking for work. LinkedIn released their open to Work banner,
the kind of green banner that you see on people's profiles.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
LinkedIn introduced it's green open to Work banner in June
twenty twenty, and since then thirty three million people have
used it. Suddenly, what could have once been seen as
an embarrassment started to be publicly portrayed as something else entirely.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
It was more maybe a badge of solidarity. It was
we are all in this together, or so many of
us are in this together, and those of us who
are in that position. It became something that was collective
in a way.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
There it was the slim silver lining of all this
workplace blood letting. The stigma around being laid off was fading.
People weren't hiding it. They were talking about it, sharing struggles,
asking for advice and connections.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
It was just kind of showing what used to be
a very very private, shameful moment and putting it out
there to say, you know, this is what happened, and
you know, implicitly it says, this isn't my fall.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
The pandemic eventually ended and the economy came roaring back,
but layoffs haven't gone away. What's different now is that
layoff culture has been fundamentally changed. The stigma around layoffs
is largely gone, and laid off workers are now eagerly
bringing their stories and their frustration to social media. Workers
(08:10):
like Britney Peach.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Hi Brittany Hi.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
You may have seen Britney's video when it went viral
in January. It starts with a caption POV You're about
to get laid.
Speaker 4 (08:21):
Off, thanks for meeting with me.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
In the video, Brittany is sitting at home, leaning over
her computer, listening as an HR rep for cloud Flare,
the company where she worked, tells her she's being laid off.
But instead of just listening in shock the way some
people might do, Britney starts to push back.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
Yeah, I'm stay right there.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Brittany asks the HR rep some pretty direct questions, Well.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
Yeah, no, can you explain for me why Britney Peach
is getting let go? Do you guys even know? Like why?
Speaker 3 (08:51):
Like who you're talking to?
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Each day?
Speaker 2 (08:53):
She posted the video online and it got millions of
us and thousands of comments, many cheering her on for
standing up to the man.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
So am I getting let go for no reason?
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Which Joe says is how a lot of these TikTok
layoff videos are getting received.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
There is kind of a power that's being taken back
there in terms of you know, I'm gonna own my story.
Speaker 4 (09:16):
This morning at eight am, I got a last minute
meeting invite titled business Update with my whole team, my manager,
my manager's manager, and someone from HR. So I think
we're all about to be laid off.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
And this is what happened. Hello, I just got laid off.
It wasn't anything personal, they said. It feels personal, and
I'm going to keep moving forward and you can follow
along on my journey and like and subscribe. Just overall
really grateful for this experience and wish you guys the best.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
Thank you guys. Guess I'm a full time influencer now.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Like, subscribe and maybe hire me? What employers think of
all this after the break. So far this year, more
than eleven million people have been laid off in the US,
(10:22):
and the job market they're entering isn't easy. Friday's jobs
report showed the economy added just one hundred and forty
two thousand jobs in August, and recently, when the New
York Fed asked workers if they expected to be unemployed
in the next four months, more people than at any
time in the last decade said yes. So I asked
(10:44):
Bloomberg's Joe Constance how employers are viewing this new genre
of layoff video.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Yeah, I mean, I think talking to recruiters, my sense
is that it really depends on the nature of the
things that you post. If you are posting about the
fact that you were laid off, but you were framing
it in a way, you know, this is what happened,
and I'm looking for new opportunities, kind of spinning it
(11:11):
in a positive way.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
It could be like a cover letter itself.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
It could be a cover letter. Yeah, you could use
it as an opportunity to re engage and connect with
your network and you know, just kind of showing this
is what I'm looking for.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
But Joe also says there's sometimes such a thing as
too much honesty, and not all hiring managers view pass
layoffs the same way.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
There are other recruiters who feel very strongly that you
should never admit that you've been laid off, that you
should come up with another story, and it should be
you know, I'm taking a career break, I'm taking a
break to travel, and just don't use the L word
at all.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
The other thing about layoffs is that for many companies,
it's not just a way to signal fiscal prudence to investors.
It's also a way to avoid firing people for cause.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Part of the reason some companies will kind of couch
it as a layoff is because there's a little bit
more legal protection. If you fire somebody, it's easier for
them to sue for you know, if they're part of
a protected class, that sort of thing, if they feel
like they've been discriminated against.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
But Joe says that there is some evidence that the
attitude towards letting go of workers for any reason is
starting to shift for companies too.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
There's research that says that companies that are quick to
lay people off for financial reasons don't do as well
as other companies that wait longer and do everything that
they can to keep people because it's very expensive to
replace people, especially folks who are trained, who are good
at their jobs. So are layoffs bad for business Oftentimes yes?
(12:47):
Oftentimes yes. I mean there are times, of course, when
business executives have no choice. They truly don't for whatever reason,
they've exhausted all options. And this is the only way
to say afloat. But I think there are a lot
of cases is where it's the first option in it
really shouldn't be. There are other ways to cut costs
that can be considered.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
And as for Sylvia, the former YouTube employee, she says
she was lucky enough to get a good severance package,
so she was able to take her time looking for
new gigs, and as she was sending out applications, she
kept making podcast episodes.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
I can't believe this marks twenty conversations with incredible people
in my life. Thank you to everyone who continues listening.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
When an executive at Into It came across Sylvia's resume,
he started listening.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
And so he said that at first he listened to
the first few to get to know me, but then
he enjoyed them, and then they became part of his routine.
I was concerned that it was going to be a
red flag. It ended up being a grain flag.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Sylvia went in for an interview in this past January.
She started in a new role at Into It, but
she's returning to the workforce with a slightly different mindset.
Did your layoff change the way you tie your identify
to work at all?
Speaker 3 (14:01):
First starters, my mom stopped calling me Mini Google felt
they definitely have. I have, Sarah. I try to be
very purposeful to say I have other identities outside of work.
Obviously a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend, and
I also have a relationship with myself right and I
now believe that by taking care of these other aspects
(14:23):
of my life, I will be a better employee overall.
So I have definitely.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
This episode was produced by Thomas lou and Jessica Beck.
It was mixed by Blake Maples. It was fact checked
by Adrian Atapia. It was edited by Stacy Vannicksmith and
Raehan harmanci. Our senior producers are Kim Gittlson and Naomi Shaven.
Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso, Nicole Beemsterbor is our
(14:55):
executive producer. Sat Bowman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. If
you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe and review
The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps
people find the show. Thanks so much for listening. We'll
be back on Monday.
Hosts And Creators
Sarah Holder
Saleha Mohsin
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