In late July of this year, I was laid off from OkCupid Labs. The company was kaput. I remember the day vividly, despite having one of those drink-like-crazy-because-I’m-getting-fired-tomorrow hangovers. It was a Friday, and it happened like this:
10am - An unexpected FreshDirect delivery of about 4 cases of beer. (hmm?)
10:30am - All company meeting (except for our group) begins. (oh…)
11:30am - Two Boots pizza delivery (crap..)
12:00pm - All company meeting ends, our group is called to meet with the CEO (yep..)
12:01pm - Laid off, GG
For the first time in my life, I was being forced to leave an organization that I wanted nothing more than to stay and be a part of. My job at OkCupid Labs became a huge source of pride for me over the past year - I’d been given the freedom and responsibility to work as I wanted, a strong voice in product decisions and the best team that I’d ever worked with. When referencing the people that I worked with to others, I used the word ‘friend’ rather than ‘coworker’ because it was simply more accurate. I loved that job, and I never would have left.
Looking back though, that feeling of never wanting to leave was incredibly dangerous. I say this because even though I liked the people and the work, the truth was that my personal growth had been stagnating. We worked mostly with frameworks we’d hacked together at Labs, and though we had many interesting technical challenges I’d never really seen how other companies operated. We didn’t really have scalability issues and our use of development tools was minimal. I had learned a ton in the year I was there, but I was certainly starting to see diminishing returns.
Fast forward past two crazy months, and you’ll find me at Venmo. I’m now in a DevOps role, which is a bit different than what I’m used to. I don’t write much code, but I’m getting a solid grasp of how applications interact to form a coherent, scalable and sustainable system. In just the past two weeks I’ve used and become familiar chef, puppet, vagrant, and jira. I can’t say I know all these well, but frankly I didn’t really know they existed before. I’ve also become much more confident with nginx, nagios and even bash scripting. Just being forced to use all this new software has been amazing, and now I’ve got even more tools to work with.
I’m glad that I got laid off. I can’t say it was easy, but I don’t think I could have achieved the same level of personal growth if I had stayed at OkCupid Labs, and in the future I’ll look towards that next job with a little more optimism. Funemployment ended up being great because I got to spend it with the Labs folks, and now I get to look forward to bonding with my new coworkers over downtime and beer.
Embrace change.