Thursday Digest - November 11, 2022
Layoffs, Irresponsible Innovation, QOTD and a Writing Prompt Just for You
Grieving a Job Loss
By now I’m sure you’ve heard the news that Meta has laid off 11,000 employees (13% of its workforce). The layoffs are the first in the company’s 18-year history following thousands of job cuts at other tech companies including Twitter and Snap, Inc. (CNN Business)
They aren’t the first and they probably won’t be the last Big Tech company to make cuts this year. Amazon and Apple have both announced hiring freezes, Lyft said it will also lay off 13% of its employees, and Stripe is laying off about 14% of its workforce. (CNN Business)
If you’ve ever been laid off from a job you love, you understand all the emotions associated with it. “Even in good times, a job loss is often one of life’s most stressful events, coming close after bereavement, marital difficulties, and personal injury.” (Harvard Business Review)
Work is a huge part of our lives. It gives us meaning. Our co-workers often become our friends—they are the people we work alongside on important projects, and who we see or talk to almost every day, sometimes even more than our loved ones.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that many people feel a profound sense of grief following a layoff. Not only have you lost your livelihood, but you may feel like you’ve lost your identity or sense of self as well, especially if it was a job you loved.
I’ve been laid off three times in my life and I can say from experience that it never gets any easier, but there IS light at the end of the tunnel. (Layoffs and toxic workplace cultures are what drove me to pursue a full-time freelance career).
This round of layoffs could prove to be exceptionally tough for many who also experienced mass layoffs due to Covid-19. For some people, this could very well be their second layoff in less than two years, and they still may have not bounced back from the first one.
Headspace.com offers the following seven ways to mentally bounce back from a job loss:
Allow yourself time to grieve, but try not to dwell.
Establish and stick to a routine.
Explore new opportunities.
Assess your marketable skills.
Try to avoid internalizing rejection.
Ask for help
Seek out professional help.
Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that he hired too fast during the high growth pandemic years. Like many social media companies, Meta hired aggressively during the pandemic to meet the surge in social media usage during the shutdown. I was actually job searching in June 2021 and I remember that it seemed like every job recommended to me on Indeed and Linkedin was with Meta or another Big Tech company.
Meta was once worth more than $1 trillion dollars. It is currently valued at $256 billion and has lost more than 70% of its value in 2022 alone. Reality Labs, the metaverse division, is losing an estimated $10 billion a year and that number is expected to climb in 2023. (Forbes)
Now the company is being forced to scale back to increase profitability. In his message to employees, Zuckerberg said, “I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.”
This brings me to my next topic, irresponsible innovation.
Irresponsible Innovation: Should Big Tech be held more accountable?
In light of the recent Twitter and Facebook layoffs, Warby Parker and Grammarly are among dozens of companies that have warned against “irresponsible innovation.”
But what exactly does that mean? To what extent is innovation being pursued irresponsibly among Big Tech companies? And what should we do about it?
A group of four dozen tech companies and investment firms convened yesterday at the inaugural Responsible Innovation Founders Summit in New York, San Francisco, and online to discuss the idea that, moving forward, tech companies should be required to consider the social impact of their innovations and take measures to decrease negative social consequences in the future.
The Responsible Innovation (RI) Movement dates back to 2016 to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In response to that scandal, Facebook (Meta) and other tech firms created the first RI teams to ensure that their products and processes worked fairly and equitably. (Business News)
But, Meta disbanded its RI team this past summer and Twitter made a similar decision, firing its “ethical AI” team on Friday before laying off half its staff. According to the New York Times, Big Tech’s sudden slowdown “is exposing a weakness. The big tech companies haven’t really found a new, very profitable idea in years.”
Many social media platforms still rely on ad sales for revenue and many of the initiatives that the big tech companies pour money into for research and development, never turn a profit.
Responsible Innovation Labs is a non-profit coalition of leaders working to fulfill the purpose of Responsible Innovation, stating on its website, “We understand that the innovation economy must be transformed for the benefit of the world and that we need to help transform it from the inside out. Together, we will write new standards for ethically deploying technology and building enduring companies.”
The coalition’s aim is to create an infrastructure for RI that calls for technology companies to innovate intentionally, operate with accountability and transparency, advance inclusive prosperity, respect people, champion diversity, build sustainably, and promote healthy societies.
In a survey of nearly 1500 members of the tech community, the majority agree that “founders and investors have special responsibility for the companies that they build and fund” and “80% of respondents think founders should focus equally on building companies with positive financial AND societal returns.” (Responsible Innovation Labs)
What do you think?
Who is ultimately accountable for Technology’s impact on society?
How might social platforms, as we know them, be forced to change if an RI framework was put into place?
#QOTD
I know. I skipped a day (I decided to take the day off from querying the world).
I was going to put this out at 7 p.m. last night when I finished writing it, but then I thought: That’s not really a Question of the Day then, is it? It’s more like a question of the Evening.
But let’s not waste any more time, here is the #QOTD for Thursday, Nov 10, 2022.
Have you ever lost a job? How did you get through it?
What advice do you have for all the recently laid-off employees at Big Tech companies?
Head over to the thread and be the first to comment.
Weekly Writing Prompt
I mentioned in my last writing prompt (which is also the November Writing Contest prompt btw) that one of my most recent favorite movies is Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. It got me thinking about all the possible versions of our lives that we could be living had we just done a few things differently.
In the last prompt, I asked you to write a short story (fictional) about missed connections. This week, I am asking you to really think about all the decisions you have made in your life up until now. Home in on one, a big one, one that you feel really changed the trajectory of your life - if you can’t think of one, think in terms of your biggest regret instead.
How might your life be different if you had made a different choice? Where might you be living? Working? Would you be married? Would you have kids? Would you be worse or better off?
If you are happy with all the decisions you’ve made in your life, then I applaud you! This prompt might not resonate with you, but I am pretty sure that we can all think of one major life decision that had we chosen differently, would have changed our stars.
This one is more of a personal essay so feel free to share if you want to! I love getting emails! Send me your responses at frequentstarts@gmail.com and I will publish some of them to Frequent Starts (with your permission of course!)
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