I was walking from my regular morning train when my phone trilled.
“Where are you?” My colleague and friend was loud whispering. “There's a big meeting about to happen.”
I hustled into the two-story brick warehouse near the train tracks and stepped into the crowded conference room. My colleagues at the tech startup stood shoulder-to-shoulder or sat on the floor as the CEO and COO, with sad faces, announced that 25% of us would be laid off that morning.
Nausea deep in my core told me that I would be one of the unlucky few.
This could have been last week at a company like Meta, Lyft, or Stripe, but this scene actually played out a generation ago in June 2001.
I was 27 and living in Chicago. We didn't have smartphones yet — Nextel two-way radios were all the rage — and we had only desktop computers so it wasn't like we could look at our phones or laptops for an email while we sat there getting the news together.
The company handled the layoffs with more humanity than most. They gave everyone the day off and paid the tab at a local bar where we all drank together for the last time. And those of us laid off got a few months of severance.
After licking my wounds, I tried to enjoy my summer while casually interviewing for other jobs in industries that hadn't been hit yet. Eventually, my cat Lyle and I drove back to my hometown on Long Island to stay, just days before 9/11 hit New York City.
I found a new job quickly as an Interactive Product Manager, building one of the first-ever interactive television platforms (most people were calling it “Web TV back then”) for a big cable company. I found myself on a niche team within a huge legacy enterprise. We worked in an office park in the suburbs, but I got a higher salary and significantly better benefits than I had at the startup. We got first dibs on tickets for Madison Square Garden events, and the Rockettes danced at our annual holiday party.
I found myself on a niche team within a huge legacy enterprise. It was in an office park in the suburbs, but I got a higher salary and significantly better benefits than I had at the startup.
What I consider my “tech career” wasn't over. Over the next 21 years, I continued to grow and learn new tech skills, eventually becoming an executive leader in product management and then starting my own consulting practice in product strategy and coaching. In the years between, I developed digital products and helped modernize ways of working within teams for a variety of beloved consumer brands in media, e-commerce, and the arts.
If you were too young to be aware of all that happened when the first dot com bubble burst, you don't have to trust me about how bad it was. Plenty of other Gen X'ers got burned, and you can read all about it in this article on ideas.TED.com, TheStreet, or The Internet History Podcast.
“A whole generation of workers who staked their careers on the dream of technology were unemployed. It was later estimated that between 2001 and early 2004, Silicon Valley alone lost 200,000 jobs. In the space of a decade, a group of people had gone from being young upstarts who “got it,” to masters of the universe who were transforming the world, to completely redundant.”
— Brian McCullough in “A revealing look at the dot-com bubble of 2000 — and how it shapes our lives today” on TED Ideas
I consider myself one of the survivors, partially because I kept an open mind about what my future might look like. I did get laid off from that cool interactive television job a year later but that was more related to the challenges New York's economy had after 9/11— and shortly thereafter I landed another role within the same company working on a video on demand service long before streaming services went OTT.
Here's an animated 5-minute video from The Plain Bagel explaining what happened and how. (Btw, the dog in this graphic was one of my favorite brands of the dot com era, the Pets.com sock puppet.)
Twenty-one years after all of this went down, I am writing this to convince the next generation of tech workers to consider a legacy company for your next opportunity.
Working for a startup or a tech company is seductive for many people. Perks, swag, and cool outings; the pride of being part of something disruptive and game-changing; and the chance of exiting with millions after cashing in stock grants.
The downside is a pretty steep cliff.
Layoffs are painful and often life-changing. When they happen in conjunction with a volatile or down economy like the one we seem to be in now, a layoff can be debilitating and force people into unexpected career changes, long-term unemployment, or early retirement.
If you're among those whose job was eliminated this year, please don't assume that your only option is competing for a role at another startup or tech company where the risk may still be high.
You have an opportunity that has never really been available at scale before: transforming and modernizing legacy companies.
Even though my peers and I have been pushing digital transformation forward for more than twenty years, there are still literally tens of thousands of companies in the United States alone that have not successfully future-proofed their businesses.
Rather than chasing the dream of disrupting an industry, you could be part of a different kind of innovation — saving these supposed dinosaurs (or are they camels?) before startup funding comes back and creates the next cycle.
An infusion of tech talent into legacy companies isn't just noble, it would improve the U.S. economy by preventing big companies from shutting down or being acquired or split up, inevitably resulting in even more layoffs and possibly whole cities being affected.
Rather than chasing the dream of disrupting an industry, you could be part of a different kind of innovation — saving these supposed dinosaurs before startup funding comes back and creates the next cycle.
Tech spending at these companies will continue to increase even as thousands are laid off in the coming months. And enterprise tech companies are not immune to RIFs either. Salesforce has announced that they will need to let go several hundred employees as customers curb their infrastructure spending.
To give you an idea of the number of large-cap companies at risk in the United States, in 2018 GE was the last of the original stocks to get removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average. We're in the middle of a decade where half of the constituent companies in the S&P 500 are expected to turn over. And there are only 52 companies left on the Fortune 500 list that remain from 1955.
Legacy companies large and small in a variety of industries need strong talent to survive. They know that they need to invest wholesale in transformation yesterday, and they know they can't possibly do it only with the talent they have.
Upskilling and coaching are both effective ways to bring agility to a workforce, but there is a strong need for leaders and individual contributors who have “been there” and have the t-shirt.
Experienced and skilled humans are critical to helping companies grow. By bringing a modern product mindset into a legacy company, an organization can transform from within.
Imagine you're an engineering lead or a product manager who has been doing this work at a tech company or a relatively well-run startup. Knowing how to move fast using tactics like research, experimentation, and analysis can help others adapt and change at the team level, where individuals may struggle to see a way forward.
Talent is in demand in a lot of areas at these companies, but a big gap I've seen is in experienced engineering leaders, product managers, and product owners. There are many other important roles, of course, but those tend to be critical as they can act as evangelists for design thinking, lean, and product-led frameworks and practices.
Experienced and skilled humans are critical to helping companies grow. By bringing a modern product mindset into a legacy company, an organization can transform from within.
Even one person on a team confident in these ways of working can make a huge difference to company culture in the long run.
Product mindset and product management skills are in high demand. Many companies are still working toward adopting product-led operating models. If you are a product specialist who knows how to drive business value, consider how you might be able to drive change from within by leading strategy for a willing team of people who have never worked in a product model before.
Systems thinking and DevOps values and skills are incredibly valuable to companies with legacy systems steeped in traditional IT models.
And all of these companies rely on coaching in various forms. Big consulting agencies with their factory models and Dojos have been the approach in recent years. But many companies are starting to see the value of lean learning (getting the right education to the right person at the right time) and are hiring in-house coaches for product management, agile, and DevOps upskilling of their workforce.
All of these opportunities are especially strong if you like to coach or teach people new skills. I meet so many smart and talented individuals who are game for trying a product model but need guidance from skilled people who have been there and can help them see what good looks like.
When you bring modern skills to a legacy workplace, you can be a big fish in a big pond and create a name for yourself as an expert. I have seen firsthand how one strong engineering lead can completely transform a company's approach to technology.
Ok, I'm coming down from my soapbox.
I'd love to hear from others who work for enterprise companies in technology or digital. I didn't go deep into the personal rewards of innovating from within (you're welcome), but there are many, so if you're someone who has worked in one of these organizations, please weigh in with your own experiences in the comments!
Maura Charles is the founder of Keep it Human. As a Product Leadership Coach and Consultant, she is on a mission to help teams and organizations embrace human skills like communication and emotional intelligence in their ways of working.
She brings 25 years of experience as an editor, product manager, and digital business leader to bear on the challenges of building human-centered high-performing tech teams.
If you'd like to develop more human business and tech teams that hum together to drive results, check out Keep it Human and follow Maura Charles on LinkedIn.