It's Rough Out There with Sidney Miller
Notes de l’épisode
Matty talks with Sidney Miller, who has worked in talent acquisition for 24 years on the back-end infrastructure side, with a focus on candidate experience and on getting marginalized populations into tech. The conversation is about layoffs, how to protect yourself mentally while out of work, pay transparency and how to negotiate. Matty opens with a disclaimer: the stories are "so cleverly disguised" that nobody should try to work out whether they're about Matty or someone else. The cold open is that same line.
Who Gets CutMatty describes hanging out a shingle as open to work about a year earlier and watching layoff waves roll through from the end of 2022, while the same companies kept hiring, which could be a left-hand, right-hand problem or "eventual consistency." Sidney says early layoffs hit functional roles like engineering, product and data science, and since March Sidney has seen many sales, tech talent acquisition and HR people on the market, which Sidney reads as a sign of overhiring and a course correction. Even experienced engineering managers are struggling, because the open roles are so specific that the ask is for a "purple unicorn with a T-Rex on its back shooting off machine guns."
Sidney was laid off in September of the previous year from a Series B fintech when interest rates went up, was picked up at a Series A startup after leaning on Twitter, and was hit by a second reduction after that. The common denominator across all of these is that "when someone loses their job, they lose their, they feel like their value is gone."
Not Taking It PersonallyMatty calls this "Rule 7: don't take it personally," a phrase from a former therapist, and says it's nearly impossible because so much of identity gets tied to the place you work. Matty recalls bleeding "Chef orange" at Chef, feeling betrayed when the company did things Matty disliked, and needing two jobs to learn the distance. Now Matty loves the company, but "the company is not me," and colleagues are coworkers: "we're not a family."
On layoff decisions, Matty says the best performers sometimes get let go, since the best performer may be the most expensive, and describes an organization where people couldn't volunteer to be laid off in place of a colleague because the decision was about a function and not about performance. Matty adds that managers who had no part in the decision are the ones who have to make the calls, and that CEOs crying on YouTube about it are tone deaf.
Sidney's advice for the mental side is to "give yourself space to process" before firing off resumes that aren't ready, to build a support system, and to find a cheerleader, because people in fight or flight end up on a hamster wheel. Sidney adds that a therapist can help. Sidney also notes that even with 24 years and a history of startups that were bought for billions, leaving still felt awful because the identity was wrapped up in "I built that."
The Cost of SettlingMatty describes the early 2000s, when a company acquired by GE laid the team off, the job search dragged on, and Matty took a cut of around 30 percent that took years to recover, since the next employer asks what you make now. Matty now takes recruiter calls for the information: asking for ranges, seeing what people are wanting to pay for a role, and watching people who need the work accept it. Matty suspects some companies see a chance to reset pay and get people cheaper. Sidney passes on advice from a woman CMO that it's okay to take a step back in uncertain times and cover what you need to, and that you can always keep looking while working.
Pay TransparencySidney says employers in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Nevada, New York, Rhode Island and Washington are not allowed to ask what you made before, and that roles posted as remote that could be hired in those states tend to disclose a range. Matty says some ranges are games, like a posting spanning over $200,000 where nobody's paying the top number. Sidney says recruiters ask about threshold or expectation, which has nothing to do with last year's W-2.
Matty walks through Talk Pay: Lauren Voswinkel started the #TalkPay hashtag in 2015, and Paul proposed an in-person version as an open space at DevOpsDays Austin that year. Matty has helped run them at many DevOpsDays and did two at Austin in 2023, anonymous but with people free to volunteer their number. Matty says people fear that their number is too low or too high, and that in practice nobody thinks the lowest number is the person's fault: "They think your employer is bad." The links below cover Paul's write-up and the Corey Quinn and Sonia Gupta talk on salary negotiation.
Asking for the RangeSidney's tactic is to ask what the level is for the role and what salary corresponds to that level, instead of naming a number, because "the first person to name a number loses." If the answer is higher than expected, keep a poker face and celebrate privately. Hiring managers should not hand out different salaries to people doing the same job at the same level, which Sidney calls out where it happens.
Sidney tells of a woman engineer whose offer came in $40,000 below what a same-level person in Portland, Oregon was getting. Sidney pushed to match the salary, and the engineer cried and said thank you. "It's not rocket science. It's influence."
Matty adds that most of the audience can't yell at talent acquisition, so the lever is transparency from peers. Matty describes telling a friend exactly what the offer was, and a case where a friend applied to the team without asking. Matty's advice to people who aren't cis white men is to find someone who looks like Matty to coach them on having audacity: before pushing back on a wrong title in an offer letter, Matty asked a friend to "remind me to be a white guy in tech." The recruiter's reply was that it was a mistake and the DocuSign needed regenerating. And if an offer is withdrawn because you asked for more, Matty says, "good."
Start and StopSidney's last advice is to stop telling yourself you aren't worthy of the next opportunity, to process what happened through a support system, to ask for the level and the band, and to be as confident as possible. "All they can say is no. You got a 50/50 shot." Matty says a follow-up episode is likely.