Words. Ideas. Actions.

31 March 2023

There are a lot of opinions about how today’s economy has been recovering since the start of the pandemic. And, this is the place where I would usually say something like, “people much smarter than me can better explain where we may be headed.” But lately, I feel like nobody actually knows anything. Especially when it comes to our current economic realities, much less the future and where our prospects are headed. All I know is my lived experience. I assume that’s the same for you, too. So I want to give you a peek into what it’s been like for me, looking for work in Biden’s America, and trying to navigate a constantly changing economic landscape.

In a surprise to probably no one, I tracked my job search in a spreadsheet. Here are a few of the facts and figures that I gathered as I scrolled LinkedIn every hour, emailed people I haven’t spoken to in years, and posted a couple of hundred words here every weeknight:

70: Days since the layoff announcement
51: Blog posts since getting notified
54: Applications submitted
29: Cover letters written
7: Phone screening calls with recruiters
6: Discussions with teams and potential collaborators 
6: Unique presentations created showcasing my work and experience
4: Interviews with hiring managers
17: Written rejections 

I don’t have a lot more of these posts scheduled. By my count, the Soundgarden titles left to use are “Kristi” and “Like Suicide”. So, I plan on posting just two more (for those keeping close track, Soundgarden released 121 songs, nine of which are covers which I didn’t want to use as titles, which would bring the grand total to 112 posts since starting these in November). After that, who knows? 

I like the process that making these has forced me to go through. I feel like I’ve sharpened my thinking here in a couple of helpful places. And I know that some of  these first drafts turned into more polished thoughts and answers to questions during my interviews. It’s odd how this initial idea morphed into something so very helpful. And it just reinforces the notion that I never know what’s coming next. Even if that is one of the hardest things for my mind to accept. So, on this last official day of my Google employment, I want to say thank you to my now-former colleagues who have reached out after reading something on this blog. I hope I can find a way to keep us connected, even if it’s just through reaction emoji on LinkedIn posts. Most importantly, if you’re reading these words, I want to thank you, too, for coming on this journey with me. And as I mentioned a few nights ago, if you need help in your own search, please let me know.

See you tomorrow?

29 March 2023

I very rarely know if I’ve made the right decision. And I find that I question decisions I’ve made for a long while after. They could be big ones, like did I pick the right college, to small ones, like should I have ordered the shrimp and grits tonight instead. And as I sit here tonight, I feel that familiar feeling of second-guessing coming on again.

See, I think I’ve decided what my next gig is. I have been very fortunate to have a good amount of interest in my services since being part of the Google layoffs in January. I know that. There are a lot of talented people — and seemingly more and more every day — competing for what feels like fewer and fewer roles. So, I understand what a luxury it is to have my last paid day at Google this week, while starting something new on Monday. I just don’t know if I picked the right option. And I probably never will. What I do know, however, is I don’t think I’ll ever stop looking. Not anymore.

One thing these last few years has taught me is that you never know what’s coming. And I have also discovered — the hard way — that your only allegiance you should have is to your colleagues (both past and future), not your company. I am making a choice that’s right for me and my family today, and that’s the most important consideration. But I am going to keep my eyes and mind open to new positions for a few reasons:

1) The future is unknown and unwritten, both for you and your employer, so change can come at you in a moment’s notice, and your only true boss is yourself.
2) I want to continue stretching my understanding and my skills, so as soon as I feel like I am stagnating, I’ll look for ways to learn even more.
3) There are many highly qualified candidates on the hunt right now, and if I can help connect any of them with their next gig based on my network and teams I’ve already talked to, I am more than willing to help in any way I can.

I hope that in a few months I’ll be able to look back at this post and confidently see that I made the right choice. But there’s nobody handing out “Winning Decision” ribbons, that I know of. Instead, I’ll just have to ask myself some hard questions, and hope that I like the answers. In the meantime, if you’re reading this while looking for your next content design or UX writing gig, and you think I can help, please send me a note either here or on LinkedIn.

See you tomorrow?

24 March 2023

There’s this strange, liminal space that happens while looking for a new job. And I’m deep in it now. Offers are finally starting to come in. But so are replies to opportunities that I got excited about in the early stages of my search. Obviously, these are good — and privileged — problems to have, but I’m finding that I don’t really know how to approach finding the right decision. The idiom “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” keeps popping into my mind, and I feel like that logic is weighing heavily into my decision. And I just don’t know what to do.

Part of this decision paralysis is on account of my fear of making mistakes. But what really qualifies as a mistake in this instance? Let’s say I pick the “wrong” job. What does that even mean? Knowing that I’m really the only one making the judgment, I’m at a loss for how I’m even grading myself. I can compare pros and cons, but as the impending deadline of no more paychecks looms, isn’t the “right” choice the first offer you get? Again, I know what a luxury it is to have multiple offers, but that deadline also means that there were questions which went unasked during the interview process. And not knowing those answers may lead to regretting my decision. Which, I guess, then means I made the wrong one. Right?

I would love to be able to quiz my potential new managers more about how they think about career development and learn more about their management styles. All I hear in my head, however, is that ticking clock, counting down the seconds until I’m officially without income. I’ve been lucky to pursue new opportunities without this pressure in the past. But the job searches I remember most are the ones which came right down to the wire, and I had to balance my ability to negotiate with my need for a more immediate start date. If I look back at the summer of 2015 as an example, I had two offers to lead content strategy teams in hand when I finally got an offer from Twitter. It was the one I really wanted, but I know it stunted my career growth. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of almost every piece of work I was part of there, but content strategy at Twitter was not a real discipline yet. There was no career ladder. No appreciation for the craft from other teams. No real understanding of what we did and how we could help. The three of us, at the time, helped establish all those things. And more. Those factors led to being years and years away from a promotion, however. And now, I think, I’m paying for that.

There are a ton more nuances to that situation, and a pretty long story about the first job I took right after leaving Twitter where I only stayed for 29 days. For now, though, I have a lot of thinking to do. And options to consider. And, also, bills to pay. With less than ten of these posts left scheduled to be published, I assume I’ll have a decision before these end. At least I hope so.

See you tomorrow?

20 March 2023

The job search continues. And continues to be frustrating. While I know I need to be patient, I just want to be done. Add to that the fact that there’s no real good system of feedback, and the process becomes even more demoralizing. Let’s take today as an example.

I’ve been honing a presentation of my work examples for weeks. It’s pretty solid at this point, highlighting some work I’m proud of and the collaborations which brought it to life. It’s a radically updated version of a deck I came up with when I was on the hunt in 2020. Thankfully, there was one interview panel back then where I got some valuable feedback. And I’ve incorporated it into this new, 2023 version. But that’s so, so rare these days. In one presentation today, for instance, I know I highlighted all the points I wanted to make. I tied them to the business needs of the position I was interviewing for. I even threw in some ideas for how I can help achieve the goals they have already revealed will be part of the position’s success metrics. But as I left the interview, I had a sense of dread. One of those, “You did your best, but your best wasn’t good enough” feelings that I’ve only had a couple of other times in interviews. And my intuition was always spot on, in retrospect.

So, as I sit here tonight, I’m thinking back to a line in one of my favorite things I’ve ever written: 

But even in the Bay Area’s highly publicized culture of “Done is better than perfect,” jobseekers never get a second chance to make a first impression. We aren’t given feedback. We can’t take what we’ve learned and make things better. The process ignores exactly what we are supposed to be good at: progress.

I try to approach these interviews like user problems. I get as much information as I can about why the role is open, what the success metrics for the position are, and ask for the types of things potential collaborators are looking for in their new college. Then, I try to see what examples I have in my work history that I can show which will help them decide I'm the exact person who can bring a solution to their specific problem. But I wish we would look more broadly at how people can help. 

Nobody should be hiring based on what people have already done. We should be hiring on the promise of what we can do together. The work I’ve done came to life thanks to a specific confluence of events, in a particular moment, at the hands of a unique combination of people and their ideas. We’re never going to be able to recreate that. And the solutions I’m showing in my portfolio would be different if even just one of those elements were changed. So, why aren’t we better at assessing and quantifying whether we can create beautiful solutions with someone, other than looking at their past work? I honestly have no idea. And I’m obviously frustrated by that. 

One thing I’m sure of, though, is that I — thankfully — have a few more interviews lined up for later this week, and I’m again refining my portfolio deck for them, one more time. I don’t think I’ll ever be satisfied with having to present past work to represent future promise, but unless and until that changes, I’ll keep playing the game. Right up until I land my next gig, that is. Then, I hope to take this curmudgeonly perspective about how we hire and suggest changing it in each and every place I’m lucky to be a part of from now on.

See you tomorrow?

14 March 2023

Well, while applying for jobs today, I got really worked up about the names we give to things again. I know it’s a little bit of a recurring theme around here, but naming and labeling and taxonomies and categorization are all ways influence is imposed and structures are enforced. 

I definitely have a lot more to say about this, but I feel like if I try and get it all down tonight, it will just end up as a ranting tirade without a real point. I mean, I could turn it into a bit of a party trick and just vomit a bunch of poorly thought-out half-ideas, like starting with 3.14159… and just keep going until I run out of breath. So, instead of just aimlessly venting here, I think I want to put a little more focused effort into talking about pull-down menus with the titles companies use to try and categorize its candidates. White. Black. Hispanic. Female. Male. Disabled. Veteran. Ethnicity. Identity. Almost every application includes a demographics section where we have to squeeze into these little boxes, defined by others and understood by few (and don’t even get me started on the places which use Workday as their application software).

This is my promise to you: I am going to jot down some notes tonight, watch a few new episodes from season three of “Ted Lasso” (I know!), and sleep on all this angst in the hopes that I can have something of a little more coherent approach to talking about why we should be more careful when we attach a label to something. Especially if we want other people to feel both represented and understood.

See you tomorrow?

07 March 2023

The cycle of interviews and presentations and cover letters and rejection emails continues this week. It all has me a little frazzled. Obviously, the rejection is the hardest part of all this. So, with a hat tip to the Pizza and Affirmations session I joined last week (thank you Jane Ruffino and Shannon Leahy), I want to share a few thoughts if you are facing any of the job-searching self-doubt similar to mine. Essentially, these are reminders to myself about the many reasons why I didn’t land a role I wanted, combating the voice in my head screaming, “you’re not good enough!”

They lost funding for the position.
This is definitely happening. As companies go through their own layoffs, the projects that were funded and the hiring they expected could be cut due to a refocused roadmap which no longer includes the project you might have been hired to help bring to life.

You have too much experience.
This idea has come up a couple of times for me this month. And it sucks. And it’s short-sighted. I get to decide how senior a role I’m willing to take. But what people hear, sometimes, is, “He's trying to take my job.” I can appreciate that senior people can be more costly to hire, and that can hamper some hiring decisions, but threatening the job security of the hiring manager is also an unfortunate possible outcome of being a “seasoned” professional. And there’s nothing you can change to make someone else more secure in their role. Move on, and be glad for the reprieve.

You were a great candidate, but — believe it or not — they found someone even better.
This can be hard to take, but there’s just so much fabulous talent available right now that employers are able to find people who check all the boxes. Which is fine, because you are that person for some company, you just haven’t found them yet. Keep looking, refine that presentation one more time, and remember no one else has your unique combination of skills, experience, and perspective. There’s nobody more you than you.  

One constant that has kept me going is that I know what I know, and I’m not afraid to point out the areas where I’m still learning. The companies I want to work for aren’t ones who want me as I am today, but are looking forward to, and encouraging, my growth with them. Those are the places I want to exert my effort. Those are the products I want to help build. Those are the companies I’m willing to take a chance on. To repeat an idea I shared last week, I want to be hired for my potential, not my accomplishments. I’m so much more than what I’ve already done, and we need to get better at appreciating people’s potential, not just their portfolio. So, for myself and to you: You’re going to find exactly what you need. You may just have to be a little more patient than you had hoped.

See you tomorrow?

28 February 2023

Good lord, interviewing is exhausting. I know I promised a recap of Noise Pop, but honestly, I just didn’t get to it today. I did talk about why I think I’m qualified for a couple of jobs. And it was so draining. Seriously, how can a few video calls be so taxing?

I get that companies want to make the right hiring decisions. And I understand all the work which goes into honing job descriptions and creating success metrics and asking interview questions to try and understand a candidate’s problem solving skills. I understand. Hell, I’ve been on the other end a number of times. But sometimes I think we’re getting it all wrong. I mean, I wish interviews where just two questions: 
1) What excites you about this job?
2) Will you talk about any work you’ve done in your past which might be applicable to the work we’re doing?

These days, people want to work. They don’t necessarily want their work to be the entirety of what defines them, however. Those days are gone. We should be taking that into consideration as we hire now. We need to stop being so precious about “culture fit” and “self-starters” and “greatest strengths,” instead focusing more on the human you are looking to hire. 

Nobody joins a new team already knowing all they need to know; we already assume they are going to need to learn something. Let’s focus on that, instead. If people are looking forward to collaborative problem solving, and willing to learn new tools and processes, then they are more likely than not ready for day one. As long as their new company is willing to invest in their continued education and have a good system for performance evaluation, everyone should come out ahead.

For now, I need a rest. If only so I can focus on finishing gushing about Noise Pop.

See you tomorrow?

17 February 2023

Last night, I shared part of the thinking I was going to use for a presentation today to a potential new team. I’ll cut to the chase: I didn’t get the gig. As we move through my post-Google life, I hope you don’t mind me doing some retrospective evaluations of how things went and what I could or should have done better. It may help any other job seekers. I know it will help me. So, let’s talk about today for a bit.

One thing that has become clear in just this first week of interviewing is that nobody has any idea about how long these positions will exist. That holds true for the people I’m talking to and for the roles I’m actually interviewing for. Above all else, there’s this unsettling sense of looming foreboding. Nobody wants to make any promises. People are placing caveats on everything. There’s no sense of knowing. And it’s compounding all the anxiety I already feel as I’m looking to help my next team. 

When I am having trouble adequately articulating my emotions — which can happen often — I tend to go for similes or metaphors or analogies instead. In an effort to better describe what this week of conversations and interviewing has been like, let me try one on you now. Essentially, I feel unmoored. Like a small boat that’s seaworthy, but has seen some action in its day, coasting around looking for a safe place to tie up for a little while. There’s not a lot of urgency yet, because although the seas are rough, it’s nothing this sturdy vessel hasn’t seen before. Except that this time, it just feels different. The waves are the same heights as others which have been successfully navigated before, but there’s just something a touch more menacing in them tonight. Is it that the water’s warmer? Are we just further from shore? Or is the ship just ragged enough these days to ramp up the uncertainty of its survival. I have no idea. It could be one of these things. Maybe a combination of all of them? Or —gawdforbid — some other, unknown vexation just on the other side of the next wave. All I know is that, for now, the “any port in a storm” adage is making a lot of sense. But there’s even a problem with trying to find a port. And that has to do with using the right navigational charts. This is where we’re going to change the analogy considerably, so please forgive the sudden switch to dry land. 

The conversations I’ve had with potential teams have been enlightening, but, ultimately, not fruitful. I’ve done my best, and prepped well, but I’ve come up short over and over so far. Now, that’s not to say I haven’t accomplished what I set out to do. In fact, it’s the opposite. A couple of times this week, I’ve presented well, made all the points I intended, and tightly tied my skills and accomplishments to the job description. But the teams still went with another candidate. It’s been hard to take, but I have to understand that maybe my best either 1) isn’t as good as I think it is, or 2) wasn’t better than another candidate who had more of what they were looking for. To return to the land of explanation, it feels like I got an invitation to an amazing party, which included the time, place, menu, and guest list, but forgot to include the fact that it was a costumed affair. There just seems to be a disconnect between what teams are saying they need and what they actually want after hearing from the available candidates. Again, it’s just been really hard to swallow. But I understand that’s how job searching goes. It just downright sucks. And I’m sorry for everyone having to go through this right now. Both the candidates and the teams looking for talent. 

I know nothing is guaranteed. And I acknowledge the vast amounts of privilege we have for me to take my time and find just the right role. Not everyone has that luxury, and I am grateful and appreciative to have it. I can’t help but think there’s a better way, though. I just don’t have any suggestions for it right now. Mainly because after licking my wounds in this post tonight, tomorrow, sift through relevant new job postings, survey my network again, and write a handful more cover letters. Then, I head back out to sea to find a welcoming berth for this seasoned vessel. 

See you tomorrow?

16 February 2023

Well, interviews have started. I’ve had a couple of screening calls with recruiters this week and last, but now the full-on “what have you created” discussions with hiring managers and potential teammates is getting underway. So, if you’ll indulge me tonight, I’m going to draft one of my case studies here in front of you. 

As I’ve mentioned when I started creating these posts, writing has been a constant through-line in my career. One of the aspects about being a content designer and UX writer that’s so attractive to me is the ability to use systems thinking to make writing easier and better for both individuals and teams. Essentially, I want to help make crafting content quicker, and more scalable, for global organizations. Whether that means creating and maintaining style guides so that standards are understood and adhered to, or mentoring designers — for instance — who are looking to document their decision-making process so they can better defend them in presentations or submit them as a talk at conferences, I really love giving people the tools to become better communicators. With these systems in place, we can streamline the ways we implement the improvements we want to make in our apps and online experiences. I think of it as setting up a kitchen so that you can create exactly what you are craving. That means ensuring recipes have all the steps you need, you have easy access to the right ingredients, and you’ve made sure the cookware and utensils are clean and in expected and convenient places so that you can start creating rather than casting about for one thing or another. With that explanation of how I think about content strategy in general out of the way, let’s look at an example of how I put it into practice during one project at Twitter.

Specifically, I want to talk about why and how we expanded Twitter’s Tweet limits from 140 to 280 characters. We noticed that people were abandoning Tweets as they got close to that 140-character limit. So the Design Team worked with our data partners to figure out how much of a problem that limit was for people creating Tweets. Turns out, 9% of all English-language Tweets were bumping up against the 140-character limit, but less than a half of a percent for Tweets in Japanese. We also learned that a good portion of those people who were bumping into the upper limit were abandoning their drafts rather than revising them. So this was a problem not only for our users — because they couldn’t say what they wanted to — but also for Twitter, since Tweets were the fundamental building blocks of essentially everything else the business was built on. To put it more starkly, without Tweets, Twitter doesn’t exist.

As we explored ways to test whether giving people more characters would keep people from abandoning Tweets which were too long, we needed to make sure making this change — specifically longer Tweets — didn’t have negative effects on other aspects of the timeline, such as Tweet density, especially in double-byte character sets. In addition to how Tweets would show up in the timeline, we needed to look at the Tweet creation flow, and test different ways to make it clear what the new limits were and when people were getting close to exhausting it. Working with my Design partner, Josh, we created some visual explorations for how we could simply and clearly communicate the new limit to anyone, anywhere in the world. 

As we tested this extended character count, we saw the number of those 9% of English-language Tweets which were previously hitting the 140-character limit plummet. With the expanded character count, that number dropped to only 1% of Tweets running up against the limit. We were definitely addressing both the user and business problem. With the solution in hand, we still needed to figure out how to implement it, though.

What I love about the explorations and collaborations we worked on for the final implementation was the fact that the “content” I was strategizing was more than just words. Our needs were global, and that meant that almost any error indicator or hint about the limits were best indicated without words so that they were universal and accessible, no matter how people were interacting with the apps and website. So rather than iterating on different versions of a “Your Tweet is too long” written error message, we settled on an indicator which closed and changed color as you got closer to the new, 280-character limit. We also built the status indicator into the VoiceOver flow so that people using screen readers would know if they had exceeded 280 characters, and by how many of them they had gone over. 

Once we had the product design approved and the product implementation coded, we need a communications plan to coordinate with the launch. Working with the Brand, Marketing, and Comms teams, we did a series of Tweets and blog posts, which I helped edit and ghost-write, to talk about the entire process — from the design and the rationale, to UI indicators and error messages. But we can talk about that part of the story another time. Wish me luck.

See you tomorrow?