Another Round Of Meta Layoffs, Config,

First of all, I just wanted to drop a quick message to say I'll be speaking at the first ever Muslim tech fest in London today. If anyone else is going to be there and would like to chat about design or anything else, please don't hesitate to stop me for a chat! (The event is sold out!)

I’m also trying out a new email provider called Beehiiv, they have a really nice take on the editor experience for composing a newsletter and the platform fees are a lot lower. Hopefully this email doesn’t get sent to your spam folder 😊

Round 2

I wanted to talk about my experience navigating through the Meta layoffs for the second time, which I felt was a lot different mainly because of my changed perspective and learnings from the first round.

We had six weeks of upfront notice that there would be layoffs occurring at the company. Last time, there was only a few days' notice. This gave people a lot of time to prepare for what could potentially happen. It was like a cauldron bubbling over. Some people were able to work with this ambiguity and uncertainty, while others understandably were frozen and stuck in time.

Conducting a design sprint

I'm mainly focusing on vision pieces of work right now to inform future roadmaps, which means I'm preparing and running design sprints at work.

The six weeks of upfront notice provided a lot of people with anxiety and clouded judgments on things, which made it harder to first of all motivate people to do all the groundwork for the sprint, preparing the various activities and pre-reads.

Other people, in the back of their minds, couldn't think beyond the layoffs. Some people had the sentiment, "Are we still going to be here after the layoffs? What's the point of focusing on the vision?"

Catch 22

A unique challenge in itself. My take is everyone reacts differently to these situations. It was a catch-22 situation. If we don't do any of the vision work for the next few weeks and take a break, and we still keep our jobs, we're going to be seriously behind.

Performance reviews won't be looking great, and we'll have a half-arsed vision deck. If we do all the work and then get laid off, what was the point in the first place?

I wanted to keep myself busy during this period and challenge myself, operating with this clouded ambiguity. I'm particularly excited about Generative AI, and we could have a nice break talking about some potential opportunities here.

Ramadan was perfectly timed

Ramadan in April meant work was nowhere near my priority or main focus. I was focused on trying to attend Taraweeh (night prayers), keeping up with all my fasts, reading, helping out the local community, mentoring lots of different designers, and attending loads of epic Iftars! It was so awesome.

I met so many different people, and it was such a spiritually enriching month for me. The thought of layoffs really seemed so minuscule. There was so much going on during this month instead. This is the best way to go about layoffs. Remember what's really the most important thing in your life.

Overall Thoughts

Redundancies are out of your control, and it's important to remember this. Have things to focus on outside your job role. Deep down, I knew I wanted to keep my role at Meta because I've really started to enjoy some of the new projects I'm working on.

My new teammates are awesome to work with, and the market realistically isn't as good as it was a few years ago for looking for a new role. Regardless of how good the severance package is, at the end of the day, you don't know what's truly best for you.