I have a lot of cheerful funny stories about interviewing and being hired. I also have a similar number of harder stories about leaving jobs. This is the toughest one. It’s a layoff story, too, just not my layoff story.
There I was at AltaVista in 2001, entering my third year or so as a director and my fourth year as an AltaVista employee. I ran Production Operations: our system administrators, our NOC, a very small project management team, and a few other things. I owned servers for AltaVista.com and the Zip2 services, and another director — Ken Rouleau? — owned shopping.com. There were a couple other departments in there but we don’t need the laundry list.
All of us technical operations directors reported into the VP of Engineering: David Henke, formerly of SGI, later of LinkedIn. One of my best bosses ever; I owe him so much.
I had been there long enough, barely, so that I’d gotten paychecks from three companies: my first few were from DEC, then a bunch from Compaq after they bought DEC, then finally a lot from CMGI after they bought AltaVista. I’ll talk about CMGI some other time, when I explain why one of the best search engines in the world bought a web forum for stock traders.
AltaVista was on the downward slope as a company in 2001. The first round of layoffs was in September 2000, and it hurt. I lost some good people, stood up in front of my team, and told them that it was going to be OK. We needed to do this to stay in business, and it sucked, but we would be OK. I believed it. Then we did another round in January of 2001; that time we had security guards on site, just in case. That didn’t feel great. AltaVista was the first time I’d been part of management, and helping make these decisions was tough. Tougher for the people who were laid off, though.
Anyhow, after that second round I made the speech again, and I was still able to believe it. The year went on. Google was absolutely eating our lunch in search, which is also going to be a topic for another post. It wasn’t great. I wasn’t a smart enough director to read the tea leaves, so when David told his direct reports that there was going to be another round of layoffs, I was surprised again. Still, I loved AltaVista and I believed in David, so I was willing to gird my loins and do it all over again.
The technical operations side of the reorg would actually have been a bit of a promotion. David decided to shift more groups under me, since he was at the point where he needed to lay off directors as well. One of his direct reports was on the cut list, and I came up with a good plan for promoting someone from my team to run the group which was losing its director. We started building org charts and presentations for the big day.
Word spread around the company that another round of layoffs was coming soon. People figured out the date. It was going to be a Tuesday. I was as ready as I could be.
At this point in my life I was living in Pacifica, a place I’m still quite fond of. It’s quiet and convenient to San Francisco, although it’s like an hour from our Palo Alto offices by freeway during rush hour. On the Tuesday, I was awake by 6 or so — much earlier than necessary but I couldn’t sleep. I flipped on the TV to kill a little time before going into the office.
Every single channel was talking about the planes which had just crashed into the World Trade Center. By the time I turned on the TV, it seemed fairly clear that it wasn’t an accident.
I had no idea what would happen next, either at AltaVista or in the world. I can’t remember who reached out to who, or if it was email or a phone call or what, but David let us know the layoffs were off for the day. We were going to have to get through the day with everyone knowing that cuts were coming soon.
So I drove down to the office, listening to the radio in half-shock. A plane hit the Pentagon while I was driving. I got in and started making sure that the servers held up under whatever level of traffic we got. They did; we had pretty resilient infrastructure for the era. Also our traffic was generally lower than it had been.
That day was the proudest I’ve ever been to work anywhere, before or after. Our Web team revamped the entire home page on the fly to put the information people needed front and center. They spent the whole day watching searches and refining the front page to make it more useful. “Here’s who needs blood donations. Here’s the most current news.” That sort of thing.
Mid-morning, I decided we had server capacity to spare and reached out to the Red Cross to find out if there was anything we could do to help them technically. They were fine.
By the end of the day, the situation felt stable. I made sure the NOC knew to page me for anything at all, checked in with David and my peers, and went home.
The next day, Wednesday, HR rescheduled the layoffs for a couple of days later. I had been thinking really hard since I got home, and I’d reached a decision. I went into David’s office and told him I wanted to be on the layoff list. After 9/11, I didn’t think I could get up in front of the team and tell them everything was going to be OK a third time. I decided that life was too short.
He told me that he couldn’t get me the severance package, which was completely reasonable, and didn’t otherwise try and talk me out of it. We redid the org chart on the fly, saving that one director. Unfortunately we failed to update our slides, which made for a very embarrassing all hands following the layoffs.
And I left on the day of the layoffs along with everyone else. No regrets, then or now. I spent the next year or so sitting on my ass watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That was the year I learned I’m really good at not working, although it would be a decade or two more until I really figured out why.