Being Laid Off from Tech in America: Following Hansel and Gretel Out of the Forest

Over the past few years there have been a string of work-related phenomena that have touched the collective cultural minds of America. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work has risen into cultural consciousness and is now an expectation for vast swaths of the workforce. “Quiet quitting” has entered the professional vernacular to mean a work orientation of “doing the bare minimum to get by.” Throughout all that, there has been serious work-world whiplash: throughout 2021 big tech companies aggressively hired and emphasized how teams and employees were like “family;” only to then turn around and react to “economic downturn,” prompting massive layoffs throughout 2022. To make matters worse, these massive layoffs seemingly targeted tech workers who are perceived as “quiet quitting” and those who refuse to go back to the office. 

What kind of cultural nightmare are we living in?

In the late part of 2022 I was laid off from a middle-management role at a technology startup in a promising clean energy industry. We were going to receive millions in government subsidies from Biden’s infrastructure programs. I was described by my peers as an “incredible product leader” and a “leader who is undaunted by complexity.” And yet, our new CTO, of less than 2 months, scheduled a 15 minute Zoom call to let me know that I “won’t need to attend any meetings for the rest of the week” (as if he was doing me a favor), and that I would lose all system and email access after exiting the Zoom meeting. It was a shock. Just a week earlier I was in conversations with him about how we could drive towards the revenue goals that aligned with the new Infrastructure Bill. 

After ending the call, I sat for a moment pondering what had just happened. Out of habit I pulled out my phone and opened my calendar. With a flicker my overbooked Google Calendar app deleted all work-related events, and I was left with some personal reminders like, “Go to the Dentist.” Suddenly I was free from hours of Zoom meetings and work crises. It was a huge moment of release.

Quite understandably, the American workforce attempted to set some boundaries to the complexity of the working world, saying “no” to overworking and sacrificing quality of life. This most clearly (and publicly) manifested as the idea of quiet quitting and the insistence on remote work. Soon companies were instigating mass layoffs. Large organizations and executives will say that the reductions are due to “macroeconomic trends,” but the timing and responsive nature of the move feels palpable to the individual employee (speaking from first-hand experience). Maybe large organizations really did over-hire and the economy really is in ruin; but maybe we as workers are getting what we really needed all along: to just “quit” the toxic “work family” dynamic. Logging into LinkedIn, every other post is a layoff announcement, and the sentiment is decidedly bittersweet: sadness to leave “wonderful communities and teams,” but also a sense of relief.

If I’m being honest, I likely had been “quiet quitting,” with one foot out the door with my previous employer. I was doing what many would consider the “minimum”: accomplishing the goals set by leaders, not investing 200%. 

But above all else, I was drained, bored and not well utilized.

Even after being laid off, I wondered: Would I have been spared if I had delivered more and plunged head first into company goals? What if I would have invested over 80 hours a week, (like Musk is expecting of his employees at Twitter)? I most certainly would have still been impacted, evidenced by the fact that only a few weeks later a majority of my peers were either furloughed, laid off or resigned.

During this period, I had started a part-time Masters of Psychology at Columbia University’s Teachers College. I applied and was accepted to the program in early 2022, in a very different economic environment (both collectively and definitely personally); but despite the layoff, I decided to continue with my one evening class per week. Looking at the psychodynamic theories of Carl Jung, we learned how he posited that myths, fables and fantasies can shed light on our individual psychological processes. He also said that the experiences of an individual can reflect the experiences of a culture or the current process of a society.  Since the start of the semester, in the moments between meetings and on the train to class, the classic Hans Christian Andersen fairytale, Hansel and Gretel, bubbled up to the surface.

I believe that Hansel and Gretel have a lot to teach us as we seek a path out of this forest we find ourselves in. The story of Hansel and Gretel opens with the troubled family of a Woodcutter. “He had but little to eat, and once, when a great famine came to the land, he could no longer provide even their daily bread.” His wife complains that they’re running out of sustenance and demands that the father bring his two children into the woods to die (at least she’ll have enough bread tomorrow, right?) Hansel hears this disturbing conversation and hatches a plan of his own: he will sneak out in the night and collect pebbles to drop along the path into the forest so that he and his little sister Gretel can find their way back home. The following day, the grieved father enacts his wife’s plan, yet is foiled by Hansel and his pebbles. The mother again complains to her husband, “We must get rid of the children.” This time, the parents locked the door to the home and the only thing Hansel could use to trace his way back was the crumbs of a piece of bread. Unfortunately breadcrumbs are just the thing that the animals of the forest might snack on! Without a way back home, Hansel has to take the lead and drag his crying sister somewhere-anywhere that could provide safety, sustenance and shelter.

When the two children stumble upon a candy house in the forest, it seems too good to be true; and it is. The witch inside is ready and waiting to gobble up the defenseless young children. In the same spirit as the Woodcutter’s wife, the witch has to eat something tomorrow too. The witch locks up our hero Hansel so she can plump him up for the oven; and here is where our story shifts. Gretel devises a plan inconceivable by the action-oriented, next-steps-obsessed Hansel; she slips him a bone and instructs him to trick the blind witch. Day after day, the boy doesn’t seem to gain any weight; and the witch becomes impatient. Finally, she decides a skinny boy to eat is better than nothing and plans to make up the difference by roasting the young Gretel as well. But our little heroin has been watching and learning; no longer is she the whimpering girl in the woods. Using her perceived inabilities, she fains the need to be helped with preparing the pan in the oven; giving her just the chance to push the old witch in and lock the oven door behind her. The two children escape, not through Hansel’s strategic power, but through Gretel’s wait-and-see wits. The children discover a hidden treasure in the witch's home. “’These are better than pebbles,’ said Hansel, filling his pockets… But now we must leave, and get out of these witch-woods.’” They bring the witch's treasure to their father, “The man had not had even one happy hour since he had left the children in the woods…” and mysteriously, “the [mother] had died.”

This quaint children’s story struck a nerve in me. For most of my life, I held onto a high achieving, action-oriented persona, embodying the heroic outlook of Hansel: rough times called for me to pull myself (and those around me) up by our bootstraps and push through threatening challenges. When the CTO told me that I was being eliminated, my immediate response was to ask, “how can I help [the company] develop a strategy for this tough moment-” and promptly realized: this man is taking me out to the forest and is going to leave me there. This was not a negotiation or even something I could strategize my way through. I shocked even myself with this delusional attempt to salvage a situation that was clearly leading to my elimination: I was blind to the self-interested motivations of the company. If me and the company were in a family relationship, it was definitely toxic.

Just as the mother in our story frets over having enough to feed herself, Wallstreet “activist investors” have recently pressured leaders at tech companies (like the father of Hansel and Gretel) to cut costs; cutting off people who will consume precious profit margins. Survival of the company on the stock market seems to be the primary concern of company leadership; leaving the employees (the children in our little metaphor) out in the forest alone, without much more than a slice of bread (severance) to survive the next day, weeks, or even months.

The skills that made Hansel valuable and successful with the family at home (at the company), will not be what is needed deep in the forest (or for his challenges to come for that matter). My previous way of being was to parachute into high stakes environments, to track the proverbial pebbles, and drag little Gretel out of challenging situations. I decided that this time I wanted to try a new way: I restrained myself from applying to job postings and (tried) to stop opening LinkedIn every few hours. I was burned out from my old work environment, and it felt like there was no “going back” to the old way even if I wanted to. Maybe all the breadcrumbs really were getting eaten up by the forest animals!

I tried to let myself feel this moment: I am a thirty year old man, burnt out, living in one of the most expensive cities in the world, supporting my partner through his MFA in Directing, I lost my job, the industry is being flooded with high caliber talent who were also laid off, and for some reason my psychological process is telling me not to apply to jobs? We were in a crisis, and I was going to just sit here and do nothing but feel it? This was new, more like Gretel and her “bitter tears” in the middle of a dark and scary forest. I continued to walk forward, seemingly in circles. Every few days recruiter messages would trickle in on LinkedIn, and for those few moments, I let the Hansel part of me work his magic: attending interviews and completing homework assignments.

In November, I ended up landing a contract role on a tech team in a traditional business, one of the largest pharmacy providers in the world. By then my severance had run out and while not physically hungry, I was feeling the financial pressure. Like Hansel upon coming to the candy house, I thought, “Let's help ourselves to a good meal.” This wasn’t the kind of offer I had imagined at the typical big tech company; and it wasn’t even a full time employee (FTE) position. There isn’t the normal prestige or name recognition, no free meals or perks, the processes and tools are just a little archaic and the people are not like my co-workers of the past: coastal city-dwelling millennials. And if I’m honest, I do feel a little bit like Hansel, lured into a candy house (this too-good-to-be-true opportunity) just to be locked up in a cage: doing the day to day without the thrilling heroic adventures I was used to.

This feeling of being trapped pointed to how I was highly identified with this expectation of the high tech worker: that we would be solving the “worlds biggest problems'' with “highly scalable products.” This outsizes expectation (or in psychological terms, inflation) of the importance of oneself has contributed to this dynamic in the technology world: companies espouse their high aims and goals to raise billions of dollars, capital raising requires continual success on the stock market, employees buy into the message and convince themselves that they deserve the outsized compensation packages. It seems like the candy house illusion may be running out; the industry and the individual are being slammed with an identity crisis. The tech worker expectation bubble is going to, has already or is in the process of popping; and the question is, which side is going to lose out? 

Hint: It’s probably not the company.

As it turns out, this candy house and the witch who lives inside are the trap of my own making. The more that I project an idealized solution to all my problems, the deeper I slip into the clutches of the witch. What could be more tempting to a hungry and lost little boy in a dark and dangerous forest? A candy (sustenance) house (shelter), of course! The acceptance of the fantastical perks and enormous compensation packages created the witch lurking inside, more than happy to burn us up in the pressure cooker. I created the witch by agreeing to participate in this work dynamic, being the ever-helpful, generative, jolly and plump little Hansel. The one-sidedness of Hansel (and ignorance of Gretel’s abilities) leads to  an outer inflation (the candy house) and an inner toxic attitude (the witch). The only way out of this candy house is a new way of responding to the dynamic.

Personally, I’m taking this opportunity to try to no longer use my typical “Hansel” strategies; let’s leave him in the cage for a little while. Instead, I’m going to let Gretel do her thing: assist the old witch in the kitchen, do her daily chores and maybe use a more wait-and-see part of myself to feel my way to success.

Hopefully I’ll be able to follow Gretel’s lead to escape this broken duality that the evil mother (who threw me out) and the witch (who wants to eat me up) have created. Maybe by attempting a new way, sitting in the cage, I’ll be able to get back to what work should really be: the daily, repetitive and maybe unglamorous job of chopping wood in the forest. (And maybe I’ll be able to bring some treasures of discovery with me.) Let’s be clear, I won’t be going back to the same company I was let go from and probably not even to another role in “big tech.” If we see Hansel and Gretel’s family as a metaphor for the individual’s relationship with work dynamics, I don’t want to go back to a place where the kindness and strength of the father is overpowered by the greed of an evil mother. I want to get to a place in my work relationship where I can participate in the working world, earn a fair wage and hold onto the treasures I find along the way.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, it’s only been a couple of weeks, and I’m definitely still back there with Hansel in the witch’s cage. So as we sit trapped between layoffs and an ever-demanding industry, are we living in a cultural dream… or a cultural nightmare? Will Hansel and Gretel escape or will they be cooked in the oven? We will only find out based on how we respond to the forest, witch and the cage. Will we keep repeating this cycle and upholding this dynamic, or will we find a new way to respond to this toxic and dangerous moment?