Leaving the nest

For the first time in my life, I am unemployed without having my next occupation lined up. For years, I have felt that this would actually be the best way to search for a new job. I have never felt I had the chance to see more than a glimpse of the market. For months, I’ve been considering taking the plunge into a full-time job search.

As 2024 arrived, events overtook me, and the hypothetical became real.

One weird thing about my situation is that I was neither laid off, nor disgruntled in any way. Running the Data Office at Branch was an incredible experience. I loved the people I worked with, at every level, it was a huge career opportunity for me, and I learned a ton. But I knew the time was coming to head out, into a tough job market, for a couple reasons:

• I was brought into my role without a data or insurance background to provide organizational leadership through rapid expansion and bring software development methodology to the data practice. Having substantially accomplished the initial goals (or at least guided the org well down the path to completion), I could see that going forward, true insurance data expertise was going to be more critical, and I felt out of step with the evolved needs of the company.
• This one is hard to publicly admit, but our home renovation cost us most of our savings and significantly increased our baseline living expenses. I have never wanted to be in a position where lifestyle choices become a driving factor my career decisions, but if we want to eventually accomplish some of our life goals, it means I probably need to work at later stage or public companies to rebuild the savings to fund those goals.

The timing of my departure and the reduction in force are connected. It would be inappropriate much more than this, but knowing that a reduction was likely, I decided (in consultation with my wife) to voluntarily leave. Frankly, my position might not have been tenable, anyway.

This isn’t all bad. I was able to plan for my departure and get my head together for a search. This is especially helpful because there are a lot of potential paths in front of me. Also, since departing, I have been able to focus all of my attention on the search, without having to balance my responsibilities at work.

I want to pause to acknowledge a lot of privilege here. I had agency in leaving my job. I had time to prepare for loss of income. I am at a point in my career where I have built a very marketable experience base. I have broad network to lean on. So many folks experiencing the wave of layoffs don’t have these things working in their favor. I am trying to keep my eyes open for ways to help other people while I’m doing my search and don’t have a full-time job. All of these things take the edge of this phase of uncertainty, while I know a lot of folks are in precarious positions, with fewer lifelines.

Given the amount of layoffs going on, I’m pleasantly surprised by the number of opportunities I’m finding that are potential fits. But I do think the structure of the job market has changed. Companies are no longer hiring simply to increase their talent base or to hire ahead of hypergrowth. They’re hiring to address specific gaps. It’s much more of a matchmaking process.

Admittedly, I am a little stressed. I don’t have infinite runway to find my next role, and it’s not going as fast as I would like. With so many people on the market, it’s extremely competitive to get to the offer stage. I have experienced rejections at the screening stage and rejections after interviews, which are deflating in different ways. But on the whole, I am cautiously optimistic, I’ve got a lot of irons in the fire, and it has honestly been fun to be able to engage with companies and imagine myself in different opportunities.