4/26/23, 1pm EST

In my LinkedIn feed, I saw two people’s posts: “I just got laid off.”

One was an excellent recruiter at AWS I was talking to about a potential job at AWS as a trainer of some sort.

Another was a manager for Masters of Scale, a person who I got to connect with over two years remotely.

It sucks to see good people write on LinkedIn about getting laid off.

In fact, CNBC’s Annie Nova published a blog later that day, “how long a recession could last according to economists”

I saw both those names, I saw those headlines, and I had just gotten out of a meeting with my manager.

We were talking about how to improve my future performance for the AWS class I am managing, any exciting new tech I am studying, any insights from management books I am reading.

The whole day, in hindsight, was very surreal.

Compartmentalization really helped.

The next morning.

I could not stop thinking about my own layoff experience on January 9, 2019, and juxtaposing it with yesterday’s experiences.

January 2019, I had just flown back to LA from celebrating New Years in Jersey. I got to my Airbnb and was very excited to get back to work part-time at Special Order and Accidental Talmudist, only to find out both companies were changing.

I went from two jobs to none.

That experience in mind, it felt really really good to talk to my team about Linux learning games, Windows host files, DNS, helpful tech training videos to teach the day’s lessons.

That class prep meeting ended around 930 am PST / 1230 EST, and during my lunch break, I remembered Scorsese’s Hugo, a movie that affected me deeply when I first saw it at age fifteen.

Originally a book written by Brian Selznick, Hugo turned into a screenplay by John Logan, directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Asa Butterfield, Sir Ben Kingsley, Chloe Grace Moretz, and more.

A children’s historical fiction book published by Scholastic, turned into a film by Martin Scorsese, The Gangster Priest.

This movie is a gem. It is unbelievable that Dec 30, 2013, 4:49 AM EST, The Verge posted that Hugo was free on iTunes.

“As part of its "12 Days of Gifts" promotion, Apple is giving away free copies of the movie Hugo. The 2011 film was directed by Academy Award-winner Martin Scorsese, and focuses on a young orphan named Hugo that lives in a Parisian train station.

It starts off as a fairly generic kids' film, but soon turns into an ode to Georges Méliès, a pioneer of cinema who's responsible for, among many other films, the revolutionary Voyage dans la Lune.”

Cinema is tech.

Never forget that.

Coppola and Scorsese certainly understand how smaller, faster, cheaper tech made their illustrious movie careers possible.

SO IF YOU WERE JUST LAID OFF, REMEMBER THIS:

1. You are not worthless.

   Even big budget movies that barely broke even like Hugo still inspire generations of young creative people. “Despite receiving acclaim from critics, the film was a box office bomb, grossing just $185 million against its estimated $150 million budget.” Wikipedia

2. Leverage tech skills and your ability to learn, fast.

3. This Hugo quote, uploaded by Nate to Script Lab

HUGO
"Machines never have any extra parts, you know. They always have the exact number they need. So I figured if the entire world was a big machine I couldn’t be an extra part, I had to be here for some reason…"

Getting laid off may seem like the end of the world.

But the reality is, your life has just begun.

You just need to find a new place to fit into The Machine.