The layoff, the landing
Towards the end of my sophomore fall semester in college, I committed to joining Etsy as a software engineering intern. I was psyched to spend the summer in New York City, work with some really cool people, and earn a higher salary than I ever had in my life. And that did end up happening, but not at all the way I expected.
In early May 2017, I heard the news that Etsy's board of directors had fired the longtime CEO and laid off 80 people - one in twelve employees at the time. Other, braver interns emailed our recruiting contact and were reassured that we still have our internships; someone reached out to arrange our flights to New York.
But just a few weeks later, an ominous email appeared in my inbox: "Greetings from Etsy". A sympathetic employee dropped the news that the entire intern class was being laid off, not for financial reasons, but because they couldn't offer a good experience with all the changes going on within the company. Our first day at the company would've been exactly two weeks away.
This was... not entirely surprising, yet I didn't really have a plan. That same day I started my search off with a bang, by sending two (2) emails to the campus career center, and then anxiously doing basically nothing for the rest of the day.
The next day, I woke up to an interesting screenshot in the intern group. Someone named Marc, who had previously been a VP at Etsy, had heard about our situation and offered to help. I emailed him, and within 30 minutes he sent my resume out to a group of dozens of companies who were interested in taking us on as interns; within 12 hours multiple people had reached out to set up calls that led to interviews. I signed an offer with Squarespace's SRE team a week later (with a week to spare before my flight to New York!), and the rest was history.
Over the course of that internship - my first at a company that couldn't fit all its employees in one room - I learned from my teammates about supporting each other, how to leave my work in the office, the best times to slip up to the roof or down to the game room.
I learned about the world of SRE and DevOps, with concrete problems to solve, and so different from my coursework. I learned to program in Go. My intern project was a secrets management system, which led me directly to my next internship building another secrets management system, which led me to my first full-time job at Twilio, where I still am today.
I learned that in tech, people switch jobs all the time; my first intern mentor left the company halfway through the summer, to take a much better offer elsewhere. Good for him, no hard feelings, and a much easier transition than finding this internship to begin with. We caught up later, him and me and my second mentor, over food and drinks near the office.
There was a lot more in that summer: exploring the city, meeting cool new people, hanging out with cool old people. Something like that probably would have happened even in the world where there were no layoffs. So when I think about that time, my thoughts tend to wander towards the generosity of others.
When Etsy laid us off, they paid us a significant pseudo-severance, and airfare, and housing. They didn't have to do that. And when Marc sent our resumes out to scores of companies, who would then blow up our inboxes - it felt like he had swooped in and rescued us. He definitely didn't have to do that - he didn't even work for the company anymore - but he did it anyways.
Talking to Marc later, he made it seem so casual. It wasn't much effort, it was the right thing to do anyways, we would have all made it ourselves, and those countless companies took it as a lucky break for them. But even so, I do remember how big of a deal it was to me, being on the other end.
So if it wasn't much effort after all? Even better. That's inspiring to me, to know that a comparatively tiny effort can make an outsized impact on someone's day, their summer, and even further. I've tried, and am still trying, to pay it forward.
Let me know if you need help with anything, by the email contact form on the main page, or however else you can reach me.