Diamonds are not forever

This is not necessarily what I wanted, but that’s what I, along with plenty of other people, got. In the official Sketch announcement on LinkedIn, you can read some details about this whole situation.

…we’ve taken the difficult decision to reduce our team by just over 80 people.

One can also read that this drastic change was a “response to challenging market conditions” and “a desire to keep our product-first strategy”.

As you can imagine, I’m legally bound by a work contract that forbids me to say much in order to avoid disclosure of confidential information. But this contract doesn’t mention anything about the amount of peanuts I eat per day. So I can tell you that today I picked up the peanuts jar and ate around 30% of the total amount of peanuts it had. That’s a huge amount of peanuts to eat on a single day! The peanut jar is now far emptier than it was before, containing only about 2/3 of it.

Coming back to Sketch now, the announcement includes:

This will mostly impact Operations and Marketing…

Naturally, being part of the marketing website team myself, I feared for my position at Sketch when the announcement was first shared internally. And sure enough, here I am today.

In such a tragic situation it’s fairly common to ask the question “why?”. Why me? Why now? Why Sketch?

No answer to these questions was clearly disclosed, and to be honest I’d rather not chase them. But one thing is for sure, since this was a mass termination process, we can all rest assure this had nothing to do with our performance, our personalities or the work we do.

Personally, I’ve been working at Sketch for a total amount of time of 2 years and 4 months. And for what’s worth, the Portuguese law is somewhat protective of workers in this situation. Besides the compensation package Sketch mentioned in the LinkedIn post, the Portuguese law has very defined rules in this regard. Also, Sketch allows us to keep our laptop, which I’m very thankful for. And in my case, that’s the only up-to-date computer I currently have in my possession. That’s very generous of Sketch.

When I first applied to Sketch, I was moving away from a previous company. It was a deliberate decision on my part. I went through the application process for a few months and then got hired.

Unfortunately, my situation is far from being the worst I’ve come across with. Some team mates had just been hired. Some had come from recent layoffs in the first place. And I’m sure it’s especially disappointing and frustrating for someone who had just decided to enrol on a new work adventure at Sketch, after working for years for the same company.

This whole situation messes a lot with everyone’s lives. Both for those who leave as well as for those who stay, life at work will never be the same. It’s easy to focus on the frustrations of the ones who are leaving Sketch, but I’m sure the ones staying will have concerns of their own too. After all, they are the ones seeing their teams being dismantled, and need to get used to a reality where their good old trusty team mates are not around anymore. And especially wonder when is the next time a similar situation may happen again, and if they will be affected by then. I bet that’s not easy either.

For what is worth, I’ve been through a very similar situation in a not so distant past. Back when I was working at Doist, the marketing website team was also affected by a team restructuring, resulting in a layoff as well. That team was extremely small — only 2 developers, and I was one of them.

Right after that, I spent 4 months looking for a job. Spoke to dozens of people. Sent 50+ applications. Had countless interviews, both virtual and in-person. And had to hear “not this time”, plenty of times. It’s soul-sucking and demotivating.

This time though, there’s a bit more coverage of this whole Sketch situation than when it happened at Doist.

For instance, the designer Mizko, who leans more towards Figma, than Sketch, covers this subject on a recent YouTube video. John Gruber also briefly covers it on a blog post at Daring Fireball, just like the developer Christian Tietze did on his blog. And as usual, Twitter has plenty to say about it.

The best part of this whole situation was the fact that shortly after this announcement was made, one of the affected people created a Slack workspace for all of us to keep together and have some comfort nearby — not that I like Slack itself, but it’s a good thing we can still keep in touch. Eventually people started joining and it rapidly got to +100 users. Truth be told, it’s now a place for “the affected 80”, as well as some current Sketch employees, but also — and the most fascinating part to me — previous Sketch employees that had left way before. Some of them I didn’t even get to know myself!

This Sketch Alumni workspace has been an amazing place for everyone to vent, share ideas and concerns, ask questions, share plans for the future, share job opportunities, etc. It‘s heartwarming to see this bunch of helpful individuals in a single place. Let’s not forget that Sketch is a fully remote company — there’s no office at all. But we still managed to get a one of a kind culture and community!

Last year, Basecamp made a public announcement banning political topics from being discussed in the workplace. This announcement caught plenty of employees off guard. Some were so unhappy with this change, they decided to leave the company. I personally see it as a good change.

Politics these days are just like soccer teams or religions — you either support a specific one, or you become an enemy of their supporters. This can easily become toxic — and I would go as far as to say “a cancer” — in the workplace. Fostering discussions with such a high level of emotion and low level of reasoning — which is common to any of these subjects — between team mates, which may end up changing the way they work with team mates and how comfortable they feel around them, is too big of a gamble for a company, in my opinion. Especially when the subjects being discussed are completely unrelated to the company’s business.

We’re not all the same — we look differently, we smell differently, we behave differently, we think differently… we are different! — why can’t we have different political views, regardless which party we may support?

Just like what happened at Basecamp, the remaining employees of Sketch, may or may not agree, or even feel comfortable remaining at Sketch after this whole situation.

I don’t know what lays ahead for them, but one thing’s for sure: I genuinely hope they thrive! Now, more than ever! Because now that Figma got acquired by Adobe, Sketch is the only real alternative to Adobe. And I wouldn’t want to go back to a time where my designs come out of an Adobe product.

The people at Sketch are very talented, and their mission is still worth it.

For me specifically, even though this situation is awful — especially right now that mortgages are going up, gas prices are going up, food prices are going up, just like pretty much everything else — and it’s horrible to be unemployed, I’ve been wanting to push a personal project forward for a long time. And this may just be the perfect time!

To be honest, I found there’s no energy left at the end of a work week to push anything forward. So by looking at this whole thing through another lens, I can see that this layoff may as well just have been the best gift I could ask for right now — the gift of time.

Truthfully, just thinking about job applications, interviews, and interviewers asking me questions even they don’t know the answer, gives me the chills. I’m absolutely fed up with this whole “fast growing startup” and “fast paced team” fad. That’s, in my opinion, the source of many layoffs around the world.

And I just don’t want to be a part of that anymore.