Sharing pain of layoff in a connected world
EX-YAHOO WORKER DESCRIBES LAST DAY ON MINI-BLOG SITE
By Jessica Guynn
Los Angeles Times
Article Launched: 02/20/2008 01:36:05 AM PST
When Ryan Kuder lost his job last week, everyone knew it. That's because he chronicled the experience of his last hours at Yahoo through a stream of electronic dispatches laced with gallows humor.
Using Twitter, a service popular in Silicon Valley that allows users to broadcast short messages to an unlimited number of people, Kuder posted periodic updates of his final, caffeine-fueled day as a senior marketing manager at the Internet company, starting with his last commute to the Sunnyvale headquarters and ending with margaritas at Chevy's.
"Ironic that I just got my PC repaired yesterday. Won't be needing that anymore."
"This is a serious downer. Trying to drown it in free lattes. Which I will miss."
"Dear Blackberry, What great times we had. I'll miss you. At least until tonight when I stop on my way home and buy an iPhone. Love, Me."
Like so many other personal experiences transformed by the Internet, getting canned need no longer be endured in quiet, isolating shame. Technology is allowing people to turn a traditionally private trauma into a quasi-public event, drawing quick moral support and even job referrals. "This is something that used to be shared over the dinner table. Now the whole world can watch and participate," technology forecaster Paul Saffo said.
As the pioneering Internet portal wrestled with an unsolicited takeover bid from software giant Microsoft, Yahoo proceeded with previously planned cutbacks. It said goodbye
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to 1,100 employees, according to a notice the company filed with the state of California. The event transfixed the high-tech community.
"The appeal of this is that some people are watching with morbid curiosity, and all sorts of other people are wondering whether they will be next," Saffo said. "In the Internet business at times, there seems to be only two kinds of employees: those who have been laid off and those who haven't yet."
Twitter is a service that notifies users' contacts, by mobile phone, instant message, e-mail or on the Twitter Web site, what the user is doing at any given moment. These messages of 140 characters or less, called tweets, are sent to anyone who subscribes to or "follows" the user's Twitter stream. Although it hasn't broken into the mainstream, Twitter is popular among the technorati: Nearly 1.2 million users visited Twitter.com in December, according to ComScore.
Twitter, which is owned by San Francisco start-up Obvious, doesn't disclose how many subscribers it has.
Kuder, one of the laid-off Yahoos, began that fateful day, Feb. 12, as just a regular tech guy with 87 people tracking his "tweets." Soon, word spread of his brief but entertaining updates on meeting with human resources in a conference room called Lucy, bidding friends farewell and handing over his security badge ("Will I be able to get a latte for the road . . .?") By the end of the next day, he had become a minor celebrity, with a following of more than 400.
Self-broadcasting what usually is a private experience gave Kuder more than 15 minutes of Internet fame. It gave him solace, and, more important, job leads. The San Jose husband and father of two was flooded with "positive tweets" offering support as well as connections via social-networking services such as Facebook and LinkedIn.
"I thought the reaction would be a couple of, 'Hey, good luck,' messages, and 'Let me know if I can help' from people already following me," Kuder said. "Instead, it got picked up around the world. There were even blogs written in Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and Spanish. It was fascinating to watch how things spread like that. My wife keeps saying I planned this. I wish."
That sense of online community has become pervasive as more people have ventured online and the technology has advanced, said Vanessa Fox, features editor for SearchEngineLand.com and an entrepreneur-in-residence with Ignition Partners, a venture capital company.
"The Web has given us a way to connect with others," Fox said. "We're bound to find others who have gone through and who understand exactly what we're going through, and many deem it worth the trade-off of putting ourselves on public display to become part of that."
For his part, Kuder is treating the job loss as an opportunity to start over, perhaps in brand marketing for a start-up instead of an Internet giant. Recording his observations of his final day at Yahoo helped him cope and move on, he said.
"I have gone back a couple of times to look at my tweets from that day to remember what happened," he said. "When you read coverage of layoffs, you don't recognize these are people with kids, families, who are going through a big change. This puts a human face on it."
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