Category Archives: Workplace

Hosting a customer dinner tonight

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Last week, I got asked if I could help co-host a customer/prospect dinner in Midtown tonight. Nowadays, I don’t travel very much for customer visits or do many customer events, so I happily agreed to go. The bonus was that the restaurant was just a 20-minute walk from our place, so it was very easy to get to. I actually hadn’t heard of the restaurant before, but I was pleasantly surprised that not only was the food very good, but the service was excellent. Our server was a drink whiz; he managed to make a mental note of the flavor profiles every attendee wanted, then kept the drinks coming!

I did not know any of the customers or prospects present tonight personally, but it was a really good event with lots of interesting conversations, both work and non-work related. I generally don’t like networking events very much, but this one managed to be fun. Despite not going to these events often anymore, I really enjoyed my time tonight meeting with new, very different people, and also being reunited in person with a handful of my colleagues who I rarely see in person. It’s funny to think that pre-pandemic, I was in an office five days a week unless I was traveling for work or on vacation. And now, seeing colleagues and customers, as well as being in an office, are more like novelties.

At the end of the evening, I exchanged contact details with some attendees. My colleagues and I had a nightcap before all going home. Overall, it was a fun, productive evening. I wonder how many more of these events I will go to in the future?

Another day, another layoff

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I’ve been working full time for over 18 years now. And at every single company I’ve ever been at, I’ve seen layoffs happen. At my first company, there was a layoff just four months after I started. Then five months later, layoff round 2 happened, and I got cut. Fast forward 18 years later, and layoffs are pretty much the normal thing that I expect will happen. The question, though, is, whether I will get laid off.

I’ve been at my current company for almost six years now. I’ve seen two rounds of layoffs here before today. The first was unexpected. The second was planned, announced, and very much expected. And then today’s was also expected given my company merged (or really, got acquired) by another company, so of course there were duplicities and restructuring that needed to happen. I guess at this point of my career, I have just become numb to all the madness, the constant change, the constant “reductions in force.” It’s tiring, exhausting, demoralizing. When you work in tech, your job is never, ever “safe.” Job stability is a joke here. The default expectation is that there will be layoffs.

Luckily for me this time, after layoff round 3, I am still employed. My job is safe — at least for the next few months. Who knows what will happen and what decisions will be made? I remember when I got laid off the first time in 2009, even though I had a big feeling I would be impacted, when it finally happened, I felt so sad, angry, and confused all at the same time. I felt a lot of insecurity and uncertainty about my place in life (it also didn’t help that my mom equated employment with self worth, but that’s another stupid story for another day). What I wish I could have told myself then was that — everything always works out in the end. “You will be more than okay.” Leaving a job not on your own terms is never a fun thing. But there’s always something better out there — the time just has to be right.

Two companies combining officially

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Yesterday, my company officially merged with another competitor. As we are all supposed to say, we are all “better, together” to create new possibilities. Today, we had an an official all hands meeting to welcome the first week as a newly combined company, so “watch parties” were set up across coworking spaces around the world for employees of both companies to congregate and celebrate over lunch. We have a good number of employees at both companies in New York City/New Jersey, so we got a coworking space in Midtown West today and I attended.

I will say that the overall turnout on my company’s side was pretty paltry; people at the other company far, far outnumbered us, and they’re the ones with the remote-first culture, whereas we actually have a 2-day-a-week-in-office policy assuming we live within a 50-mile radius of an official office space. They passed out cookies, socks, and had balloons decorating our part of the coworking space. A decent lunch spread was put out in the kitchen. I made some small talk with a few of the employees at the other company and chatted with one of my current colleagues I rarely see. But I also noticed that there were some people at my company who basically showed up just to “show face” and left almost immediately. They barely even said hi to me and other colleagues they are supposed to know. It was so strange and even borderline rude. What was the point of even coming if you weren’t at least going to try to talk to new people who are supposed to be your new colleagues?

I wonder if people being so weird and cagey in these types of temporary work settings is a lingering result of the pandemic, of preferring to be holed up inside one’s own apartment and not wanting to socialize at work unless it’s simply to socialize “up” to get ahead, or to get favors done for you. Some people, even with age, do not actually get more mature.

Pre-recorded video interviews as the norm in today’s interview process

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For the last 22 years (including interviews during college), I have been used to having interviews conducted over the phone, video conferencing, and of course, in person. Back in 2020 when I was looking for jobs, presentations of various sorts were a given with the types of roles I considered. But alas, a lot has changed since 2020. Artificial Intelligence has taken over. Pretty much every tech company out there is either pushing an AI product, or at minimum, claims to have some product, which is then “powered by AI.”

So it shouldn’t have come as a shock when I was invited to interview with a company in the last week, and instead of being asked to have a recruiter phone/video screen, I was asked to do a pre-recorded video interview as the first step of the process. This is meant to streamline the screening process and to get a sense of how well I speak and present myself (especially given I am being considered for a customer-facing role, which would require these skills). In the brief email, they shared that I would be given three questions, with about one to two minutes to answer each question. If needed, I also had the option to re-take each answer once. Before I would start, I would be given the opportunity to test my microphone and video to ensure the audio/visual was working properly. In total, they said this should take me no more than five minutes of time to complete.

I did some research on the tool I’d be using. It seems like this is more “normal” now than it is not. Every organization on the face of the planet is looking to streamline their processes and become more efficient, and if a recruiter can review hundreds of candidates in five minute videos of each speaking versus thirty minutes, that’s cutting the time needed to interview by over 80 percent. Why would they not do this if they could and then focus on tasks that actually require direct human-to-human interaction? I guess these are the things I am learning now since I’ve been out of the habit of interviewing for almost six years now.

Resume writing, interviewing, and the job market

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I’m currently in my sixth year at my current company, which for me and most people in my generation, is a long time to stay at one employer. Before I worked at my current company, my longest tenure at a single place was four years, three months. That sounds kind of sad when you share this with people like my parents, who worked at their respective companies for 20-26-plus years. But in our generation, most people tend to switch jobs every two to four years. There’s no real incentive to stay loyal to one company because there’s zero promise at 99 percent of work places of things that my parents got to benefit from, which is… a pension. A pension is this mythical, beautiful thing of bygone days for most people in my age range. Plus, if you get a “merit-based raise” of about 2.5 to 3 percent staying at a current company, but could get 15 to 20 percent more by switching jobs, most people will choose the latter.

Over the years, I’ve had many prospective employers reach out to me via LinkedIn and direct email, asking if I was open to to roles. For the first couple years during the pandemic, my mind was not there at all: I had just started this role in the midst of the pandemic. I was trying to get pregnant (then got pregnant, and finally had a child), and was completely immersed in the early days of learning to raise a tiny human on less-than-optimal levels of sleep, while also pumping milk around the clock. I’ve had former colleagues reach out to see if I’d jump ship for their organizations; I told them I just wasn’t ready to even consider. My main focus was making sure my child had everything she needed to grow and thrive, and I liked the stability of knowing I had a decent job and the flexibility to maximize time with my child. But unfortunately, “stability” is not a real term in today’s workplace. Things are changing a lot pretty much every day, especially with AI taking over. I can’t really take for granted whatever feeling of “stability” I may erroneously be harboring in the back of my mind. So, I’ve leveraged the power of AI to help me update and revise my resume, do potential new company research, and help get me back in the game and mindset of being on the market, if even just casually for now. There’s really nothing I hate more than looking for, applying to, and interviewing for new roles — the vulnerability that you have for putting yourself out there, the idea of “selling” oneself, the uncertainty that it all brings because you never know what the corporate politics are at any given organization, or how well you will or will not get along with new colleagues you’ll need to collaborate with. But given it’s been almost six years, I probably do need to challenge myself more — get my brain working in different ways again, and stop staying within my comfort zone. Plus, I have the burden of needing to provide a steady income and health coverage for my entire family, so resting on my laurels in a state of flux is not the smartest thing to do.

The anxiety I am feeling of doing all this is real, though. I feel very rusty, out of practice, and need to carve out time to really reflect on my work accomplishments over the last six years and how I want to showcase that to a bunch of new strangers. Plus, I have to be more forward looking with all things AI. I guess this is what it’s like to be “out there” in the wild in 2026.

What you think is common is not so common

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I feel like I’ve spent most of my life hearing people from outside the U.S., media, professors, teachers, older adults, and even my own husband talk about how stupid Americans are. Our literacy rates are pretty poor. Our math and language standards are significantly lower than in most rich industrialized nations. We have a lot to be embarrassed about from an education standpoint. But sometimes, people really, really shock me in ways I would not have otherwise guessed.

I was working on a shared Google Sheet with a colleague over the last few days. Both of us were editing it, and I had to hide a bunch of columns because I wanted to isolate certain columns of information I needed to work on another project. He got confused when he was in the sheet today and asked me why he couldn’t find certain columns of information. “Did you hide the cells or delete them?” He messaged me. “Can you please unhide them?”

I was baffled. I read the message twice before it suddenly hit me that he probably didn’t even know how to unhide the cells. How can you possibly be a white-collar professional in your seemingly late 40s and not know how to do the most basic functions in Excel or Google Sheets? And even if you didn’t know, go look it up — that’s what Google Search and all these AI applications are for!

Changing attitudes and demeanor with age at work

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It’s funny to think that this June will mark 18 years of full time work for me. That isn’t that long in the grand scheme of life. I’m 40, after all, and supposedly at the “prime” of my working years. But to say that I have 18 years of work experience sounds like a lot. I haven’t really “climbed” the career ladder, so to speak, in any externally admirable or impressive way. But when I reflect back on my working years, I realize that I’ve learned a lot about corporate America, work politics, and how luck plays a huge role in how “well” you do in our “dog eat dog” world. I am definitely not the same green, naive person I was when I was 22 and entered some tech startup in a questionable building near Union Square. As time has gone on, I’ve definitely become a lot more assertive, direct, sarcastic, and even snarky. I also just want to do what I want to do, and I care less about impressing others. That’s likely cost me promotions and/or raises, but I still have what I need, so it’s not like I’m going bankrupt because of my attitude.

In my first several years of attending my different companies’ annual sales and success kickoffs (SSKO), I used to make this huge effort to meet as many people as I could, to schmooze with leaders and people “above me” in the corporate ladder to make sure they knew who I was and we had some level of camaraderie. That’s the advice you’re always given — you have to politic in the world of politics. But in the last couple years, I feel so much less inclined to do this. I am in a fully remote role. I don’t get to see my direct teammates (who I mostly like) at all. So when I’m at this once-a-year-event when I can see almost everyone on my team in the same place, I kind of just want to see and chat with them. I can be myself around them. I can be as sarcastic, snarky, and jokey as I want, and they appreciate it and get it (at least the ones I like).

But of course, I still meet new people. I meet people I’ve worked with over Zoom in person finally. I have random chats with people I bump into, and all of that is fun for me. I an extraverted introvert, after all. But having worked remotely for six years now, these events are definitely draining because you’re essentially on — all day long, and far beyond work hours due to evening social events. I feel mentally tired coming back home from SSKO and feel this deep need to decompress and stretch both my mind and body out.

When I’ve flown home from these events in the last few years, I’ve thought a lot about the workplace in general. And I’ve always wondered but never quite pinpointed: how much of “work” is your actual day to day responsibilities and customer requests versus just internal politicking — creating a brand for yourself, making your name and accomplishments known, elevating yourself against your peers and advocating for yourself in terms of recognition, raises, promotions, President’s Club? I don’t know what the percentage is obviously. But what I do know for sure is that if there is just one thing I cannot stand about work, it’s the constant internal politics, which exist anywhere and everywhere as long as there are people. It’s my least favorite thing about the corporate world. Your work will never be enough, and it will never speak for itself even if you are the best.

I also wonder to myself what the feeling will be like one day when I no longer work for a company, for “the White man.” I wonder how much of a weight off my chest that will be, and how it will contribute to my quality of life. Or, will I become one of those people who misses what I hate (that’s also called masochism) and tries to go back into it….?!

Round robin of holiday highlights – back to the mundane

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After several weeks, I was on a team call this afternoon. Today was our first full day back from our month-long trip away, so it was definitely a mental adjustment for me. We started the call with a usual round-robin, and the topic was what our holiday highlights were. Our manager framed it as, “What was the most exciting thing you did during the holiday break?”

Let’s keep in mind that my company currently gives just Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day off as official company holidays during this period. New Year’s Eve is not a recognized company holiday. The company does not give Christmas Eve through New Year’s Day off like I hear a number of companies do even in the U.S. Back in my digital agency days, we had that entire week off (on top of accrued paid time off), and it was really nice to know that no one was actually online during that time. So whenever colleagues here refer to the “holiday break,” I always chuckle because… it’s not like our offices were closed for an entire week. What’s implied and understood, though no one wants to say it out loud, is that this is an extremely slow period, one during which the vast majority of our customer contacts are out. And being customer facing, if all our customers are away… that means we don’t have that much to do. We just need to monitor our inboxes, ensure any internal tasks are completed, and that’s it. So in reality, we’re not actually doing much work at all.

We went around the Zoom “circle,” and each person gave their update. It was mostly of the same theme: being happy to spend time with family, hosting Christmas or Christmas Eve dinner, taking kids to see X big event/show. I was the only one on the team who was away from home for this period. So when it was my turn, I said that my highlight was snorkeling in Cebu on New Year’s Day. The majority of my team doesn’t travel much at all (unless it’s a cruise), and they also don’t get excited to hear about other people’s travel plans. So their eyes mostly glazed over at my snorkeling activity. Fun.

I don’t expect everyone to travel, and I definitely don’t expect everyone to travel as much as we do. But in these moments, I do sometimes feel bored and get annoyed that everything with my colleagues can seem quite dull. I can’t really have that many interesting conversations about food, culture, or travel with anyone at work because most people don’t care about that stuff; it almost seems like a theme of the majority of the teams I’ve worked on. Even the people who claim to have traveled a lot or have taken a year off to travel don’t go to destinations that are that off the beaten path.

So while I am physically back in New York, in front of my two-monitor computer setup, and back online most of the day, my mind is still at Diniwid Beach in Boracay, sipping calamansi juice and endless all-mango smoothies.

Wankernomics comedy show at Hamer Hall Arts Centre, Melbourne

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While Chris and I have seen quite a lot of comedy shows while in New York, we’ve never seen any performing arts shows while we’ve been in Melbourne together until tonight. He got us tickets to see Wankernomics, a male duo of comedians, James Schloeffel and Charles Firth, who “unlock the secrets to workplace success through the ancient art of being an annoying wanker.” It’s geared towards anyone who has semi-recently or is currently working in a corporate office setting and has to regularly hear obnoxious but ubiquitous terms like “circle back” or “stakeholder engagement/management.” That… is pretty much my life.

Here is an example of “advice” they have given for speech at work:

Don’t say: “Sorry, I don’t have even the most basic grasp of what this project is about.”

Instead, you should say: “Let’s circle back once we’ve got more visibility.”

For Chris, it’s easy for him to laugh at these things because he’s no longer doing full-time work. For me, it’s part laugh-out-loud, part hard smile, and part painful cringe because pretty much everything they make fun of is a thousand percent true. It doesn’t matter what part of the world you work in; the chances are high that you deal with this kind of thing every single day in some shape or form. The part of the show that definitely made me feel ill was when James and Charles talked about “company values” and basically how they are all the same across any company, and are pretty much a gathering of “bullshittery” to make everyone feel holier than thou and good about what they are wasting their time doing every single day.

Corporate work life: you can’t live with it, but you can’t really live without it.

(One of) the most enjoyable conversation topics: cross-cultural differences

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I love talking about food, culture, travel, books, food, cooking, and more food. But when I think of the best and most interesting conversations I’ve had with people I am just getting to know, one of the most exciting ones is most definitely about cross-cultural differences. Although I have not always been passionate and loved what I have done for a living, I know I’ve been really lucky and privileged to meet a lot of genuine, kind-hearted, and truly good people in the last 17-plus years of full-time work. I mean, work life is how I met the love of my life — my fuzzball Chris. And it’s also how I’ve met some people I am lucky to still call friends today. What has also been lucky is that although all the companies I’ve worked for have been American companies, the last two have had global offices, so I’ve been able to meet people who were born, raised, and live in other countries that I previously had known little about.

I met up with a friend and former colleague from my last company who happened to be in town from Amsterdam today. I hadn’t seen him since pre-pandemic — in November 2019 in Amsterdam, so almost exactly six years ago. This was before COVID-19, before the world shut down, before he got married and had two kids, before I got laid off, started a new job, and then went through IVF and had Kaia Pookie. We did the best we could to cover what’s happened between our respective lives in the last six years since we saw each other, though we had loosely kept in touch over Whatsapp throughout these years. He told me that while he would be in Manhattan, he was also meeting up with another friend he’d made recently, an American he met while in Uzbekistan last month. This person was very friendly, and they got along really well during their travels. And he had said to him that if he would ever come to New York that he’d like to meet up with him. And so he figured it wouldn’t hurt to message him to ask because he really did plan on coming.

“So, I never know what to think of Americans when they say things like that because most of you don’t mean what you say,” my friend started. “If a Dutch person says they want to meet with you while you are in town, they definitely mean it. I’m very direct in that sense, as Dutch directness is a real thing. But Americans? Americans say all kinds of shit they don’t mean, and then I’m left wondering if they really mean their offer!”

I laughed at this because I know exactly what he means. People here always say stuff they never follow through on: “Please keep in touch (this is actually code for: let me stalk you silently on social media/LinkedIn especially so I can see how you are doing personally/professionally, but I have zero desire to interact directly with you live).” “Please reach out when you are in town, and we can grab coffee.” “Let’s get lunch when you’re around!” Personally, I’ve messaged former colleagues and people I thought were work friends when I’ve been where they are. And when it came to making plans, a number of them have just not responded or responded initially, and then when it came to setting a firm date and time, stopped replying. And that’s when I realized, okay, I made the effort, but they don’t want to make the effort, and therefore, I’m not going to try anymore. It is what it is; I accept it, stop thinking about it, and move on.

I told him that at this point, I think he knows me better than to assume I am full of shit – this is where I am not like the American stereotype. If I say I want to see you, I definitely do want to see you. I will never suggest catching up with someone I am either indifferent to or flat out do not like.

He grinned. “I know, and that’s why I messaged you to see if you wanted to have a meal! Plus, I knew you’d recommend a good place because you know food!”

I think American culture could improve quite a bit by being more direct the way Dutch people are. At work, it can be especially painful. One of the things (of a long, endless list) I hate the most about American work culture is excessive politeness and small talk because then you are left wondering if they are asking because they genuinely care, or if they are just doing all this to put on a polite front to gain favor with you. But I suppose that is the fun in working with global organizations — learning to navigate all these nuances and making sense of it.