Dodging Bullets: Work Edition

It might be the tumultuous nature of ad agencies, but I seem to have accidentally dodged some serious bullets in my career. In the moment a lot of situations have looked less than ideal, but in hindsight (like most things) they look amazing. My Mom truly believes there’s a reason for everything and each step is pointing you in a positive direction. I’m less optimistic, but it’s a nice thought and looking back at my career it seems to be very true.

A few months after I quit my first job because of its toxic environment they lost the account I was working on and most people had to be let go. Meanwhile I had gotten a promotion and a raise while working for a much more prestigious agency. When that prestigious agency lost one of their largest global accounts they laid off hundreds of people. I was one of them.

A few months later they also lost the entire account I was working with and everyone was laid off or quit. Luckily before all this happened I had already been talking to a recruiter and planning to move on anyway. I got the job we were chatting about. That is the job I was only with for 3 weeks. Apparently the client who agreed to hire me so I could run their account changed their mind and decided to not renew the contract before we had even met. So I left and took another job. 

While at the new job (which was originally contract) my former company of 3 weeks wanted me back. I decided to stay with my latest company since they offered me full time and they were much larger than the 15 person agency with no windows that I had come from. It turns out that was a good decision. My former boss, who I loved, quit and moved across the country. The only woman she was working with went on maternity leave and never came back. The only people left were not the ones that made me choose the job. 

When we decided to move across the country I told my then boss four months in advance. That turned out to be perfect timing. A few weeks before I left she was made the president of the entire NYC office. She had a lot more on her plate and we would not be working one-on-one to grow a new agency like we had been and like I loved. Another bullet dodged. 

Most recently a company hired me over Skype before I moved to Seattle. They ended up laying me off when a tech giant cut their budgets. I was the most recent addition to the team with everyone else being there five or so years each. No hard feelings. The interesting thing was my last day was the first day of the tech giant’s new fiscal.

Apparently my company had decided to lay a lot of people off and cut costs by outsourcing a lot of our work to….Argentina. Which I knew from experience was a difficult office to work with because of the time difference, language barrier and different expectations of responsiveness and urgency. Not only was my former agency having to do the same amount of work with less people, more work was added. They were now in charge of not being a hub, but deploying everything for every market globally. 

Life for the people that remained was about to get a lot harder and more complicated. I still have friends working there and they confirmed this is true. They used to have regular 8 hour work days, now it is not unexpected to finish working at 2am and get on a call with Europe at 6am before continuing your regular work day. Madness.

An easy and relatively stress free job turned into the meat grinder I had seen many times before. If they hadn’t laid me off I would have quit. Apparently even more changes are happening now that undermine the core of what makes an agency an agency. Management is projecting that they do not trust their employees, don’t trust their decisions and have to be micromanaged. It sounds like a nightmare. 

This luck has extended outside my actual jobs. Even the jobs I almost got this summer turned out to be dodging bullets. The first company that was interested in me was a small, indie agency. After they didn’t want to pay me even my previous salary I moved on. Turns out it was good I didn’t settle since I now make a lot more money, but also because they shortly after hired someone from my old company that I do not enjoy working with. It’s a tiny shop and I wouldn’t be able to avoid her. Also the cult like culture of the shop was not something I was open to. I think of work as just that: a job. I know we’re not friends and there’s no reason I should share my personal information or life with you.

The next almost job was a new, fast growing agency that I knew had some bad Glassdoor reviews, but I had talked to a few people that worked there and they’d told me it’s a lot of work, but they pay well. Turns out they’re also a meat grinder and I didn’t move to Seattle to have a NYC workload.

Lastly a small agency that got farthest down hiring funnel with me. One of the heads of my new company calls the founder of that company, where she had worked for almost 10 years, “Voldemort.” The agency is apparently downsizing and might be going out of business. And everyone I liked during my interview process quit shortly after my interview despite only being there a few months. Woah. I feel lucky.