Ever worried about being laid off? You should read this

Sydney Morning Herald

15-05-2025

Among the layoff stories the newsletter has told are those of a former Wall Street Journal editor, a former recruiter for Meta, a former content manager at Tesla and a former financial analyst at Disney who was with the company for nearly a decade.
Laid Off 's Q&A interviews touch on topics people sometimes avoid when talking about unemployment. Ehrenkranz's go-to questions for subjects include 'What were the reasons given for your layoff?' and 'What was the first thing you did after getting laid off?'
She said the newsletter's tone was meant to be edgy and fun; a tagline on its website reads: 'The coolest place on the internet to talk about being laid off.'
'It's definitely that vibe,' Ehrenkranz said. 'The whole point of Laid Off is to show that it's not a personal failure.'
Anu Lingala, 33, spoke to Ehrenkranz about losing her job at Nordstrom in a feature published in March. 'Her interviews are so humanising,' said Lingala, who lives in New York and now works in marketing at a jewellery company. 'They unpack the shame around being laid off.'
The newsletter has a confessional-like quality that Lindsey Stanberry, a former editor of the Money Diaries column on the website Refinery29, appreciates. 'There's a voyeuristic element to it,' said Stanberry, 44, who now writes The Purse, a Substack newsletter about women and money. 'It's like, it could happen to me, or it has happened to me, and, like, I want to feel this camaraderie.'
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Maya Joseph-Goteiner, 41, was among Laid Off 's first subjects: Her interview about losing her user-experience job at Google ran in the newsletter in August.
In it, Joseph-Goteiner recalled going bowling with her family the day she was laid off and how the experience pushed her in new professional directions. Participating was an opportunity to offer a 'counter narrative' to the desperation and shame that can bubble up when talking about losing a job, she said.
'My story felt like one of resilience, and I want there to be more stories like that,' said Joseph-Goteiner, who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and now runs her own research and design agency called Velocity Ave.
Ochuko Akpovbovbo, the writer of As Seen On, a Substack newsletter about business trends that is geared toward her fellow Gen Zers, said some in that cohort had shown less interest in careers in media and technology than members of older generations.
Laid Off 's interviews with people who have lost jobs in those industries have helped contribute to 'the end of Big Tech and journalism worship,' added Akpovbovbo, 26, whose newsletter was introduced last May and has about 22,000 subscribers.
For Joya Patel, Laid Off is a platform to remind people of the importance of certain careers. She pitched herself to Ehrenkranz after losing her job as the director of communications and external affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in February.
Patel, 34, who also subscribed to the newsletter around that time, said she had been motivated to share her story after reading another Laid Off interview with a former communications specialist at the US Agency for International Development.
'I really wanted people to understand, OK, what does working at HHS mean?' said Patel. 'The American people don't know what each agency does for them and what we sit in there to do.'