Proxy with Yowei Shaw

Incredible podcast! I’m along for the ride, wherever this goes! I started listening to this show when I was unemployed and struggled with my feelings about the situation. The trilogy made me feel seen!

Wow! I’m going to listen to them all as I am deep in the dumpster right now. Mine is a very complex story of being at corporate level and knowing for months there was a strong chance the merger wouldn’t go well, and it went worse than my imagination could conjure. I still have “a”job but have been reduced to cashier for the liquidation sale. I’m 51 and have been applying for jobs since last October since I wanted to get ahead of the impending doom. I’ve had exactly 1 interview and was ghosted. Like your guest mentioned, I check every box in the jobs I’m applying for and have learned to chat gpt to try to connect with the algorithms. I just keep getting rejected. At this point I know its age discrimination as you don’t have a 30 year career with no skills. It’s taking a toll.

I started listening because of the first episodes about layoffs, which is a great idea for a podcast. The host is the type of person who you want to like, but there’s something about her earnestness that for some reason kind of comes across as off putting. Did we really need to hear audio of her crying? I pushed past that and a lot of extraneous details that could’ve been edited out of the first episodes—like the description of the couples house that went on for too long. Unfortunately I couldn’t make it past the proxy HR stand-in idea which was so cringe. Then I read the descriptions of the other episodes which seem to be all over the place. I won’t keep listening but I wish it had given me a reason to by staying on subject matter. More interviews with other people who have been laid off, etc. It’s funny the host talks about meritocracy at one point like it’s so unfair that hard work isn’t rewarded, and I think that perfectly encapsulates this podcast’s blind spot which is that you still need to be good at what you’re doing. Hard work doesn’t always get you all the way there and such is the case with this podcast.

I definitely feel like people don’t talk about the stigma of being unemployed or layoffs enough and as someone who has experienced it, it feels great knowing that others have felt the same. I am really enjoying this podcast!