B (13:00)
I, you know, I think I always had a bit of this attitude, but I probably had some of the opposite. So I probably needed this reframe when I first started working because I definitely have always felt like I wanted to be loyal to my, at least to the projects I was working on. Like, I, I would feel like I never wanted to leave a project before it was finished. And so, but I, but I did have the flexibility to think, okay, if there's a better job, I'm going to consider that. And I, I, I liked my first job out of college. I, I like the company. I like the people I was working for. I like the work I was doing. I was getting promoted, and so everything was fine. But the, the, at that time, this was in the early 90s, so it was a While ago, but salaries were going up a lot every year. It's nothing like today, at least in my industry. Like, it would be going up maybe even more than 10% a year. Like, just new college grads every year would be making a lot more than the prior year. And even internally, they would be giving out typically 10% raises to the people at my company. So that's kind of what you came to expect is every year I'm going to be making 10% more than I was last year. And maybe every few years I get promoted, but really, it was still probably a 10% or so raise every year. And that's just how they did it. And. But the problem was the market was going faster than that. Like, it might have been going up 15 or 20% a year. And they. They didn't do the. They didn't do the internal raises as quickly. And so I. I eventually realized, hey, I'm not making what I should be making here. And I started calling back headhunters that were leaving voicemails for me. And I got an offer from another company just like mine, and they said they'd give me a 40% raise just to come over. So I did that. But I. Even then, I was like, well, I want to finish off my project. And I offered that to my old company. And they initially said, oh, yeah, that's great. Thank you so much for doing that, because it'll take us a while to find somebody to fill your slot. And then they panicked. Every day, the time frame got shorter until they just told me to pack my stuff. I think it was maybe three days later, they just said, pack your stuff. You're done. So I thought that was kind of unprofessional, but, you know, that's their end of it. They were looking out for their interests, and I was looking out for mine. And so I kind of learned my lesson of this reframe through that process, that I have to look out for my own interests and not the company. And that next company I was at for probably eight years, it was a long time. But in the end, what happened was they did a merger, and all the leadership, that was over my group, all my bosses went away. I got new bosses, and I was a very top performer at the company. They had a very structured review process and evaluation process, and I was always ranked in the top 10% every year for five years in a row. And then all of a sudden, they had to do layoffs, and they had gone through all the low performers. So they did something like five rounds of layoffs. Like, it was a lot. They kept. Kept cutting people and cutting people and cutting people and saw the low performers were gone. But they reached the point where they still had to cut more people. And they. They laid me off. And I really couldn't understand why. I'm like, well, how can this happen when I'm ranked in the top 10% every single year, including this year? I. I don't get it. And I. I think what it came down to was just that loyalty of the leadership. You know, we had had this merger, so a bunch of people came over with that, and we had had people say, you know, like, I. I didn't know those people. They didn't know me. Even though they could probably see my evaluations, they didn't know who I was or have any of the history, and I didn't have time to develop that with them. So they just chose me to get rid of me because they didn't know me, and they. They were going to keep the people they knew and liked. And that's just how it worked out. And so that was another very stark lesson in this reframe of they don't care about me. And it was also that I think this might be a different reframe, but you may end up better off after that. I ended up getting a job offer pretty easily by just calling up one of my buddies that had moved over to yet another company like this and said, hey, do you want to hire me? And he said, yeah, sure, I'd love to. And I had a new job lined up very quickly. So I bounced straight back, and it was no problem. But I've been through this a number of times in my career. I've had a lot of success, and I think I could certainly say that my career has been a success, but I've had a lot of setbacks like that where I've had to switch companies, sometimes involuntarily. And I've certainly come away with it with this reframe of saying, my job is to get a better job very solidly in my mind, that whatever I'm doing, I'm trying to develop my talent stack. And if you've ever switched jobs, you know, you got to update your resume. And then the advice is, usually you want to show results. Like, you know, what did you actually accomplish in terms of results? Did you make something 20% better or 50% faster, or what financial contribution did you make? And if you can put numbers on your resume and show those exact results, you're much better off when Another employer is looking at you because that's the type of stuff that they love to see. But if you're just giving a general description to tasks, it's nowhere near as good. So those are the types of things I would focus on in the context of this. But I'll stop now. I've been talking a while. Sergio, go ahead.