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By Jose Bigio —

Disclosure

A few days ago I learned that William Banks is going to jail for 8 months for allegedly stealing 5 Israel flag law signs. I've met William through open jams that he and his friend Tej Khanna host at the Brooklyn Comedy collective.

Since I know William from a comedic context it's harder to discern what's true, and what's not. The news articles certainly seem real, but if the incident occurred on Dec 30, 2023 and he turned himself in to the police on February 27th then it seems weird that the legal proceedings are happening now.


On William's twitter you can see him posting about going to court, and even posting about having to sublease his apartment for 8 months. There's other elements that seem kind of strange like having a partiful to attend your court case, and having a website about freeing you.

I did very limited research about this, and saw that on a random lawyers website the penalty for grand larceny of the 6th degree is 90 days in jail which would be about 3 months. I also tried to look up William's case here in addition to using the news report that stated his age of 27 to add the age to the search. Although I didn't search extensively I unfortunately couldn't find the case.

It is strange that this news article points out that he is due in court on March 19, 2024 but his Partiful even is for Oct 9th, 2024. Anyway the point here is less to discuss the extent of the truth here, and more to discuss the extent to which you want to disclose information about your life.

This topic is very prevalent for me as someone who writes publicly on the internet (this blog for instance), and because I often would like to disclose more, but find myself reflecting on whether I am disclosing too much.

A framework that I found helpful comes from this picture of a page from How to Tell A Story:

A few standout points:

Can you remember a moment where it all went horribly wrong? How did you recover? What did you learn? Don't be afraid to explore those uncomfortable moments and share the not-so-glamorous sides of yourself. Our biggest mistakes often lead to great stories! Those mistakes make us human and that vulnerability creates connection with your listener.
Remember not to let a trauma or a struggle be the story, but rather the context of the story. Stories always lead need to go beyond "a bad thing happened"

The framing of not letting the trauma be the story is incredibly helpful, because often times the trauma is the story. This can happen because we are still processing the event. It's not an obvious distinction to make between what you share publicly and what you treat as a diary.

Being vulnerable / open has proved very beneficial societally. For instance, prior to the #MeToo movement there was a lot of shame with being sexually assaulted, but by de stigmatizing this and bringing it to the surface women were able to hopefully make progress on reducing the extent of sexual harassment and assault. Unfortunately, this isn't something that is going to go away. Currently in France there is a very shocking case of Gisele Pelicot's rape trial , but throughout this she has been very brave and has chosen to make the trial public and the evidence public.

In William's case things are slightly different he's the one that has done the alleged wrong doing, and yet he's coming forward with it. A few reasons for coming forward with this are:

  1. Publicity
  2. A coping mechanism

On the publicity front if William is going to jail this has helped him get the message out to his friends so he can spend time with him, and it has also helped him sublease his apartment.

In terms of a coping mechanism talking about something that you are going through can be a way to process what is happening.

In my case I want to discuss being laid off. I haven't been shy about letting people know that I was laid off. Although I have noticed that in a work context sometimes when people have been laid off they use less clear language to allow others to save face. For instance, when I was at Docker Solomon Hykes the founder was pushed out of the company, but initially the messaging was that he chose to leave.

I was laid off after more than 4 years at a company as a Software Engineer. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, and the day prior to being laid off I was in the office. In hindsight it was strange being in the office. The leadership team didn't expect me to be here. The CTO who would later lay me off made some small talk with me. The CPO was wondering if I was on a business trip or just happened to be traveling.

That evening at around 5:30pm I received an invitation from the CTO asking to meet the next morning. The invitation asked if I was available, which made it seem like the inevitable could be avoided at least for some time by claiming I was busy. My brother who still works at the company also received an invitation. We did some sleuthing and figured out other people who would likely be laid off.

The following morning at around 10am my brother Sam got to witness me being laid off, since I was nearby on his couch in his home. I only saw the CTO for one minute as he delivered the message that I was being terminated for performance reasons. The human resources employee stayed on the video call and provided the additional details. Sam was not laid off. Despite believing that we might be treated as a package deal this was not the case.

Being laid off revealed that often the people more equipped to understand our situations are those who have gone through them. This reminds me of the joke about the difference between a recession and a depression which says that a recession is when your friend doesn't have a job and a depression is when you don't have a job. There was a friend who I had only biked with once who reached out to his network, and was able to provide many opportunities. When I dug deeper into why he was so helpful I learned it's because he had been laid off before, and he knew what it was like.

I know that prior to being laid off I often felt like I would never be laid off, and I am sure some of the people who have never been laid off feel that way. This means that when you see someone get laid off you'll rationalize that there was a reason for them being laid off that can be attributed to them.

Since my brother is still at the company I've also learned about the perceptions others have of me. Some people said I had been checked out for a while, or that I was laid off because I took too much vacation. Our reputations are very important, and in job interviews we have very limited control of them. There's a fear that if an interviewer learns that you were laid off that this could be a blemish strong enough to lose you the job offer. I think this fear is more diminished now that layoffs have become more prevalent or normalized.

Not only was everyone told that they were laid off for performance reasons, but this message was shared to the company. I feel confident in my work ability and output, so am not concerned with the perception of my past colleagues. Nonetheless, this messaging does add insult to injury. In general layoffs seem punitive. It seems that they target people who were less desirable to the company. Not having a job could make it harder to land a new job. In the US your health insurance is tied to your job, so then you lose that as well.

The punitive nature of layoffs also makes it so it's harder to discuss the circumstances. The circumstances leading up to my layoff were in the works for possibly up to a year if not more. I was pretty vocal in questioning the decisions of leaders, and the leadership style didn't appreciate it. For instance, once I questioned the viability of integrating LLMs into our product via a hackathon. I argued that if this was truly important to the business it should be added to the roadmap.

In late 2023 I got a new first time manager. Shortly after he shared that I needed to change my communication style. This was the beginning of the end. There was a lot of misunderstanding. It took me a long time to realize the criticisms were from the leadership team, and that they were about how I questioned their strategies / ideas. This later led to a performance review of a 2 out of 5 by manager and then ultimately to being laid off likely due to that performance review.

At the advice of one colleague I even tried to change managers. This change had to go through the CTO who met with me prior. He opened up the meeting by asking me when I had succeeded at the company. To me this seemed like a loaded question like there weren't many cases when I had succeeded at the company. Ultimately, this meeting made things worse rather than better, and ended with the CTO saying that the company doesn't cut corners and we would work to repair the relationships. I asked the CTO for accountability on how this would be measured, and unsurprisingly he never followed up on this. A few months later he'd lay me off. I guess I wasn't a corner, considering he cut me.

Having a negative relationship with my manager also led to me being a less pleasant person to be around at work. In this case it's not who you know. It's how, you know? By this I specifically mean how you interact with people is of utmost importance. This is easier said than done though. I truly didn't understand my circumstances, and this lack of understanding upset me. Even when I developed a further understanding of my circumstances I felt misunderstood, and felt that the criticisms weren't accurate.

Sometimes when the going gets rough get going. I was trying to do this by getting a new job, but it was taking a while. Whether it's my upbringing or other insecurities it was very hard to make the decision to leave the company beforehand. However, when I was laid off there was definitely a big relief, and yet there were many mixed emotions.

I do think there is tremendous value to being at a company for a longer period of time. You get to see the impact of your decisions many years down the road, and can remember the mistakes people have made in the past even when they may be long gone. To this end I also think it's important to work through differences between people. What I will say is a difference in management / direct report relationships is there's an imbalance of power. The manager may have the option to terminate your employment, and you as a direct report have less of an ability to do that to your manager. This dynamic creates a scenario where a direct report may naturally have more deference to the manager. I think deferring to managers in these instances can lead to very difficult work environments for the work the direct report, and in those situations "get going" could be applicable.

I by no means am going to jail, but William Banks situation provided a prelude to allow me to talk about something else other people could be ashamed about, and that they might not want to disclose and discuss. I really hope the elements of the prison sentence are more joke than truth because they seem overly punitive. I also hope that this provides some insight for those who haven't been laid off, and maybe is relatable in some way to those who have. Ideally I managed to not make trauma the story, and this story does more reputational good than harm.

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