I was laid off; what do I do next?

I decided that I wanted to capture my experience of leaving the High Tech Industry in Silicon Valley and finding my next adventure. I have been part of the computer industry for over 20 years. For the most part I have loved the experience but I am ready to move on. I am looking at being laid off as a gift to help me find what I want to do next. Plus I am being realistic about my chances of finding another position in this youth-oriented industry. In addition, being a women has always been a disadvantage in High Tech and it has actually gotten worse instead of better in the last 20 years.

Being north of 40 is a challenge. It seems that many people believe that if you know about mainframes you could not possibly understand SaaS, cloud computing and netbooks. When the reality is, what you know from having 20 years of experience in this business, is that technology changes happen all the time. Everything cool today will be old and boring in 10 years just like mainframes and COBOL are boring today. JAVA and Web Services will be just a strange to a new generation of developers as mainframes and COBOL are to the current generation. In addition, having 20 years of experience you know that every trend recycles. Best of breed; consolidation, virtualization, utility computing and so on have all been done before. This is probably why those of us north of 40 are always seen as cynical about technology by the young; we have seen some form of the current trend before and we know it will be replaced just like the last one was. This is not say that there have not been some incredible advances in technology and new developments in the past 20 years. I can not image a world without the Internet and cell phones. However, I can image a future without enterprise licensed software and in house data centers. I also believe that the laptop is going to be as outdated as the mainframe in 10 years and all software will be open source.

So what am I going to do next? They often say look at what you are passionate about and find a way to make it a business. So what I am passionate about outside of technology? Four things come to mind right away: Fashion; especially shoes, food; eating and cooking, exercise, and real estate.

Let's see, if there is a more youth oriented business than high tech it would be fashion. Probably not a great option. Besides my passion is acquiring shoes not designing shoes. Scratching this one off the list is really easy.


Getting paid to eat? I think I missed this trend already; there are already way too many cooking shows on cable TV. How about starting a restaurant? I lack a couple of things that make this a great option. One, extended family to work for next to nothing and two, lots of money to get it started. Plus I don't want to work harder than I did in High Tech and I think running a restaurant is a 24 by 7 job. Scratch this one off the list as well.

This leaves me with exercise and real estate. I have not ruled out being a personal trainer but I am not sure the financial rewards are along the lines I have gotten used to in High Tech.

So this leaves me with real estate. Yes, real estate! Why? It fits my what I loved most about my High Tech career in business development. Real Estate is all about creating win/win relationships. It requires strong negotiation skills, a personal network, tenacity, a sense of humor, intense self-motivation and the ability to put copious amounts of lipstick on a pig:-) Oh, and the ability to spot a trend.

I am going to try my hand at real estate I will let you know how it goes!