I'm curious to see how many of you have been impacted and how you bounced back? I'm building a project around this and would love to hear about your experience.
I’ve been working as an EE for 40 years, for 3 companies who worked or work with the US intel community in S.V. and have never been laid off. That’s not to say I haven’t been impacted. All 3 companies experienced layoffs while I was with them and some very good friends and colleagues were let go. Those hurt, often quite badly. They leave you shaken and wondering why them, not you, and am I next. It’s not being actually laid off, but it is the next worst thing.
I was going to make a very similar point. It's not only the fact of a layoff that impacts those who remain, but it's also how it is done. I think this can change company culture much more negatively than is widely considered as the case.
I want to state how amazing it is that you could have a 40 years career as an engineer in SV while working in only 3 companies (I assume you are in your early 60s).
I'm 36 and the longest I ever stayed in a single job was 4 years.
I not in SV, but an EE working same place for 24 years. Been through 2 rounds of layoffs, stack ranking, etc. Still here. The older I get the less I give a crap. I have zero debt (no mortgage) and 6 figure college savings for 2x kids. I’m really just here for the health insurance and technical challenge. Maybe I’ll get lucky with the next round of layoffs and get a buyout, then start a job-shop or consulting business.
You sound like my alter ego. I'm biding my time, looking for a good point to pull the plug. Like you, health care is my primary reason for staying even though I do like my job. If I was to be let go tomorrow, I don't think I'd really care all that much.
I’m probably in the same line of work as you. Specific skill set (embedded RF/Microwave/Antenna) with a small group of customers. It’s not SV FU money, but still pays very well.
Some of it is luck but I think my career path choice was a solid one, I am pretty good at what I do and I'm well paid for that, and I've never really cared to go chase those bright shiny jobs that promise a lot but rarely deliver. If I had, maybe I'd be wealthier but, all in all, I satisified with my career.
I've never been laid off either, but experienced half a dozen or so. Some included the very founders of the business. One person crying, "I love it here. This is my family. You don't even have to pay me, just let me stay. I'll work for free." They didn't let him stay though. :(
I have a similar experience- I've been working for nearly 30 years and have not been laid off directly. But many people in my group were laid off over the years
I was laid off once. I almost feel hesitant/guilty to share this because of how many silver linings it had for me, vs friends I've seen put in much more untenable positions after a layoff; I feel like I got off comparatively easy.
Early in my career I was working as a video game tester. This was effectively just to get my foot in the door to "any sort of tech job" (previously I had only been a Mover). One day, at the end of what seemed like a very normal workday, our entire group was told "our primary contract just got cancelled, we won't have work for you all tomorrow, we'll be in touch if we do but otherwise don't bother coming in."
In hindsight, if that happened to me today I'd probably have an aneurism on the spot, but, likely due to naivete, I just shrugged and thought to myself "well the commute was miserable, the job sucked, and I got a decent chunk of time out of them for the resume" and leaned hard into some connections I had at a local software consultancy; they ended up picking me up as a subcontractor and the rest is history.
There wasn't so much "bounce" for me because simply put, I wasn't far enough in my career to have anywhere real to fall to, and I think if I hadn't already been building connections with the intention of moving into Real Programming Work I would have probably felt quite a bit more panic.
I think the takeaway I'd make from this is that the impact of a layoff, and my ability to bounce back from it, would differ DRASTICALLY based on the surrounding context, but that network/contacts+relevant skills have become a core "must have" in my book of long-term-career-stability.
I've been laid-off a couple times (and in one case was on the verge of possibly being laid off, but thankfully found employment elsewhere before that had a chance of happening). I "bounced back" with a combination of persistence, patience, a decent support network, networking, unemployment benefits, and a hell of a lot of luck.
I will say that it absolutely sucks all around. The longer you go without finding a new job, the harder it becomes to get past the suspicious-looking gap in your employment history. Unemployment benefits only cover a portion of your previous pay, and they take awhile to start flowing in (if they're ever approved at all). It's easy to blame yourself (and I still do blame myself). You're left feeling like a complete failure.
I managed to squeeze by thanks to family and being able to take odd-jobs here and there to pay the bills. It's at least slightly easier to justify those gaps if you can claim that you were "freelancing" instead, so that's exactly what I did, in the meantime sending applications and résumés everywhere I could only to get rejections (or - worse - no response at all).
Even now, having had my current job for awhile now, it still weirds me out when I actually get praise. Every time I'm pulled into some one-on-one with my boss I get a sinking feeling of "welp, time's up, better polish off the ol' curriculum vitæ" only for those fears to be unfounded. I guess "impostor syndrome" is a thing, but my brain at this point is trained to believe that I actually am an impostor and am pretending to have impostor syndrome to rationalize my incompetence.
So I guess objectively-speaking I "bounced back", but it sure as hell doesn't feel that way.
> The longer you go without finding a new job, the harder it becomes to get past the suspicious-looking gap in your employment history.
I lucked out once here at an software interview - my parents had bought a house that they were having renovated, and I spent a few months between jobs acting as a general contractor, and doing some of the labour that I was qualified for myself. Turned out my interviewer was a former carpenter, so we spent a while chatting about that.
I have been laid off a few times. Almost universally, it was in preparation of an acquisition (purchase of the company or the company's imminent purchase of another) wherein the standards and goals of the development teams were universally put into question. 35 engineers and another company it was 10 (me inclusive in each). It didn't affect me much as I have no loyalty to a specific company (even if I have vested equity) and have never lived in an area where work was scarce. I keep my skills fresh and develop new skills (side development is a must) and assume my job/project is not forever. I speak to this from time to time everywhere I go.
I was laid off from a CTO role in 2016. I was only at the company for 9 months but the President who hired me was let go by the board and myself and a few others were let go shortly after by the new President. I landed my next full-time job in the same industry a year later as a VP but between that I struggled a bit & even contracted as a developer working on a ReactJS web app.
I still have the CTO role on the front page of my resume but I can't help but think prospective employers shy away from me assuming my short-lived C-level role ended by termination even though it says "downsized".
I agree. A resume is not supposed to be so much a confessional as a brag sheet. If you are not proud of it, consider removing it. But be sure you have a cover story for the interview. e.g. "it was a job where so much went wrong. I learned a lot from it, like what I do and don't want to do, and that is definitely something I do not want to do again." Safe statements whose accuracy can easily be defended.
both things. cto is great, but you'll have to spend a lot of effort to explain your side of it and that you weren't removed by cause. if someone ever brings it up, then you explain, and say that you weren't hiding it, you were wanting to avoid wasting time on a confusing situation and you are happy to discuss it.
The conundrum I have with this is not just removing it from my personal resume but also from LinkedIn. In my experience, recruiters and companies pay for the premium version of LinkedIn so they can see my entire profile even though I limit viewing to just my connections. I would like to keep the CTO role on my LinkedIn because I have connections, colleagues endorsing my skillsets and recommendations from the former President and a VP.
If there is a discrepancy between a personal resume and LinkedIn, then that ends up being a "red flag" in the eyes of recruiters and HR.
> I can't help but think prospective employers shy away from me assuming my short-lived C-level role ended by termination
I understand that if they're not enthusiastic about the rest of your resume in the first place, they might not bother checking your references, but generally, isn't that why one provides references? So the prospective employer can check your story?
Or perhaps ask for a letter of recommendation (though it's probably a bit too late for that now, I'm just thinking of the general case)? Not sure if that is a thing for C-level jobs.
It's so interesting that people get hired on account of the organizations and jobs they've held in the past, instead of strictly based on current skill. It sounds like those things should roughly line up, but from my experience they often don't. Makes for a high-friction and vaguely irrational recruiting process.
What kind of project can you build around a layoff? Is your company planning to have layoffs and you are trying to see how to make it least painful (for company or victim)?
I wasn't laid off, but I have been fired before. It was the best thing to ever happen to me -- I got time to work on my passion, programming, broke into the industry and got out of a job I knew I hated a month in. It lead me down a path were I got to work for companies on the global 500, and fortune 100 list, as well as a ycombinator startup.
That said, not everyone is so lucky and I definitely struggled during the unemployment phase.
I worked in startups for the first 10 years of my career. For a while, I was laid off every christmas. The first time, I freaked out pretty hard, but I found a job within a week of coming back from New Year's. Complete that cycle four or five times and you get used to it.
They were all early to mid-stage silicon valley startups. For whatever reason, funding runways typically ran out between October and December. If you can't close your next round of funding by then, you run out of money and the whole company minus the founders gets laid off.
As for why so many startup duds that all failed in under one year? I was young and didn't know what the hell I was doing. I chose my jobs based on how cool I thought the product was rather than how viable the product would be in the marketplace.
I lost my job in January because the company closed the office in my country, haven't written a single line of code since then, looking for motivation to start again but I feel like an absolute failure and don't know what to do now. The fact that I stopped coding 10 months ago and wasn't even a good developer, to begin with, isn't helping. I guess I need therapy.
You can try going to meetups, participate to the local developer community. There you will realize how much of your self-deprecation is justified or not. Identify your weak spots and work on them, but also realize your strong points and use them to climb out of it.
And yes, talk to a counsellor as well if you feel it helps.
Not true when the company that laid you off constantly posts job openings with your exact job description. You're forgetting about things like age discrimination, too. For example, I'm in my 50s and had a long history with my previous employer. Promotions, bonuses, etc. However, big companies in the US do layoffs to get rid of pension liabilities. I had no pension at this company, but because of my age I was tagged. Why? Age demographics...including those without pensions in the layoff rounds let the company show they were not violating the WARN Act and others (in the US) by singling out only pension holders.
When I am having a problem getting up the gumption to tackle something, programming-wise, I tell myself that I'm not going to do the actual code yet, just comments (TODOs and such) about what I will do eventually.
Some of those comments, are just sentences, but then sometimes it's easier to just put the code in the comment, than to describe it in any other way. Still commented out, though. I'm not coding this now, just saying what i will do, eventually.
After a while, sometimes I uncomment a few sections, and test just those little functions to see that they work, anyway. But basically, I'm not coding now, don't have the energy or will to do it right now.
Sometimes, it is enough to get me going, and I turn the comments into code. Other times, I stop for the day once everything is planned out, as much as I can at this point. Either way, it is better than not approaching it at all, because it seems to require (psychologically) a smaller step to code it once I do come back to it the next day, because everything is planned out.
If you don't have a job in programming just now, do puzzles, do a small app for organizing your recipes or books, do something. It doesn't have to be something which anyone else will ever want or need to see, just something to exercise that part of your brain.
Only answering this comment to avoid spamming: just a quick message to thank everyone for the great support and advice, I've started solving some problems on LeetCode today and I should be back to working on my personal app by the end of the week. Thanks again, everyone.
Create an urgency to deliver. Use that as a motivator.
1) Promise someone you value/respect to deliver some program
2) Join an interesting coding competition
3) Help teach kids programming.
4) Figure out if you can solve a problem in your current scenario with any program.
Concentrate on the process/act of doing it, rather than the thing itself. Learn to enjoy doing it. Also if you are not doing it already, I would suggest to start exercising or playing a physical sport which would put you in better frame of mind.
Do a few LeetCode puzzles each day. You want to keep things fresh, plus they're the kind of thing that people ask for before interview stages these days.
And you'll inevitably learn something. Bite sized so you can for it into your day.
I took voluntarily redundancy 15 years ago & got an ok payout. The company that let me go paid me handsomely at a contract rate for many years after
Laws are different to America though. In the UK you’ll get a bit of cash & they have to give you notice. France basically have to give you a few years wages to get rid of you. I guess America essentially is a zero hours contract, because you don’t get any compensation if there are redundancies?
In the US, you are legally obliged to nothing more than the right to quit freely, and the right to be fired freely.
Though ‘Severance Packages’ are very common for skilled/high-salaried employees, where you receive a payout of x weeks or months, negotiable but usually based on length of employment. This is done in part so the employer does not get a bad reputation in the market for skilled/high-salary talent. For a startup, let’s say that maybe 1-2 months of ‘severance’ would be perceived as Very Generous to its Employees.
The key phrase is “perceived as being generous” by doing so. All the better if the firm’s reputation would be poor otherwise. Nothing keeps a Glassdoor profile cleaner than paying departing employees well, attached to a gag-rule barring them from disparaging comments.
It happen to me once. Company I worked for was acquired by competitor, our product was not offered to new customer anymore and it was decided to shut down majority of development team. I was quite unfortunate as I had to switch from contractor to full time position that day so no severance package for me and I was told to not come back next day (other devs stayed for next few months doing nothing).
It was early in my career, I had no obligation and I was thinking about moving to London anyway. So I took it as a sign, returned back to my office, book a flight for next week, said good bye and left.
Being young and having valuable skillset it never felt like some bad event. It was sad to say good bye, but hey there are tons of challenges out there.
Early in my career, right after the first dot-com bust, there was a large downsizing of practically the entire staff; it wasn't a big place but I want to say at least half of the company was let go.
I was young, moved into a friend's place and paid cheap rent for about 6 months and collected unemployment. Then ended up getting hired back right before the startup was acquired.
Very similar experience; after unemployment I took a job with a sociopath for six months, then went back to school for C.S. (I had a humanities B.A.). Lessons:
1. Human toll of layoffs can be extremely high (up to and including death) and hard to see.
2. Many coders are much more re-hirable than most non-coders, but many aren't.
3. In resilient labor markets such as modern SaaS and app coding, there is an experience<->hirability S-curve. Going from 0 to 1 year of saleable experience depends on the employer, from 1 to 3 years power shifts slowly towards labor, and after that you are in control. (These statements obviously don't apply to all software labor markets.)
4. Many coders get stuck in bad labor niches, many are really lousy at the sub-skill of getting a job, many don't realize how salable their skills are, and many can't tell which of those possibilities applies to them.
I'd just like to add a caveat to point #3 that it is based on the last 10 years of low unemployment and high growth in the tech sector. Things probably will change one day. Who knows in a few years you might be competing for a "bad" mid-level position with 50 ex Googlers for half the pay.
The startup I was working on here hired a new creative director who immediately 'pivoted to video' and laid me off, the only in-house content manager and producer. As I'm not a 'video editor', I got chopped via re-org.
Still shuffling around NYC looking for a better opportunity in content strategy, and in the meantime looking into starting my own boutique content solutions LLC.
My entire career as been driven, almost exclusively, by layoffs. I had been at my first job for about a year and was starting to think about moving on when my manager (who I think knew I was looking) told me that they were going to have to lay off a developer, and if I had an offer they'd rather I take it, otherwise they were going to have to let my co-worker go.
I took the new job and moved cities to work at a startup for about 18 months. When I was laid off there, the CEO was very transparent about the reasons for it: they decided to get rid of full time staff and focus on contractors who were on work visas, because the threat of losing their visa meant they were easier to abuse.
I was out of work for about a month then before starting a new job that again lasted for about 18 months. The company was looking to sell off our business unit and laid everyone off except for me and my manager. Not seeing a lot of hope for the future and not wanting to be a sole developer keeping a product limping along, I left for a year.
The next job was doing funded research. I went in knowing that my job depending on getting funding, and lasted a year before the funding ran out. I was out of work for a few weeks before going back to my old team, which over the last year had been successfully sold off to a new company, which had brought back a few of my co-workers.
I stayed at that job for another 4.5 years as the technical lead, until the product was once again getting sold and management wanted to make the numbers look better. This time I was the salary that was cut to improve the numbers.
After a contract-to-hire role that didn't work out due to "bad cultural fit", I landed at another startup for about 16 more months. Due to my previous history of layoffs and wanting something more stable I left when I could see that we were starting to run out of runway and didn't have good prospects for another cash infusion.
From that job I joined a mid-sized tech company doing unexciting work, but after a rocky few years I really wanted something more stable. I was there for 18 months before most of engineering was laid off when the company decided to focus more on supporting other companies products.
This time I was out of work for just a few weeks, and found a great role. I've joined an even larger company, and one that has been doing well, but the long history of layoffs has left me constantly hyper-aware of the lack of stability in our industry, and I'm actively going through therapy to help get over the constant fear that any small hiccup or misstep means that I'm getting fired or that my team is going to be laid off.
Although I've always bounced back quickly, and certainly my salary and experience have been benefited by the quickly changing jobs, the psychological toll is very high.
The industry is full of bust and boom. People see high tech as a gold rush and are often in it to make as much money as quickly as possible. Layoffs are inevitable in that situation. I've been through a few layoff rounds myself (though not always chosen to be the one laid off). One thing I did really helped me, though. The last time I got laid off, I intentionally took 6 months off. I got a job offer within weeks, but I decided to turn it down and just spend some time for me (well, I spent it writing free software ;-) ).
It's a bit risky because the first question you get when doing subsequent interviews is "Why have you been out of work so long?" I'd tell them I took time off and showed them the code I was working on. There would be some raised eyebrows, but to be honest, I think this actually helped filter out some companies that I really didn't want to work for. Indeed, had I took the initial job offer I received, I would have been out on the street again in 18 months (they laid everyone off...)
For me, anyway, this gave me a better sense of control at the expense of using up some of my retirement savings. Subsequently, I have had some management try to put the screws to me. It is freeing to be able to remind them (and myself!) that I'm only there because I choose to be.
I don't know if any of that will be useful to you, but I hope so.
I've never been in a position where I could financially justify being out of work for 6 months. Even if I theoretically have the savings to do it, growing up poor and intermittently homeless I just can't fathom the idea of spending that savings to live on when I could otherwise be working. When I've been laid off I treat getting my next job as my full time job, and I will spend 8-10 hours a day, seven days a week, either interviewing, networking, or researching companies I might like to work for.
Most recently I took about 6 weeks off between accepting my new job and actually starting it, and even that was extremely stressful on me. I spent most of it being certain that something bad was going to happen and I'd show up on my first day to find out that the job had evaporated.
Ultimately, I think people have different risk tolerances and dispositions for how they handle being out of work- but for everyone who's not independently wealthy it's going to be stressful. When your ability to survive is fully dependent on working, the knowledge of how capriciously it can be removed can be terrifying.
Personally, I haven't been laid off, but wanted to recognize that a layoff also affects those who weren't: morale drop, worry, survivor's guilt, stress leading to physical symptoms, etc.
Sometimes, this can quickly lead to a downward spiral effect at the company. Productivity falls and whatever issues the layoff was intended to remedy end up being magnified instead. This is usually the case when - before the layoff - there was either "writing on the wall" (that typically management wouldn't admit to publicly) or an inherent distrust of management.
What really sucks is the pile on. Recruiters watch for these moments and jump on them like piranhas. They notice a sudden spike on LinkedIn of resume updates by people all working at the same company and hone in on those still there, reaching out to see if they want to take a look at other possibilities. Simply put: no one wants to be the last one to go down with the ship.
Whatever project you're building/working on, please remember those who weren't laid off, too.
> Recruiters watch for these moments and jump on them like piranhas.
Really, that would be the best outcome. You’re retained because you’re valuable. Recruiters see that and think here’s someone I can make more money. Leaving a company for one that’s on better financial footing makes business sense.
I went through a site layoff where of all the developers only me and another guy got relocation packages instead of severance. I would have much preferred the severance since I had to put in my resignation to avoid moving.
I do agree that layoffs don't just affect those who were laid off. I'm building a product now that I'm testing to work out any bugs and will do a release soon.
The platform isn't only those laid off; it could also be used by those still employed and worry about being laid off.
Early in my career, a company I worked at has a round of layoffs. I remember thinking about my stability. I was assured by those more senior around me that we would be fine. Three months later, our entire department was also laid off.
I haven't been experienced such a scenario since, but to your point.. I wouldn't sit around.
I got a buy out offer about 14 months ago, fantastic offer and I was planning on leaving to pursue my own business anyways. It's turned out great; the buy out gave me a years runway to not have to worry about income so much, meanwhile I was able to pursue my own product. Making more now than I did before the buy out.
The small family firm I worked at folded after the owner remortgaged his house. I was told on the Friday and had my last pay check on the monday. (Sad story, I felt for them)
After contracting for a bit and running through my savings I was days away from losing my house when I was offered a great job writing software earning twice as much. 2 years later I was offered a dream job and doubled my salary again.
Today I am forever thankful for my fairly ridiculous salary because I've been at rock bottom.
I got caught up in a re-org when the company hired a new VP of Eng and he basically came in and fired all of the Ruby developers (everything was built with Rails) and hired a bunch of Java developers as replacements because Spring Boot was the bees knees according to him.
Took me about 6 months and almost all of my savings to get myself back on track but now I'm at a self-funded fintech startup that's already profitable as an architecture lead so everything is looking good for now.
The startup I worked for laid off 30% of their workforce, and I was among those cut. That was 3 years ago. 113 job interviews later, and i'm only just getting things back together with freelance work.
Yup. Happened to me. Big corporate decided most of our floor were surplus to requirements. Got an email on Sunday telling us to be in early on Monday for an off-site meeting.
Got handed my redundancy / compromise agreement and told not to return to the office. And, the kicker, told my non-compete meant I couldn't work for a competitor during the redundancy process.
It was devastating and emotionally wrecking. It was like being dumped, out of the blue, from a multi-year relationship. And being told you couldn't see anyone else. I went through all the classic stages of grief.
And then...
I contacted my Trade Union and explained the situation. They took a look at the contract I'd been given, passed it to a very expensive lawyer, who made a couple of phone calls.
The next week I was free to work for whoever I wanted and was paid ~7 months salary (tax free).
Join. A. Union.
Your employer has more lawyers than you do. Pay a couple of quid per month to have decent legal representation on hand when you need it.
That layoff was the best thing to happen to me. Shook me out of my cosy job, forced me into building my own consultancy, and taught me the power of solidarity.
This may be UK specific, but as Vice chair of the New Digital division of Prospect the quick version is:
Recongnition is where a union has a formal agreement to negotiate collectively either by mutual agreement or via the legal process (similar to the us system)
However unions will still represent members individually I have done so in the past.
The union that has the majority of technology workers who are union members is Prospect - this is tech in the widest sense.
Totally depends on jurisdiction, but where I am, labour lawyers will usually do a free consult, and can extract their ongoing costs if an employer underpaid you owed severance and termination pay if you were suddenly fired.
Sane employers will pay lawyer costs if they know they’d lose in court.
It's the same in most of Europe. A letter from a lawyer can be worth much more than from an employee and lawyers won't charge you if they expect the employer to pay the cost anyway.
The way you said it - "join a union" - made me think that unions may be a good idea in software if anyone can join and leave any time. This would be like insurance that funds a big nonprofit with very motivated (and well paid) lawyers. 250 usd / month shouldn't bankrupt a software dev and 100k such devs (a large corp) would bring 250 M/year. There's definitely a room for a few unions in the US with 200-500 m/year budgets. The first thing to do would be banning non competes at the federal level.
Although the idea is promising, 250 a month is too high. At 100k, your bring home is roughly 70(varies greatly by state). And then you'd pay almost 5% of that to a union to help insure your job. My mom's Union fees were well below 1% of her bring home.
Should be deductible at least. Unfortunately, I did Google it, and they are not, though they were before the recent tax law (though they were counted employer expenses which meant almost no 'normal employee' would be able to do so).
That being said, we're a smart group. We should easily be able to find some loophole just like all the big corps do. Couldn't we form a LLC, all become members, and use the fees as an investment loss each year? When it pays out a severance, pay taxes on the income as you would with employer provided disability insurance.
But yeah, even a $100 / month would be enough, I think, to start it off.
Let's get 1000 members * $100 * 12 and that's $1.2M a year. To start, hire two very good lawyers at $250K / year and a few other auxiliary staff, create a union-only forum that's easily searchable, and start populating it with anecdotes.
I think a union is a different structure than LLC and plays by different rules. Regardless, the first step should be talking to a proper attorney who can explain what requirements need to be met to make this organisation a union.
Rule of thumb I head somewhere is that union dues should be around half hour of wage per week, assuming full time employment. Not sure what it would be for part timers.
Non-compete usually don't hold up in court in our field. You have to remember that somebody has to prove damages somewhere. Who do you think every court sides with when you're the only one who can demonstrate damages and they were the ones who let you go?
So unless you worked for a car wash and then go open a car wash across the street. Its not even worth thinking about.
Makes me want to lawyer up for relatively small shit than this but nonetheless shit, for an employer calling me low energy on taking a day off for flu and then telling me that my next 6 months' leaves are withdrawn.
I agree that the employee/employer relationship is highly asymmetrical.
I'm now an employer of one, in Europe, and I can tell you I passed up on many candidates where the screening error bars should have been acceptable, but the error multipled by cost of firing were not.
I suspect this actually a negative pressure on diversity as well, since any unconscious uncertainty is multiplied by the risk, regardless of how hard we try to control for our internal biases.
A pooled legal team is probably a good idea to take care of the truely illegal stuff and provide advice based on industry standards.
For knowledge workers at least, I believe union style employee protections are going to reduce the opportunity of average and below workforce and not benefit the top either.
Got laid off in March. Spent all summer on holiday doing what I wanted (which was mostly just fucking around in a few different countries and doing nothing related to technology). I got laid off in 2008 as well which was a very different story and was the reason I went to university.
Depending upon where you are in your life it can be liberating or a death sentence and anywhere in between.
I was laid off around 7 years ago. It was a massive hit to my self esteem and confidence and I actually considered leaving tech and going back to wood working (I used to build furniture).
I managed to bounce back somewhat accidentally. A guy needed help with a Wordpress store he used to sell his woodworking products, so I did some stuff for him. He was so happy with what I did, he ended up telling other people. They got a hold of me about some work, then other people, and other people... and suddenly I was building bespoke applications on long term contracts making 3-4x as much as I was before I was laid off.
It was stressful because I didn't have the experience to suddenly run my own business, and I was bad at it. I did an okay job writing code, my customers were happy with that, but I'd invoice a month late, I'd forget to track time and inevitably bill too little because I couldn't bring myself to charge what I knew it was worth, I was a bad communicator at times, terrible at estimating time in certain conditions, etc.
That was a huge help in building the self awareness I needed to move forward in my career. Still working on that, and still super grateful for that layoff in retrospect.
When I was laid off early in my career, I took a massive emotional hit. I was only making $35k a year programming at 20, but it was my way out of the poor living conditions.
When they laid off my entire team, I was upset, afraid, and angry. I told myself I would never work in IT again.
Then I realized how much I love coding and that I initially got into it, not knowing I could make a living. I got pulled back into it; like the mob :)
Yep, from my second job out of uni at a well-known agency. I was told my phone while on holiday, and when I returned the next Monday we were told that we may as well go home for that day since there wasn't anything left to do.
Thankfully, one of the agencies we sub-contracted to took our clients on, and offered to take us on for our remaining month of redundancy, so on Tuesday I was in a new office. Sadly, only one of us was offered a job, and it was me, but the rest of my work mates managed to find jobs to start at the end of redundancy.
That month sucked. I had gone from what I perceived to be a wildly successful, award-winning company to uncertainty at a shitty agency. I spent nearly four years at that agency, and worked on a number of fantastic projects - some of which I still talk about now. In all honesty, being made redundant was one of the best things to happen to me.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 229 ms ] threadI'm 36 and the longest I ever stayed in a single job was 4 years.
Looks like you've hit the best scenario most people can get in SV, really. Unless they bought their houses years ago.
This was a hard time: https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archiv...
> Why Is He Still Smiling? Bill Gross blew through $800 million in 8 months (and he's got nothing to show for it).
Early in my career I was working as a video game tester. This was effectively just to get my foot in the door to "any sort of tech job" (previously I had only been a Mover). One day, at the end of what seemed like a very normal workday, our entire group was told "our primary contract just got cancelled, we won't have work for you all tomorrow, we'll be in touch if we do but otherwise don't bother coming in."
In hindsight, if that happened to me today I'd probably have an aneurism on the spot, but, likely due to naivete, I just shrugged and thought to myself "well the commute was miserable, the job sucked, and I got a decent chunk of time out of them for the resume" and leaned hard into some connections I had at a local software consultancy; they ended up picking me up as a subcontractor and the rest is history.
There wasn't so much "bounce" for me because simply put, I wasn't far enough in my career to have anywhere real to fall to, and I think if I hadn't already been building connections with the intention of moving into Real Programming Work I would have probably felt quite a bit more panic.
I think the takeaway I'd make from this is that the impact of a layoff, and my ability to bounce back from it, would differ DRASTICALLY based on the surrounding context, but that network/contacts+relevant skills have become a core "must have" in my book of long-term-career-stability.
I will say that it absolutely sucks all around. The longer you go without finding a new job, the harder it becomes to get past the suspicious-looking gap in your employment history. Unemployment benefits only cover a portion of your previous pay, and they take awhile to start flowing in (if they're ever approved at all). It's easy to blame yourself (and I still do blame myself). You're left feeling like a complete failure.
I managed to squeeze by thanks to family and being able to take odd-jobs here and there to pay the bills. It's at least slightly easier to justify those gaps if you can claim that you were "freelancing" instead, so that's exactly what I did, in the meantime sending applications and résumés everywhere I could only to get rejections (or - worse - no response at all).
Even now, having had my current job for awhile now, it still weirds me out when I actually get praise. Every time I'm pulled into some one-on-one with my boss I get a sinking feeling of "welp, time's up, better polish off the ol' curriculum vitæ" only for those fears to be unfounded. I guess "impostor syndrome" is a thing, but my brain at this point is trained to believe that I actually am an impostor and am pretending to have impostor syndrome to rationalize my incompetence.
So I guess objectively-speaking I "bounced back", but it sure as hell doesn't feel that way.
I lucked out once here at an software interview - my parents had bought a house that they were having renovated, and I spent a few months between jobs acting as a general contractor, and doing some of the labour that I was qualified for myself. Turned out my interviewer was a former carpenter, so we spent a while chatting about that.
I still have the CTO role on the front page of my resume but I can't help but think prospective employers shy away from me assuming my short-lived C-level role ended by termination even though it says "downsized".
If there is a discrepancy between a personal resume and LinkedIn, then that ends up being a "red flag" in the eyes of recruiters and HR.
I understand that if they're not enthusiastic about the rest of your resume in the first place, they might not bother checking your references, but generally, isn't that why one provides references? So the prospective employer can check your story?
Or perhaps ask for a letter of recommendation (though it's probably a bit too late for that now, I'm just thinking of the general case)? Not sure if that is a thing for C-level jobs.
That said, not everyone is so lucky and I definitely struggled during the unemployment phase.
As for why so many startup duds that all failed in under one year? I was young and didn't know what the hell I was doing. I chose my jobs based on how cool I thought the product was rather than how viable the product would be in the marketplace.
And yes, talk to a counsellor as well if you feel it helps.
Some of those comments, are just sentences, but then sometimes it's easier to just put the code in the comment, than to describe it in any other way. Still commented out, though. I'm not coding this now, just saying what i will do, eventually.
After a while, sometimes I uncomment a few sections, and test just those little functions to see that they work, anyway. But basically, I'm not coding now, don't have the energy or will to do it right now.
Sometimes, it is enough to get me going, and I turn the comments into code. Other times, I stop for the day once everything is planned out, as much as I can at this point. Either way, it is better than not approaching it at all, because it seems to require (psychologically) a smaller step to code it once I do come back to it the next day, because everything is planned out.
If you don't have a job in programming just now, do puzzles, do a small app for organizing your recipes or books, do something. It doesn't have to be something which anyone else will ever want or need to see, just something to exercise that part of your brain.
1) Promise someone you value/respect to deliver some program
2) Join an interesting coding competition
3) Help teach kids programming.
4) Figure out if you can solve a problem in your current scenario with any program.
Concentrate on the process/act of doing it, rather than the thing itself. Learn to enjoy doing it. Also if you are not doing it already, I would suggest to start exercising or playing a physical sport which would put you in better frame of mind.
And you'll inevitably learn something. Bite sized so you can for it into your day.
Laws are different to America though. In the UK you’ll get a bit of cash & they have to give you notice. France basically have to give you a few years wages to get rid of you. I guess America essentially is a zero hours contract, because you don’t get any compensation if there are redundancies?
Though ‘Severance Packages’ are very common for skilled/high-salaried employees, where you receive a payout of x weeks or months, negotiable but usually based on length of employment. This is done in part so the employer does not get a bad reputation in the market for skilled/high-salary talent. For a startup, let’s say that maybe 1-2 months of ‘severance’ would be perceived as Very Generous to its Employees.
It was early in my career, I had no obligation and I was thinking about moving to London anyway. So I took it as a sign, returned back to my office, book a flight for next week, said good bye and left.
Being young and having valuable skillset it never felt like some bad event. It was sad to say good bye, but hey there are tons of challenges out there.
I was young, moved into a friend's place and paid cheap rent for about 6 months and collected unemployment. Then ended up getting hired back right before the startup was acquired.
1. Human toll of layoffs can be extremely high (up to and including death) and hard to see.
2. Many coders are much more re-hirable than most non-coders, but many aren't.
3. In resilient labor markets such as modern SaaS and app coding, there is an experience<->hirability S-curve. Going from 0 to 1 year of saleable experience depends on the employer, from 1 to 3 years power shifts slowly towards labor, and after that you are in control. (These statements obviously don't apply to all software labor markets.)
4. Many coders get stuck in bad labor niches, many are really lousy at the sub-skill of getting a job, many don't realize how salable their skills are, and many can't tell which of those possibilities applies to them.
The startup I was working on here hired a new creative director who immediately 'pivoted to video' and laid me off, the only in-house content manager and producer. As I'm not a 'video editor', I got chopped via re-org.
Still shuffling around NYC looking for a better opportunity in content strategy, and in the meantime looking into starting my own boutique content solutions LLC.
It hurts, though.
I took the new job and moved cities to work at a startup for about 18 months. When I was laid off there, the CEO was very transparent about the reasons for it: they decided to get rid of full time staff and focus on contractors who were on work visas, because the threat of losing their visa meant they were easier to abuse.
I was out of work for about a month then before starting a new job that again lasted for about 18 months. The company was looking to sell off our business unit and laid everyone off except for me and my manager. Not seeing a lot of hope for the future and not wanting to be a sole developer keeping a product limping along, I left for a year.
The next job was doing funded research. I went in knowing that my job depending on getting funding, and lasted a year before the funding ran out. I was out of work for a few weeks before going back to my old team, which over the last year had been successfully sold off to a new company, which had brought back a few of my co-workers.
I stayed at that job for another 4.5 years as the technical lead, until the product was once again getting sold and management wanted to make the numbers look better. This time I was the salary that was cut to improve the numbers.
After a contract-to-hire role that didn't work out due to "bad cultural fit", I landed at another startup for about 16 more months. Due to my previous history of layoffs and wanting something more stable I left when I could see that we were starting to run out of runway and didn't have good prospects for another cash infusion.
From that job I joined a mid-sized tech company doing unexciting work, but after a rocky few years I really wanted something more stable. I was there for 18 months before most of engineering was laid off when the company decided to focus more on supporting other companies products.
This time I was out of work for just a few weeks, and found a great role. I've joined an even larger company, and one that has been doing well, but the long history of layoffs has left me constantly hyper-aware of the lack of stability in our industry, and I'm actively going through therapy to help get over the constant fear that any small hiccup or misstep means that I'm getting fired or that my team is going to be laid off.
Although I've always bounced back quickly, and certainly my salary and experience have been benefited by the quickly changing jobs, the psychological toll is very high.
It's a bit risky because the first question you get when doing subsequent interviews is "Why have you been out of work so long?" I'd tell them I took time off and showed them the code I was working on. There would be some raised eyebrows, but to be honest, I think this actually helped filter out some companies that I really didn't want to work for. Indeed, had I took the initial job offer I received, I would have been out on the street again in 18 months (they laid everyone off...)
For me, anyway, this gave me a better sense of control at the expense of using up some of my retirement savings. Subsequently, I have had some management try to put the screws to me. It is freeing to be able to remind them (and myself!) that I'm only there because I choose to be.
I don't know if any of that will be useful to you, but I hope so.
Most recently I took about 6 weeks off between accepting my new job and actually starting it, and even that was extremely stressful on me. I spent most of it being certain that something bad was going to happen and I'd show up on my first day to find out that the job had evaporated.
Ultimately, I think people have different risk tolerances and dispositions for how they handle being out of work- but for everyone who's not independently wealthy it's going to be stressful. When your ability to survive is fully dependent on working, the knowledge of how capriciously it can be removed can be terrifying.
Sometimes, this can quickly lead to a downward spiral effect at the company. Productivity falls and whatever issues the layoff was intended to remedy end up being magnified instead. This is usually the case when - before the layoff - there was either "writing on the wall" (that typically management wouldn't admit to publicly) or an inherent distrust of management.
What really sucks is the pile on. Recruiters watch for these moments and jump on them like piranhas. They notice a sudden spike on LinkedIn of resume updates by people all working at the same company and hone in on those still there, reaching out to see if they want to take a look at other possibilities. Simply put: no one wants to be the last one to go down with the ship.
Whatever project you're building/working on, please remember those who weren't laid off, too.
Really, that would be the best outcome. You’re retained because you’re valuable. Recruiters see that and think here’s someone I can make more money. Leaving a company for one that’s on better financial footing makes business sense.
The platform isn't only those laid off; it could also be used by those still employed and worry about being laid off.
Early in my career, a company I worked at has a round of layoffs. I remember thinking about my stability. I was assured by those more senior around me that we would be fine. Three months later, our entire department was also laid off.
I haven't been experienced such a scenario since, but to your point.. I wouldn't sit around.
After contracting for a bit and running through my savings I was days away from losing my house when I was offered a great job writing software earning twice as much. 2 years later I was offered a dream job and doubled my salary again.
Today I am forever thankful for my fairly ridiculous salary because I've been at rock bottom.
Worth stating that I was starting from a below market rate position.
Took me about 6 months and almost all of my savings to get myself back on track but now I'm at a self-funded fintech startup that's already profitable as an architecture lead so everything is looking good for now.
Got handed my redundancy / compromise agreement and told not to return to the office. And, the kicker, told my non-compete meant I couldn't work for a competitor during the redundancy process.
It was devastating and emotionally wrecking. It was like being dumped, out of the blue, from a multi-year relationship. And being told you couldn't see anyone else. I went through all the classic stages of grief.
And then...
I contacted my Trade Union and explained the situation. They took a look at the contract I'd been given, passed it to a very expensive lawyer, who made a couple of phone calls.
The next week I was free to work for whoever I wanted and was paid ~7 months salary (tax free).
Join. A. Union.
Your employer has more lawyers than you do. Pay a couple of quid per month to have decent legal representation on hand when you need it.
That layoff was the best thing to happen to me. Shook me out of my cosy job, forced me into building my own consultancy, and taught me the power of solidarity.
It may be more appropriate for you to join a union which is recognised in your workplace. You can find one at https://www.tuc.org.uk/join-union
Recongnition is where a union has a formal agreement to negotiate collectively either by mutual agreement or via the legal process (similar to the us system)
However unions will still represent members individually I have done so in the past.
The union that has the majority of technology workers who are union members is Prospect - this is tech in the widest sense.
Sane employers will pay lawyer costs if they know they’d lose in court.
But that’s Canada.
That being said, we're a smart group. We should easily be able to find some loophole just like all the big corps do. Couldn't we form a LLC, all become members, and use the fees as an investment loss each year? When it pays out a severance, pay taxes on the income as you would with employer provided disability insurance.
But yeah, even a $100 / month would be enough, I think, to start it off.
Let's get 1000 members * $100 * 12 and that's $1.2M a year. To start, hire two very good lawyers at $250K / year and a few other auxiliary staff, create a union-only forum that's easily searchable, and start populating it with anecdotes.
For GP's 70K per annum wage that is 73 dollars a month.
If you're on a lower income, you pay less.
How do you find the service/them generally?
I've been with them for about 15 years and very happy with their service, training, etc.
So unless you worked for a car wash and then go open a car wash across the street. Its not even worth thinking about.
I'm now an employer of one, in Europe, and I can tell you I passed up on many candidates where the screening error bars should have been acceptable, but the error multipled by cost of firing were not.
I suspect this actually a negative pressure on diversity as well, since any unconscious uncertainty is multiplied by the risk, regardless of how hard we try to control for our internal biases.
A pooled legal team is probably a good idea to take care of the truely illegal stuff and provide advice based on industry standards.
For knowledge workers at least, I believe union style employee protections are going to reduce the opportunity of average and below workforce and not benefit the top either.
Depending upon where you are in your life it can be liberating or a death sentence and anywhere in between.
I managed to bounce back somewhat accidentally. A guy needed help with a Wordpress store he used to sell his woodworking products, so I did some stuff for him. He was so happy with what I did, he ended up telling other people. They got a hold of me about some work, then other people, and other people... and suddenly I was building bespoke applications on long term contracts making 3-4x as much as I was before I was laid off.
It was stressful because I didn't have the experience to suddenly run my own business, and I was bad at it. I did an okay job writing code, my customers were happy with that, but I'd invoice a month late, I'd forget to track time and inevitably bill too little because I couldn't bring myself to charge what I knew it was worth, I was a bad communicator at times, terrible at estimating time in certain conditions, etc.
That was a huge help in building the self awareness I needed to move forward in my career. Still working on that, and still super grateful for that layoff in retrospect.
A friend of mine once told me that there are three equally important things for a contractor/consultant/small business owner to do:
* find the work
* do the work
* get paid for the work
All necessary.
When they laid off my entire team, I was upset, afraid, and angry. I told myself I would never work in IT again.
Then I realized how much I love coding and that I initially got into it, not knowing I could make a living. I got pulled back into it; like the mob :)
Thankfully, one of the agencies we sub-contracted to took our clients on, and offered to take us on for our remaining month of redundancy, so on Tuesday I was in a new office. Sadly, only one of us was offered a job, and it was me, but the rest of my work mates managed to find jobs to start at the end of redundancy.
That month sucked. I had gone from what I perceived to be a wildly successful, award-winning company to uncertainty at a shitty agency. I spent nearly four years at that agency, and worked on a number of fantastic projects - some of which I still talk about now. In all honesty, being made redundant was one of the best things to happen to me.