Ask HN: Software developers, What happened when you were fired/laid off?

I was working for an early-stage startup during the summer of 2013 as the front-end developer. While I was there, we fired our iOS guy, our backend guy switched to iOS and the company now needed someone with full-stack experience to cover the gap, so I got the axe at the end of my contract.

Personally, I was lucky: it took me a total of 4 days to find another job. I didn't have to retool myself because I had kept up on the latest trends within the scope of my skills, and the job market was heavily in my favor at the time.

While I didn't have to learn new skills, I did learn that external factors beyond my control can affect my continued employment. It has made me more mindful of my surroundings and observant of the business direction.

In the UK, fired is generally for when an employer dismisses you from employment due to a specific issue (timekeeping, poor performance, caught stealing printers etc.) It is very different to being made redundant, which occurs when the employer believes your role is no longer viable and has become redundant. Most employers here would not have an issue with the latter, but might have concern with the former. In both cases I found employment within three months, in both cases during a job market like the current climate, in both cases the employer in question acted like an arse, but did not make moving on difficult. The redundancy was just a cheap move to offshore our teams jobs to southeast Asia, the firing was related to being told I was not pulling 100 hour weeks like the rest of the suckers there, and I said "damn right".

Firing or layoff?

Happened twice in the past 3 years. Both times I was back with a full time role within a month. The 1st time I actually was re-employed before I got my final paycheck. The 2nd time I reached into my network and had an interview within days. Then the hiring process drug on a bit but was back to work before unemployment paperwork was processed.

I was let go a few months ago from a small startup. I had two good offers on the same day just from putting out the word that I was looking. Both were more than a 50% pay increase but I turned them down because neither interested me much and I didn't want to relocate.

I took a month off, went to see some family and friends out on the east coast and then started doing a little consulting while I look at other jobs.

Between my savings and my consulting income I'm in no particular hurry to jump right back in so I'm waiting for a full-time offer that I'm really excited about.

(Need a Scala/Akka guy?)

I was laid off in Aug 2009. I negotiated 3 months of continued employment to start and finish a project I knew they would want to do (cost savings measure to move to the cloud). Tech at the time: rails.

I had (part-time contract) work within 15 minutes of leaving the layoff meeting. It pays to network before you need it.

Before my extra 3 months ended, I reached out to the individual investors in the company and asked if they knew if any of their portfolio companies had any work. I ended up taking a contract in February (there were 2 months where I did odd gigs, but was essentially out of work and living off savings - again it pays to plan ahead) that paid way better than I was making before and positionally a better spot. (titles matter too, though less than the work at hand - depending on what you want to be doing)

Back in 2008-9 I worked as a PHP developer for a small startup and at the end of my first year we had worked through our whole roadmap and there wasn't anything interesting on the horizon. The economy was pretty bad so sales were taking a hit in that market (helping people get into business school). I was planning to quit and I already had my next job lined up to start in 3 weeks (I planned to give 2 weeks notice, then take a 1 week vacation before starting the new job). The new job was also as a PHP developer at a bigger company.

On Friday I told my boss (VP of operations) that I was planning to resign, and he told me to hold on to my resignation letter until Monday, and act surprised when the founders called me in to lay me off. I probably laid it on a little thick by telling them it was the greatest opportunity of my career to be able to work with such visionaries. I complemented my boss on the great job he was doing and that I understood the need to tighten the purse strings in a tough economy. I was given the choice to be laid off and collect unemployment, or to sign a resignation letter and receive a 6 week severance (I chose the latter).

I got a new job within a week making 15k/year more (this was in San Francisco). It was actually a good thing, in retrospect.

I was laid off in 2009 - business had declined and as the most-junior developer of three in a company that was almost entirely 1-person departments, I was the natural choice. I was told on a Tuesday, paid for the remainder of that pay period (through to the following Friday so 8 days paid after separation) as well has had my accrued PTO bought back, which was nice as they were not legally required to do so. I had already built my side business up to about 70% of my FTE salary so it was about as painless a transition as possible. I consulted for about 3 years full time after that before going back to an FTE role.

I've also had to fire someone for cause. We make it abundantly clear during the interview phase that we will call every reference, verify all credentials, and all dates of employment as legally allowed. We made an offer to a mid-level developer but it came to our attention that he had lied about dates of employment to cover up a period of unemployment, and stated he had a degree which he did not. Neither of these things would have hindered his ability to get an interview or offer.

I was laid off along with most of the engineering staff at the startup I was working at in February due to lack of funding. Since I'm based in NYC and my colleagues were very well connected people, the software community immediately reached out (like sharks smelling blood in the water, but in a good way :D) and most of us landed somewhere within a month or two.

It was quite a shock the way we were all let go and it seemed to catch many of us by surprise. I've been through this kind of event twice now in my career and it sucks, but I recognize that we are still in a really great market for software jobs right now, so there's nothing for me to cry about other than getting to work with that particularly awesome team anymore.

The company was failing and I knew the end was near. The entire design department was let go a few weeks earlier and I was assured that this wouldn't happen to me (don't ever believe management when they tell you this. Everyone is expendable).

Well, I was brought into a room and let go the following Monday. The boss even got pissed when he asked me if I would not look for a job for awhile because he "might want to hire me back" and I said "no". Within a few weeks, the office was sold and the rest of the employees were let go.

It took me 2 weeks to figure out an idea for a company and I made my first $50 within a month. This lasted about 2 years and I had to get another job when the business failed. I pivoted that original idea a year later..and I've been doing pretty well running my own business since then (3 years now).

It happened to me once, mainly for doing things like question the work/life balance (expectations were to work 60+ hours per week, no matter who the person was) - fortunately for me, I was prepared with a formal job offer at another company, and the day I was let go, I started at my next company 2 hours later.

Laid off in 2009 right at the time every company in the world was shutting it's doors.

Had multiple interviews and a much better job offer in a week using similar tech (web stack rails / .net etc). I had to relocate though. Since then risen to be CTO of company I was hired by. Best thing that ever happened to me.

The company laid off many developers and every single one I kept in touch with landed a job within a month or less.

During the layoff they kept many weak performers and what I call soft skill people over us developers. Funny thing is they now can't find devs to work for them to this day. I hear they are basically taking anyone willing to try at this point.

Side note: A lot of people with good stories probably can't tell you about them because most people are required to sign an NDA when they get severance.

My story: I was laid off in August 2001. It was the third round of layoffs for the company, so it wasn't a huge surprise. When it happened I thought I'd try out consulting for a while, but then 9/11 happened and the economy tanked, so I went back to school. It turns out that the government throws money at you if you're over 25 and don't have an undergraduate degree.

I finished in 2003 and called up some old friends who I had worked with in the past and had a job lined up about a week after graduating.

I was developing systems sw around PCI Express before some projects were cut, big history short I got an offer to leave with a big $ paycheck to sign a resignation letter.

In the next 2 months, I got and interview with Amazon/Facebook and other names but since my application was for a systems position they didn't follow up, after a while I took a position doing Kernel Drivers but have been trying to go into systems (unix/linux requiring deep kernel stuff), seems like is hard for companies to think an engineer can have skills on both low/hi abstraction layers :(

Maybe being from Latin America didn't help either.

I got laid off this past january. I was the js lead for a medium sized angular app. I found a new job in a month, similar job, and only had to catch up on some new tools like gulp. It was a pretty grueling month though, I probably sent out 10 resumes a day the first week. The good thing was I got a couple interviews early on that gave me some pointers as to what people were looking for. I then was able to do some research before the next interview. I wish I had worked on my interviewing skills from the beginning as I was rusty and blew a couple questions because I was not prepared. I agree with paulhauggis: do not believe management. I had gone to my manager three months before asking where I can be a better fit in the company because I felt I was redundant. I was told not to worry about it. I am not sure if they had planned to let me go at the time but I should have trusted my feelings more. I would also say, if you have some savings or got a severance package, take the time to catch up on what is new, and wait for a good opportunity.

I'm just a little over thirty, and I've done mostly early-stage startups. In most cases, I was able to get a job pretty quickly. In my first and last firing/lay-off, and I got a job in two to three months. The longest I've been job searching was half a year, and that was because I very badly wanted a particular role.

Over the years, I noticed some trends that really bothered me a little.

1. People don't actually want to see real ambition, most of the time. If you really want a particular role, they will test you harder. It is better to get good at what you want to do, and then act as if it were nice to get to do it.

2. "Age" seems to matter. Just by doing my appearances differently to affect that variable, I got much more positive interaction in interviews. It was embarrassing. Whatever you have or look like, you have to back up. If you are older, you have to act the part, or really denigrate yourself.

Seems like everyone in this thread landed a new (better) job in a matter of days/weeks.

The last company I worked at closed the office that I was working at in a consolidation move. Within 2 hours of the announcement I had multiple recruiters calling me (and everyone else in the office). They gave us two months to find a new job. I had 4 offers within 4 weeks.

Company depended on me to keep afloat due to me being lead dev in project. They hired some cheaper devs from overseas and let me go. I was immediately hired by the company who was developing the project (no contractual issues) and the company that got greedy lost the project. It was a hard decision because I was worried about not being ethical. The worries went out the door when I realized that I did not do anything wrong. The company did survive but is limping. I do wish them the best. Good people, bad business sense.

(Btw, Im finishing up a project. Anyone who may need a Python/Go/JS [Django, flask, gorrila, learning React] dev let me know. Ive dabbed in .NET too (ASP.NET and desktop). Email in profile.)

I was laid off during 2002, during the peak of the dotcom bubble burst. Effectively I was out of work for 3 months, but didn't find full-time work for 9 months. I ended up having to borrow money from my parents to make ends meet (all payed back now).

At the time, I was very well versed in Delphi and was pretty good with C#, SQL, MDX, and various web technologies.

I spent my morning looking for new jobs, then in the afternoon I was writing my own MDX library for .Net (MDX is the Microsoft Analysis Services language/API). Eventually I was hired on by a contracting firm where I stayed for about 4 years.

My Take aways: My best advice is to stay connected with the community. Find a developer group that meets regularly, attend and present. I also learned I suck at running my own business.

In 2008 I graduated from college and moved to New York City right away. I immediately got a job at a very early stage startup. The economic climate took a turn for the worse, and after a month the startup lost their main investment and had to cease operations. I was unemployed for about 5 days before I landed another, much better job. This was largely through checking Dice and applying to jobs that looked interesting (though I doubt Dice is a very good place to look for a job nowadays).

Later on around 2012 (still in New York City) I was working at a fairly large, profitable startup that underwent layoffs. I was able to leverage my network to get another, much better job, within 2 weeks.

Both times I was laid off it was a blessing in disguise. I was able to get much more interesting positions with better compensation and more responsibility.

I was let go less than a week ago and to my great surprise. (I had moved out of state for a full-time gig and it lasted less than a month.)

Before anything else, I'm taking this first week for myself, since I felt like I jumped back into the job search too quickly the last time I was laid off. I've scheduled time for meditation, reflection, and self-care toward that end.

Next week, I plan to start looking in earnest for short-term contract work and project work. I've worked full-time for several years now, and the experience has done little to endear me to it.

Finances willing, I might just go back to school for the computer science education that I never formally obtained.

Your recommendations for for work or further courses of action are appreciated. My strengths are front-end development and Ruby, though I'm always eager to learn a new language or platform. Thanks.

These comments worry me. During the Dot Com Burst, a whole lot of developers lost their jobs for obvious reasons.

Are we in a bubble right now?

I'm contracting for 15k a month. If this bubble pops it's over for me, right? For all of us?