Notes from May: What Getting Laid Off Has Actually Taught Me
Three months in, here is what nobody warned me about, what I got wrong, and what I am keeping
I got the call on a Monday. Eleven minutes, four “unfortunatelys”, a VP I had met twice, and a Slack message from HR asking me to FedEx the laptop back by Friday. By the time I hung up, my coffee had gone cold and my calendar for the next two weeks had collapsed into the word “available.”
That was three months ago. I am writing this from the same couch I sat down on after that call. Different laptop. Mine, this time.
I have learned more in these three months than in the previous three years of being employed. Most of it nobody warned me about. I want to write some of it down, partly because the writing helps me think, partly because some of you reading this are going to be in this situation soon and I wish someone had written this for me.
What nobody warned me about
The first two weeks are not the hardest part.
Everyone tells you the layoff itself is the hard part. It is not. The first two weeks I had momentum. I updated LinkedIn. I told my friends. I applied to twelve jobs. I felt energized in a strange way like the worst thing had happened and I had survived it and now I was a person taking action.
The hard part is week six. The momentum is gone. The applications stop generating responses. The friends stop checking in because they assumed you were “doing fine.” The thing you were energized about in week two is now just your life. You wake up on a Tuesday and there is nothing on your calendar and nothing on it tomorrow either.
I have heard people call this the “trough.” That is right. It is also a place where most engineers panic and take the wrong job. I almost did. The first offer I got was thirty percent below my last salary and I was about to sign it on a Thursday night before I closed the laptop and went for a walk.
Do not take the first offer in week six. The trough is not the truth. It is just a feature of the calendar.
Your network is smaller than you think and bigger than you think.
When I got laid off, I sent a “looking for opportunities” message to about forty people I considered close professional contacts. Eight replied. Three offered actual help. Two of those three eventually led to interviews.
I am not bitter about this. Most people are busy. Most people do not know what to do with a “I got laid off” message even if they care about you. The math is brutal but it is the math.
What I did not expect: complete strangers reached out. People who had read something I wrote on Medium two years ago and remembered my name. People I had answered a Stack Overflow question for in 2022. Someone from a Discord server I had been semi-active in. A guy whose Spring Boot question I had answered in a Twitter thread six months ago.
The “weak ties” research is real. Your loose acquaintances generate more opportunity than your inner circle, because your inner circle already knows everyone you know. The strangers you have been useful to in passing remember you when something opens up.
If you are still employed and reading this: be useful in public. Answer questions. Write things down. The person you help on a Tuesday at 11 PM is the person who emails you a job posting two years later when you need it.
Identity is the thing nobody prepares you for.
I have been a senior backend engineer for years. When someone at a dinner party asked what I did, I said “I am a senior backend engineer.” For three weeks after the layoff I did not know what to say at the dinner table. Not in a deep existential sense. In a very practical sense — “I got laid off” was true but it stopped the conversation, and “I am a senior backend engineer” felt like a lie because nobody was paying me to be one.
What I eventually settled on was “I write about backend engineering” and “I am between roles.” Both are true. Both keep the conversation going. Both are weirdly empowering to say out loud.
The lesson is small but it took me a few weeks to get there. Your job is not your identity. Your identity is what you do every day, which is also what you would do every day if nobody paid you. The Venn diagram of “what they paid me for” and “what I actually care about” was not as overlapping as I thought when I had the job. It got more overlapping after I lost it.
What I got wrong
I thought I would write more.
I had a fantasy that unemployment would unlock the writer in me. I would sit at the cafe with a notebook and produce three brilliant essays a week. The world would discover me. Substack would explode.
I produced two essays in the first three weeks. Then I produced zero for ten days. Then I produced one. Then zero again. Writing while unemployed is harder than writing while employed, not easier. The structure of having a day job creates the rest of your day. Without it, the day stretches into a fog and the writing time, paradoxically, disappears.
If you are about to get laid off, set up structure on day one. A schedule. A morning routine. A standing call with a friend twice a week. Without it, time becomes a soup and you can spend a whole afternoon “trying to focus” without producing anything.
I thought side income would not matter.
I had been selling some PDFs on Gumroad for about a year before the layoff. Small money. A few hundred a month. I treated it like a hobby. After the layoff I realized small money was not small at all. A few hundred a month is groceries. A few hundred a month is the difference between accepting a bad offer in week six and waiting for a better one in week nine.
I have spent more time on the catalog in the last three months than in the previous twelve. Not because I suddenly believed in it. Because the math of unemployment makes you respect every dollar.
If you have a side project that earns even fifty dollars a month, do not call it a hobby. Call it insurance. Treat it like insurance.
I thought interviewing was a skill I had.
I had been on the hiring side of interviews for years. I had given feedback. I had calibrated. I thought I knew how this worked.
I did not. The candidate side is completely different. Knowing what makes a good interview answer does not mean you can give one under pressure when your mortgage is on the line. I bombed the first three loops I went into. I had to actually sit down and rebuild my interview prep from scratch — eight stories written out, the four-signal senior structure, salary scripts I rehearsed out loud in the bathroom mirror like a teenager going to prom.
I got better. The fourth loop went well. The fifth led to an offer I almost took. The sixth is currently in progress.
The lesson, which I should have known: interviewing is a skill, not a state. It atrophies when you do not use it. Two years between job searches is enough to lose most of it. Practice when you are not desperate. You will be glad later.
What I am keeping
The folder.
I have been writing down production incidents in a folder for five years. I almost stopped after the layoff because what was the point — I was not going to hit any new incidents without a job. Then I realized the folder was the most valuable thing I owned. Not the artifacts in it. The habit of keeping it.
I started writing things down that were not incidents. Interview transcripts after each round. Conversations with recruiters I wanted to remember. Lessons from the job search I wanted to pass on. The folder is not about production anymore. It is about whatever I think future-me will want to find. Future-me, I am noticing, is often a year out and very grateful that past-me kept notes.
If you are not keeping a folder, start one. Not for the artifacts. For the habit. The act of writing something down is what turns experience into a thing you can return to.
The slowness.
I will not pretend unemployment is great. It is not. But there is a quality of slowness in the last three months I want to keep when I am employed again. Walks at 11 AM. Reading actual books. A conversation with my partner that lasts forty minutes instead of fifteen. Cooking dinner without checking Slack between steps.
I do not know how to keep this when the job comes back. I suspect most people do not. The work expands to fill the time and the slowness gets crowded out. But I am going to try. I am going to put it on my calendar like a meeting. If it is not on the calendar it does not exist, and the slowness was the thing that taught me the most about what I actually want my life to be.
The work.
The job hunt is going. Three companies in active loops, one of which I am quietly hopeful about. The catalog is producing more income than it was three months ago. The writing is slow but it is happening. The folder keeps filling.
If a year from now I am writing the “I got the job” post, I want to make sure I do not forget what I learned here. The trough. The weak ties. The identity gap. The math of small money. The atrophy of skill. The folder. The slowness.
I am writing this down so I can find it again.
If you are an engineer who got cut in the same wave I did, the catalog is at devrimozcay.gumroad.com. The senior interview prep is the one I would read first if I were you. Built from the loops I bombed and the loops I eventually won.
If you are still employed, two things. Keep your folder. And be useful in public — Twitter answers, Stack Overflow, blog posts, Substack comments. The person you help today is the person who emails you a job in two years when the call comes for you.
Either way. Take care of yourself. Eat lunch. Go for the walk.
And if you have notes from your own layoff, write them down. I want to read them.