71–80 of 174 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there unions for software devs?
I was - and still am - a member of https://www.prospect.org.uk/ 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
Round 1: Dot.com era - 4 years out of college, out of work for 6 months along with a lot of the industry on the West coast of the US. Depressed as hell, never thought I'd work as a programmer again. In desperation, I take a sub-contracting 1099 job and get my 1st taste of consulting rates. I bank over 1/2 of my income planning for the job to end.
Round 2: Consulting job ends, but I've learned to PLAN for layoffs to happen in this line of work. Only searching for about 3-4 weeks as job marked has significantly picked up. Landed 1st start-up job at what became "psychotic start-up from hell".
Round 3: Fast forward a few years - best job I ever had, but the small company decided to use US employment law to shaft me & 4 others who had made millions in profit for them to lay of off with hardly any severance & zero warning after tricking us into TRAINING our replacements from an outsourcing firm in Ukraine (spoiler alert - everything is great at company financially: they just wanted to look BETTER on the books to get acquired). Bastards then had the nerve to call us back 6 months and ask if we'd come back (gee.. I wonder why...). The good news? I'm only unemployed for 72 hours - yes. 72 clock hours on the wall. Former colleague recommends me to a bigger, more professional consulting org that has a job my personal and professional experience is tailored for. Lunch WAS the interview w/ the director of development & development consulting. I sign the offer letter on the new job 45 min after signing the severance paperwork on the old job.
Round 4: I was asked to join a fantastic later stage startup with a bunch of very energetic & inspiring people. Then, there was a political coup where the CEO was thrown out of power and so, who got to go with him? Why the 3 newest technical staff hires + one bystander all in the name of cutting start-up burn rate. This one has ended up happy though, since the new CEO in power felt a little guilt for axing us he put 3 of us in touch with another start-up. 6 business days later for me, I've got a job again (same pay, better benefits, more "stability") and 1 of my other 2 friends also pursued & accepted an offer.
All of this was over the course of 20+ years as a developer. Not as a "team lead", not with any "management" or "architect" experience. Just a work-a-day mid to senior developer who likes to build & ship software. What I've learned from this:
Lesson 1: Never EVER let your skills slack. Keep learning new things, or hang up your keyboard and go sit in meetings (e.g. management, product, whatever). Note: If you're going to do this, it's fucking hard as hell to try and go back. It's also a completely different skill set to do it well as say, a development manager or a technical product owner.
Lesson 2: Keep networking & going to meet-ups and conferences. This helps keep your skills sharp and you inspired to keep learning.
Lesson 3: Lesson 1 + 2 does equal 3 - That is: "You will reach a point where not so much 'what' you know as 'who' you know will lead to your next big jobs and/or big opportunities". Don't burn bridges, as tempting as it may be.
I think the first time is the hardest, because of the feeling of panic and also rejection. Later in life, I actually had much more to worry about (wife and kid to support), but experienced much less stress because I knew that I had gotten jobs before, and could do so again.
I think some of this may be that the first time, you have less of an idea of what you need to be doing next. The more of a plan/procedure you have in mind for what to do, the more you can focus on that, and not any emotional impact of what you think about the fairness or correctness of the decision to lay you off.
In truth, for me, being still at work after a layoff or firing of co-workers is much more depressing, but I'm sure that's not true for everyone.
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…
Laid off from my first full-time job! Started at RIM/Blackberry in Jan 2012 in the BB OS group working on BB10. Was laid off in March 2013. Got 10 weeks of severance so I was funemployed for most of the rest of that year. Did some freelancing, projects, and went on a month-long backpacking trip.
Full disclosure: was making CAD 70k/year at RIM and my next full time job started around Nov 2013 for GBP 41k/year (and by March 2014 visa stuff was settled and I’d moved to London).
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…
Sane employers will pay lawyer costs if they know they’d lose in court.
But that’s Canada.
In the last round, it was a Tuesday. We had just discussed lunch when in walked HR and the CTO. They announced they were closing the office. Very hollow announcement. It was definitely not the best way to do it.In between the time they told us, and my turn to go into get my comp paperwork, I sent out a tweet just asking for leads. By the end of the day, I had multiple leads. I gave myself 24 hours to be sad about it. By the time Tuesday evening came around, I was going out riding with a cycling shop, and used that to put things behind me. Wednesday I woke up to 6 interviews scheduled, with another 6 on Thursday. I had a job the next week. Thankfully I wasn't too rocked because I had the finances to stay above water.
Moved from code monkey to lecturer. More stress. More fun.
Side note: people thse days who take quallifications in Comp Sci very rarely have a side project (coding) or take any time out of school to code. Most are extremely surprised to hear that it's my hobby to code, you know, just for fun. They couldn't imagine wanting to do it for fun. It's sad. But it says more about how we educate and test people, rather than their attitude towards programming.
It was pretty weird and despite reassurances from the partners, I took it as a hint that it wasn't the most stable of jobs.
Started looking right away and found a more stable dev position within a few months.
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.