21–30 of 174 posts
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 experiencehirability 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.