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Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

stevenbuccini.com

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Re: Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

#51

Post by anon50118810 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #19

> Don’t discount the physical aspect of loneliness either. If you’re like me, work is the primary shaper of your life. Work gives your life rhythm. It is the gravitational center around which the other activities in your life revolve. Then, one day, poof—it’s gone. Exhibit A of why not to take your day job too seriously. Be professional — but that’s as far as it goes. > Come up with a more, uh, positive reason for wh…

Being spoiled for choice with offers is great if you can manage it, but not very useful if you're OP who couldn't find something for a year.

Also, having a job gives you a basic social identity to use to interact with people, and positive cash flow lets you be expansive and outgoing. It's very easy to take this for granted, or assume focusing on work is ultra-materialist, if you don't have a lot of experience going without. I agree that it's healthy to not worry so much about the day-to-day minutiae of a specific job, but this is a lot different from the inevitable decline that comes with not having any job at all.

Re: Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

#52

Post by revskill »

Luck is vital in the interviewing game, from moment you apply for a position after finding a company, to the multiple rounds of interviewing.

My thought is, don't rush. Keep and spend more time on learning and doing what you wanna do, go deeper on the holes of knowledge (not for the sake of interviewing).

Good things need time and patience. It's the only thing that i can do, and i can't do more about it about the interviewing game.

Re: Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

#53

Post by dj_mc_merlin »

librish wrote: post #33
sillysaurusx wrote: post #19

> Don’t discount the physical aspect of loneliness either. If you’re like me, work is the primary shaper of your life. Work gives your life rhythm. It is the gravitational center around which the other activities in your life revolve. Then, one day, poof—it’s gone. Exhibit A of why not to take your day job too seriously. Be professional — but that’s as far as it goes. > Come up with a more, uh, positive reason for wh…

> Exhibit A of why not to take your day job too seriously. Be professional — but that’s as far as it goes. People spend 8 hours + lunch and commuting every weekday on their job. It's almost 50% of the time you spend conscious during a week. Most people want more out of that than just a chore that needs to be done.

Embrace distributed WFH and you can spend 4 hours in the morning, have a nice picnic, play some basketball, have a couple beers, then retire to your room to do another 4hrs. Or just fuck off some days and counterbalance it by doing hyper focused 12hrs days some other time.

Also: unless you're genuinely curing cancer or flying food to starving African villages or something, 95% of software companies are pretty damn useless and any impact a SWE imagines is basically just a mental fantasy that helps one keep working. No one is genuinely happier because another API is created or some rich person has a better way of managing which products he's selling to other rich people. It's all basically useless and just a way to make money.

Re: Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

#54

Post by sbuccini »

mgkimsal wrote: post #38
europeanguy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only in retrospect did I understand the connotations that post broadcast to potential employers. So, you wanna share with us what the connotations were? Is it just that the recruiter read "oh, you're failing a lot, you must suck"? Or is there something else more interesting to this? I'm disappointed that this post is somewhat vague on specifics. But on the one situation that is set up very specifically, we don't ge…

Not OP, but I'll take a guess that it makes the OP look like a troublemaker. Someone who has the nerve/gall/gumption to be so open as to name/shame other companies may not pull any punches when it comes to naming 'company X' in the future after something bad goes down. Posting "here's a list of companies that haven't got back to me" (which is possibly implicit in an open spreadsheet sort of post) is likely perceived…

The connotations I had in mind (although I obviously cannot be sure what the recruiter thought):

- what mgkimsal said

- "This employee is applying to really big companies. I'm not sure they know what they are really looking for. This is a mission-driven company, and we want people who want to be here"

- "This person has applied to 30+ places and hasn't landed a job yet? Must not be that great after all"

- "Someone who posts this information publicly has low EQ, I wouldn't want to work with them"

Re: Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

#55

Post by psychphysic »

jayceedenton wrote: post #28

> Hard Truth #6: Honesty can only hurt you I think the author has come away with the wrong lesson here. Many engineers, particularly those that don't pay too much heed to social mores, think they have some God-given right to share details of all their private interactions publicly. Every tech test they do is pushed to GitHub with an accompanying blog post. Every interview has a transcript (somewhat one-sided) publish…

Agreed.

I was mortified at the simple description of that twitter post.

To lump that with honesty is probably unhelpful long term for OP, certainly unhelpful as advice.

Why scrub social media early only to taint it later!?

Re: Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

#56

Post by p1esk »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #19

> Don’t discount the physical aspect of loneliness either. If you’re like me, work is the primary shaper of your life. Work gives your life rhythm. It is the gravitational center around which the other activities in your life revolve. Then, one day, poof—it’s gone. Exhibit A of why not to take your day job too seriously. Be professional — but that’s as far as it goes. > Come up with a more, uh, positive reason for wh…

it was merely a 37% reduction. I’m very happy with it.

You took 37% paycut and you’re happy with it? Why?

Re: Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

#57

Post by silvestrov »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #19

> Don’t discount the physical aspect of loneliness either. If you’re like me, work is the primary shaper of your life. Work gives your life rhythm. It is the gravitational center around which the other activities in your life revolve. Then, one day, poof—it’s gone. Exhibit A of why not to take your day job too seriously. Be professional — but that’s as far as it goes. > Come up with a more, uh, positive reason for wh…

> Exhibit A of why not to take your day job too seriously.

This can be more difficult when you have been part of transforming a company for 20 years instead of job-hopping every few years. When you have advocated for changes and they have been implemented, there are parts of "you" in the company.

Also the CV looks very empty in this case, even when having implemented many interesting things.

Re: Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

#58

Post by throwawaysleep »

ptero wrote: post #39

Good thoughts, but (not as a criticism of the author), some of the pain points are at least partially self-inflicted: To minimize post-layoff loneliness (and not only for that!) make sure you have a life outside of work: the people you like to spend some time with and things you like to do. To minimize money-driven stress of the layoff, build up a cash cushion that can last at least 6 months; with unemployment, vacat…

> But do not go through the motions of getting an offer with a company you have no interest to work for.

Strong disagree. In this economy, you regularly want to hip pocket job offers.

Re: Hard truths I learned when I got laid off from my SWE job

#60

Post by doix »

sbuccini wrote: post #17
doix wrote: post #3

I'm guessing #7 contributed to the fact that it took the author 1 year to find another job. If you're desperate, you can most likely find an _okay_ job in 3 months. If you don't have the luxury to wait for a "good" job, finding a job tends to happen faster.

Just curious, what do you define as an _okay_ job? Would you be willing to pay the opportunity cost to take it? For what it's worth, I thought the same. I applied to over 50 companies and not all of them were FAANG by any stretch of the imagination. I'll admit I'm not the best at interviewing, which certainly was a factor. But even as I broadened my search to the "okay" roles, I still had difficulty landing work.

> Just curious, what do you define as an _okay_ job? Would you be willing to pay the opportunity cost to take it?

If I didn't have enough money to pay for food/rent, I would take the first offer. Fortunately, I've never been in that situation.

> I applied to over 50 companies and not all of them were FAANG by any stretch of the imagination. I'll admit I'm not the best at interviewing, which certainly was a factor. But even as I broadened my search to the "okay" roles, I still had difficulty landing work.

If you're thinking about the distinction between FAANG and not FAANG, then we are talking about completely different levels of _okay_. I'm talking about non-tech companies, where you'd most likely be working on internal tools or whatever. Maybe you'd be writing crappy Jira/Confleunce/whatever plugins. Or gluing together one internal system to another internal system, etc.

I consider _okay_ to mean a job that pays enough money to cover rent/food.

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