Week 1 After the Layoff
This is week one after being laid off. I want to capture these thoughts while they're still fresh. It was around 1am last week, the night before a national holiday. I was scrolling through messages randomly when I saw a notification from a Telegram group some colleagues and I had created as a just-in-case support network if the team ever dissolved and we lost access to the company stuff and can't find each other. So a colleague sent, "I've been affected by this round of layoffs. It was great working with y'all." I immediately responded with sympathy knowing that this isn't like the first time the company did this. "I'm so sorry to hear that." And then almost comically, I checked my own Slack access. Gone. My email inbox held the formal termination letter. And so, my follow-up message to the group: "Oh, I'm also laid off too. How ironic and funny."
And if that wasn't funny enough, here's another story from two of my other colleagues. I'll just call them A and B. Their conversation was like this: "Are you still here?" A said. B asked, "Still where?" A said, "Still at the company." B said, "What do you mean? I'm at home." A said, "We had a round of layoffs and I'm one of them." B was like, "Gosh, really?" A said, "You didn't know? I got laid off." And B was like, "Oh shit, I can't log in either." A said, "Yep, you're also laid off. Check your email." B was like, "Ah, fuck."
So finding out you've lost your job while on holiday, when your mind is way away from work, it's just not great. But what was great was that since there was a bunch of us, instead of the little groups that get fired before, we had like a group chat and added the bunch. And it worked like a support group. People I knew but rarely spoke to in Slack before, because I was so busy at work, we suddenly became a daily connection. And seeing all those names, people I knew who were really, really good at their jobs, it made this whole thing feel incredibly random. Like maybe they just gave someone like a budget number or gave AI the budget number and the list of names and asked it to pick.
Yeah, but this randomness, it actually helped. It meant it wasn't necessarily about me, my performance, how bad, what I did wrong. It was just a thing that happened. It was just we were unlucky. We got picked by this, I don't know, AI, and it's a clumsy corporate thing. So here I am a week later, and honestly, I think I'm doing better than I expected. Maybe deep down I always sensed something like this could happen eventually, because I've seen people getting fired quietly here and there. And I'm not rushing into job searching just yet. The severance package, well, it was better than nothing. But the biggest upside is time. I suddenly have time, time that used to belong entirely to the company, and I feel free now.
So right now I'm surprisingly busy resetting up my whole dev environment from scratch, reconnecting with people, having actual conversations. It felt good and sort of peaceful in a weird way. I'm just moving forward, taking back my time. So the thing about layoffs is they show you what you were actually in control of and what wasn't. So it wasn't about my performance. It was just a company with bad financials, and it's not something I could actually do. But how do I respond to it? It's entirely up to me. I'm already lucky that all I need to do is just feed myself. And so I think this is as easy as it can get, if I want to put it that way.
And so here's to the unexpected turns, to support from rising places, and yeah, do whatever comes next. This is me, Week 1, after the layoff, signing off.