My mother called me in October 2022 to ask if I was affected by the tech industry layoffs. I confidently replied, “Nope, I’m good! I don’t think I’ll be impacted at all!” I had received a promotion per given review cycle, a title bump to senior, and total autonomy over my work while WFH by hitting my timelines with documentation to communicate to my manager/investors on the tech decisions I was making, all in less than a year. I was proud of pushing out completed feature sets that positively impacted the company and its users, and was aiming to push myself further up within the company. I wrongly believed that there was no way I would be affected.

However, I woke up early one morning in November to push out a massive feature I had been working on for the past couple of months. After successfully deploying the feature to production, I received a slack message asking if I was available for a quick zoom meeting. My heart skipped a beat, and I accepted the meeting only to find out that I was being terminated. Shortly after the call, my work laptop locked and I lost access to my email and logins. I was hurt, confused, and a bit angry that I couldn’t say goodbye to any of my awesome coworkers whom I had been with for the past couple of years. My mind raced with reasons as to why I was terminated. Was there something I was missing? Wasn’t I doing well? It turned out that my termination had nothing to do with my performance. The company was trying to save money and be frugal for the anticipated recession coming soon.

This was the first time I had been terminated, so I decided to spend the next month reflecting. Here are some of the thoughts I came up with:

• The company’s value of “family” only means something if the company is doing well.
• Just like how the company ultimately looks after only itself, I should be doing the same by periodically checking the job market to see how it’s doing and update my resume with my achievements during this time.
• A “no asshole” policy applies only to employees, not the company.
• I need to be better about keeping an emergency fund ready in cases like this.
• Just because I worked with a certain tech stack in the past does not mean I still know it presently. For example, I worked with nodeJS/JavaScript with my previous employers, but forgot how to navigate myself around it during interviews due to working in Java recently.
• I don’t need a logical explanation for the decisions a company makes; they don’t always make sense. Therefore, I shouldn’t get frustrated while trying to figure out why/how a company decides to do what they do. I just need to accept it and move on.
• I shouldn’t take termination personally. It has nothing to do with my personality or the work I produced during my time at the company.
• I should have taken advantage of the “unlimited PTO” perk and taken some days off during the downtimes I had in between working on features. I rarely took days off because I believed that I should always be working hard and showing up every day would indirectly communicate to my manager/company that I have the discipline to work hard. However, I now realize how silly/detrimental this is to my mental health, and taking days off to take care of myself is 1000% better for myself and work than showing up burnt out.

As with anything in life, time keeps marching forward and life moves on; I look forward to the wonderful things that await me in the future 🥂.