From Layoff To New Job

3 months ago I was involved in a layoff at the previous company where I worked. This season was pretty impactful for me, so in this post I want to tell my experience with this and how I faced it.

The layoff

This day started like usual. I ate my breakfast and drank my dark coffee, then I went to my home office and turned on the computer to start the day. So I checked the chats as usual, but there were unusual messages in the general channel: the company scheduled an extraordinary meeting with all departments. In my team chat started to appeared whys and concerns. Why so early? Meeting for what? Why all the departments? I continued my day as normal, waiting for the meeting, so I checked the PRs of my partners and checked the ticket that I had assigned.

The meeting started, and the CEO started to talk and give us the notice. “All in the meeting are in layoff,” and then the session ended and the video call service closed. I didn’t understand what’s going on in this moment. I thought everybody was in this meeting, so I said to myself, This is impossible. Then I moved to chats of my team, but I figured out that part of the team was still in another meeting. People in the second meeting were safe, and I figured out that the first meeting was only for the layoff people.

Then I started to get messages such as “Don’t worry,” “I’m sorry,” and “How do you feel?”. I was impacted in this moment. I’ve never been in this situation. So a teamworker in this moment an now friend, called me. He also was in the first call, so he also was out. He started to tell me that he was in this situation in the past, we will be ok. I hung up this call and got out of the office. I saw my wife’s eyes, and I told her what had happened.

She gave me a hug and told me that all will be ok. But I was still impacted. All looked like usual; my wife was in the kitchen, the baby was playing, but I didn’t have a job anymore. So I returned to the chats, and chatting with my coworkers, we started to figure out who was in the layoff too. My surprise was when I figured out people from other departments. We are really talented workers and extraordinary people; we were impacted more each time we figured out a new coworker was in layoff. Even my manager was out.

So my manager scheduled a final meeting. It was clear that it was a bye meeting. When I entered the meeting, people were already talking about it all. I heard a coworker say, “All’s gonna be fine…” and then a joke that someone laughed at, and then the manager started to talk. He started to tell us that we are excellent workers; he mentioned our achievements and the projects that we launched and said thank you for all. He was in the same boat, so he was free to talk personally if we wanted to express our thoughts. The day finished, and I’ve never connected to this chat again.

First days as unemployed

Well, in my country, they told me to take some days to relax and then start with the end of the relationship with the client. In this moment I’ve remembered that the company told me someday in the past that if I lost the client, they would assign another client, so I started communication with HR. Well, the notice was bad; they didn’t have a client for me, so they told me that I will get my termination pay. When I got the money, I paid some debts and started the real adventure…

My wife told me that I needed to rest and get relax, she told me “Don’t look for new job yet, get free time for now”. But these words can’t entered in my mind, I was really concerned about getting a new job, debts, and groceries, even when I had the termination pay.

Looking for a new job

Well, the first thing that I did was update my resume and my LinkedIn account. I added the new experience and skills that I acquired in the previous company. Also, I improved my LaTeX resume in order for it to be readable to readers.

When I tried to apply for a job, I checked my experience: Node.js, Ruby on Rails, PHP Laravel, Reactjs, VueJS, and Angular. And I saw specialized requirements like React Engineer and Node.js Engineer, like the full stack wasn’t popular anymore, but at this moment it was urgent to get a job, so I didn’t make a plan.

My strategy was to get the people instead of the positions, meaning I added people from companies that I was interested in, mostly recruiters. When they accepted me, I shared my resume and my experience. Also, I surfed to the main page of the company and went to the “career” section and applied for it.

I got many interviews with this strategy, but these interviews were discouraging. When I shared my salary expectation, I received a “NO” and they offered me a low salary for a senior job, and when they described to me the responsibilities, I needed to say, “I’m sorry, this is not my expectation.”

One day a recruiter from Amazon contacted me to offer an opportunity to participate in their recruitment process. So I said, “Why not?” So I got different meetings with them where they explained to me the benefits, the requirements, etc. Then they suggested I watch some videos about what it is to work at Amazon and study the guide. The guide basically studied the foundation of computer science. Data structures, complexity, algorithms, databases, etc. Since the university, I hadn’t touched these topics, so I needed a plan to do it. I made my plan on my calendar to study, and they gave me 1 week to do it and present the assessment. The plan looked solid, but I missed an essential part: I’m not a student anymore; I have not only a personal life, I’m a husband and father, and I have more responsibilities. I started to study, ignoring all that. So yeah, I studied 2 days. The plan failed, and when I applied the assessment, I felt good, but I didn’t accomplish the necessary points. After that I took 1 week to rest and actually spend time with my family.

In the meantime, I started to watch news about a global economic crisis coming, AI stealing jobs, violence, fewer opportunities, crisis in the software industry, and wars. All these increased my anxiety. In this little season I didn’t have an interview; I applied on LinkedIn, and I signed up on Glassdoor, WeWorkRemotely, and Upwork. No result, so my anxiety increased, and soon this started to be depression.

After this bad season I started to receive invitations again. One in particular, which looked for a Ruby on Rails developer. They organized a Ruby on Rails event with chats, speakers, snacks, coffee, and this kind of stuff, you know, this event to catch talent. So I thought the video calls and remote interviews were not enough; I needed to meet people in person. I drove 3 hours to the place, got a hotel, and prepared for the event. Honestly, I was excited because a long time ago I didn’t attend this kind of event. My surprise was when I figured out we were only 5 people and the speakers. The presentations were pretty good; “What’s New with Rails 8?”, “How to Set Up a Sitemap on Rails?”, and “AI on Rails.” I won some challenges, a cup, a notebook, I ate pizza and drank beer. Actually, it was a nice night.

In the event I met the tech lead of the company that I applied to, a nice guy with a bunch of experience with Rails and Python. So since I knew the people in the company, and apparently I liked them, the rest of the process was easier. But unfortunately their client paused the process.

Again I had nothing, or did I? Something that still took my attention was there weren’t many people at the Rails event. So I investigated how many Rails engineer exists in my zone. I figured out there are few. The game change was clear: I needed to move my career to a specialist on Ruby on Rails.

I already had 4 years of experience with a REST API built on Ruby on Rails. I knew the framework, but on this job I was a full-stack developer, so I had more responsibilities like the React front end, AWS services, etc. So I started to read the Rails documentation, take Ruby courses, add Rails content on my RSS client, and join the Rails communities, I figured out that Mastodon, the main social media that I use, is written on Ruby on Rails, so I checked the code, reviewed issues, and pull requests, and of course, I started projects on Rails.

Then my money was over, and I needed to use my credit card to get groceries. So it was time to get a freelance job. In the meantime of my looked for a new Rails job, I found a job that basically was about migrate a script from PHP to Node.js. And now 3 interesting Rails opportunities, and the good news is they offered me exactly what I actually asked for, the exact salary that I wanted. The surprise was that 2 of those companies offered me a job after I finished their assessments. So I accepted the one that offered me a little extra money and better benefits.

New job

So now I’m in the new job, and I paid part of my debt on my credit card. I got the device to work from home, and I’m ready to start to work. The first days were pretty straightforward: meet people, get access, and meet the client, so for now I haven’t touched or seen code, but I’m pretty sure that I’m ready and excited to do it.

With all these, I increased my knowledge because I learned new stuff to apply to the positions, and I moved my career from a full-stack developer to a Ruby on Rails backend developer. I increased my salary, and I got experience being unemployed.