Software Developer Layoff Survival Guide

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It's been a rough week.

Meta just laid off 8,000 people, and then the CEO of ClickUp — a company most people have never heard of — went online to brag about cutting 20-something percent of his staff even though they're profitable. No financial pressure. Just vibes. Just "AI made our engineers 100X more capable" so we don't need these people anymore. Then he had the nerve to talk about million-dollar salary bands for the survivors while publicly dunking on the people he just fired.

I'm not here to cover the Meta layoffs.

There are a hundred channels doing that. I'm here to talk about the people nobody covers: the developer at the 50-person company who gets two weeks and a Slack message.

The person who doesn't have a FAANG brand on their resume to fall back on. That's who I was when I got laid off in 2023.

In this episode I get into what actually happened when I got canned - the Zoom call with the person you've never seen before, the access revocation, the immediate panic. What I did right after (not much). What I did wrong (a lot). The psychological damage that nobody talks about, and the things I wish somebody had told me before I spent weeks spiraling.

This isn't a "5 tips to be layoff-proof" episode. I don't think layoff-proof exists. This is what it actually feels like, what actually helps, and what I'd do differently if it happened again tomorrow. Because it might. Your company doesn't have any loyalty to you, no matter how good things seem right now.

If you're going through it, you're not alone.