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

I have hired (interviewing team member, or hiring manager) hundreds of engineers.

If you are hearing "let me know if I can help" (number 5) you might be doing something wrong. You should be hearing some version of " I will talk to my boss" or "I will call for you" or "XXX person I know is looking".

I have a list of about 30 people who if they call me I'm going to go out of my way to get them a job. That means make a spot for them on my team. Or I will reach into the non overlapping parts of our networks to see if someone is hiring.

Im going to do this because they are good, because they don't suck, because they will get the job done. They will make me look good as the person who brought them in/onboard.

Those of us who survived the bubble did so on hard work and a network. We brought along the people we thought were the best, who we got along with, who would get the job done.

Its the new year, it is the perfect excuse to figure out who your network is, and what they can do for you. Make a list of folks you know, call them up, tell them your thinking of changing jobs. If you don't hear a lot of "send me your resume"/"is your linked/site in up to date" then you need to make some changes.

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) published and shared to Twitter. This is typical oafish behaviour displayed by mamy engineers and frankly, it annoys people. It's often considered a red flag when hiring. Understanding when to be discreet is an important skill for any employee.

Lying about why you're looking for work is a bad idea. That small lie will escalate, you'll have to start stringing together more lies, and when you get found out it won't reflect well.

This has nothing to do with radical honesty. I'm not suggesting you air all your dirty laundry during an interview. But don't lie. And don't publish all private interactions because you're a fan of free software. It's not the same thing.

Being laid off was not a relief -- it was terrifying. All indications were that a severe recession was coming. Frankly, it was quite surprising to me that companies were hiring at all given the uncertainty. It was not obvious at the time that broad sectors of the economy could seamlessly move to 100% WFH. It was also my first experience in fully remote interviewing.

I am a software engineer over fifty. I also have three children two of whom were in college, and my wife works in a travel related industry which was very much affected by the pandemic.

Given those things I approached my job search aggressively and with a sense of urgency, and I made it out OK. I was out of work for about two months and accepted a role at flat comp.

Being laid off is profoundly lonely. I was part of a mass layoff (approximately 2/3 of my company was laid off.) So while I was not alone in that sense, we were all very much alone together. Where you had been a team, you were now five people looking for jobs, each with their own problems and constraints. My wife could not have been more supportive, and yet the process of interviewing and landing a job is one you have to do by yourself. One of the hardest things is to maintain an upbeat outlook, and yet it is so necessary because no one is going to hire a miserable sad sack.

On the other hand, I had no stigma whatsoever attached to the fact that I had been laid off. Part of that might have been that the size of the layoff was such that anyone with any glancing familiarity with the place I was at would know that 2/3 of the company were laid off.

One thing that I would emphasize would be maintain your professional network in good times and in bad. I got a number of good leads that way.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. I decided to spend Christmas break in CDMX[0] by myself in order to reflect not only on the past year, but just how far I've come since I got laid off. This is the result.

Thanks for making all those hours at the café (instead of at a museum or bar or whatever) worthwhile.

[0] I'll be here for a few more days if you'd like to meet up!

I found the pandemic lonely. I saw less than 1 person a month for the first 14 months of the pandemic. And i find WFH incredibly lonely. I haven't recovered. I'm utterly alone most weeks. I see no one. Even if I go to work, no one is there. I moved cities a year ago and have only 1 friend and 2 acquaintances in the new city. 2 of those 3 are married and I see them maybe once a month, if I'm lucky. The 3rd I haven't seen since August. The pandemic as killed meetup.com. It used to be full of activities. I don't think there is 1/20th of the activities there used to be.

- Always have savings that will cover at least 6 months of expenses, now probably a year (if indeed it takes so much time to find a new job).

- Socialize outside work, ideally have a network of people that work at other companies that you are in touch with. Sports, charities, churches etc. If this is hard, ask yourself if you are overworking yourselves/spend too much time at work.

- Be careful what you are posting on social networks. Employers are more and more concerned about the image that you have on the internet. I propose to have 2 profiles, the first a professional one with portfolio of projects, blog, articles and what's not and the second for your private views (nobody should track that profile to your person using publicly available information).

Also I wonder what the author is doing professionally. I don't see any hard tech articles on his blog. Maybe he is into niche tech or doing some no longer hyped stuff like data science? That would explain why it took the author so long to find a new job. Maybe if this is the case the author should reflect on his skills and maybe change his niche to something more marketable?

A company is not family, they're not your friend, and the perceived loyalty you think you've "earned" doesn't mean a thing if layoffs are coming.

Treat your employment as a business arrangement. You get a paycheck in exchange for labor. Nothing less, nothing more.

If feels very very very wrong to compare a search during April 2020 and now.

Why? The year after April 2020 was a booming job market for SWEs. Hiring managers were competing for talent, 2021 was a boom year of low interest rates, euphoria in private and public markets.

This blog post _should not_ be considered a response to the WSJ article.

And sorry, grinding away at leetcode should only take about 2 months tops if you don’t have to worry having to balance leetcode and your job, and not a tall ask for a 250k+ job in tech. if you don’t need that high a salary, smaller companies generally are more lax about leetcode

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, vacation time and any severance it can probably be stretched for a year.

And #7, "think whether you want to work for that company after getting an offer" seems off the mark. Sure, reject an offer that is not the best and stretch time on a safety offer until you get a better one. But do not go through the motions of getting an offer with a company you have no interest to work for. If you do not want to work for a company at all, do not apply there. My 2c.

Have one or more side projects going all the time. If you get laid off, immediately start doing a startup, open-source project, or volunteering full time. A year of unemployment? Lonely, depressing, and not good on a resume.

A year of launching an unsuccessful venture? Running coding classes for the underserved? Focusing full-time on contributing to pytorch? That's a lot better, both at the time and in retrospect.

Side projects are also a good way to get hired. You meet people.

You also learn stuff, and stuff of the type you can't learn in a job.

You can also do the equivalent of an acquihire. If you want to work for the world's #1 drubble maker, and you spend 6 months developing a drubble startup, guess who'll come out the most knowledgeable and passionate about drubbles at the interview? And perhaps even bring in some helpful IP?

Your back story is "I tried to go it alone; I think I can do a lot more good with the backing of a company."

If the company is mid-size or better AND it’s not a sweat shop, take it while you assess your next move.

Don’t make the mistake of staying put, however, unless the team or company aligns with your interests.

Context: I took a break, got married, and started looking for SWE work just when the “great recession” was looming.

It took me six months and some unpopular niche skills just happened to open some opportunities. Just barely.

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 why you’re interviewing instead of disclosing that you were laid off.

There’s nothing wrong with being laid off. I was, last week. Saw it coming from a mile away. Told my new employer about it.

Here’s the secret for getting a job you’re happy with. Try to have competing offers. I would have had to take over a 60% reduction in salary if I hadn’t had one. But I did, and so it was merely a 37% reduction. I’m very happy with it.

This is an area where I have to give tptacek lots of credit. I sort of shuffled from job to job until he posted this nugget of wisdom, and it’s quite true. None of the points in the article applied to me because of a fundamental shift in mindset. It happened around 7 years ago.

I think the loneliness aspect is intertwined with the reason why most people don’t try to go interview while you already have a job. You see your job as something more. It’s not just a job; it gives your life rhythm.

Maybe so. But in my experience, the way to be happy is not to care so darn much about it. Do a good job. But try to get a better one. And when you’re on the market, try to get multiple.

The recent thread about the engineer who got their offer rescinded from two different YC companies is exhibit B. They mentioned that they stopped looking for new jobs after things seemed to be going well during the pre-offer phase. Don’t do this. You should be doing a breadth-first search of all possible opportunities: talk to as many people as possible, and spend your time weighted by expected outcome.

> “When faced with two choices, flip a coin. When it’s in the air, you’ll know which side you’re hoping for.” —Former gangster Arnold “The Brain” Rothstien

Basically, you'll know which direction to take, after taking your first step (or you'll learn to fly, after being pushed from the nest).

In my case, this was exactly that. I got laid off from my previous job (after almost 27 years). It was entirely expected (for years), so I'd had a lot of time to prepare.

When I learned Hard Truth #9 (If you are over 40, it will be rough. If you are over 50, prepare to be humiliated -and not get a job), I was fairly panicky, at first, then, I realized that I had plenty of savings to retire early, and I already knew of some nonprofits that could use my expertise, so I didn't need to stop working.

I really wanted to retire -not to play golf, but to work harder than I ever have, in my life, doing stuff that is appreciated, effective, and untainted by bad management and "fuck it -let's ship."

So I was forced into it.

A number of companies didn't get my work, but I seriously doubt they miss me. They certainly didn't seem as if they would, during the recruiting process, and I probably would have been laid off again, tout suite.

It's actually been an amazing five years.

It's sad to see people again and again sell their life.

Going through the experience once makes you more empathetic to folks in a similar boat.

Personally, I'd love to get to work with Java, after (many) years of C++. Such an amazing technology and ecosystem.

This is how the world becomes a worse place - perhaps if working for the company developing this is life or death for you or a loved one, I can see why.

But otherwise, consider doing something else.

I have been providing computers services independently since 2007, but had a cerebral hemorrhage in 2017. Which I wrote short book about(It needs some work still)[1]. My NDE came without the typical experiences that you read about, but something within me had changed, I had a really hard time being dishonest and hiding parts of myself from the world (this is how I see it, others might see it differently). During my recovery, I didn't know if I could return to providing services independently, and had some interviews after being out of the work world for about 15 years, and man, had it changed.

My brutal honesty about myself and the world didn't go over to well in those interviews. But it made me realize how messed up parts of the world are, and how the employer/employee relationship is really slavery to forces outside myself. A good book on this is "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity"[2].

Obviously, its not so easy to extract oneself from this relationship, I had something to fall back on as I redoubled my efforts to continue my services independently. Obviously, not all employer/employee relationships are slavery, but the corporate world and the politics behind it feels like slavery to me.

It feels like we are gradually moving away from centralized systems like these as more and more people realize whats important. COVID seemed like a big wake up call for many.

It's important, now more than ever, that people find what's important to them and start taking small steps in that direction as it seems like concentrated industries that are too big to fail are starting to collapse.

[1]:https://www.scottrlarson.com/books/book-most-improved/

[2]:https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Everything-New-History-Humanity-...

When I was laid off, it was very comforting to rebuild community with others who were laid off at the same time.

We started a Slack instance where we:

* shared resources with each other

* complained and vented and healed together

* celebrated each other's new jobs

* continued the network for years after

"If you had asked me right after I got laid off how long it would take me to get back to work, I would have said three months – including two months of vacation. It took me a year."

That is fascinating. I'm glad they shared this experience. It is very different than my own experience. I'm trying to imagine what that would be like, to go a year looking for a job.

Here in New York City, at the end of 2022, I am still seeing very strong hiring of software developers. I was recently hiring at FutureStay.com. And I recently had a friend lose their job and they found another job after 6 weeks, of which 3 weeks was pure vacation.

The one group that I see struggle is new developers who have just graduated from dev bootcamps. Some of these developers struggle 6 to 12 months to find a software development jobs.

But of experienced software developers? Going a year without finding employment? I heard of such stories during the recession of 2001, though I never saw it among my personal circle. And this was very much true in the aftermath of the crisis of 2008 -- it wasn't till about 2011 or 2012 that things got back to normal. But even then, when I went looking for a job in 2010, it only took me 4 weeks to find a job.

A year without a job?

I will say the industry has gotten slower about hiring, with more and more rounds of interviews. In the extreme case, some companies now have 9 or 10 rounds of interviews, which is far past the point where the Law Of Diminish Returns sets in. By contrast, when I was hired at WineSpectator.com in 2010 the CTO interviewed me for 2 hours and then hired me on the spot, I didn't have to talk to anyone else. Likewise when Mark Herschberg, the CTO of ShermansTravel.com, hired me in 2011.

I feel like the industry is driving away possible talent by adding in so many layers of testing and recruitment.

There is absolutely no good reason why an experienced software developer should go a year without a job. That such a thing can happen suggests something is broken with our current hiring processes.

I don’t understand this assertion, unless “laid off” now means “fired with cause”. People are laid off all the time, for no reason other than the company wants to reduce their labor costs.

Perhaps the author is assuming that the company is also making a judgement about their skills, e.g. that they’re somehow not up to some arbitrary standard? (I think that it is very easy to make this assumption, especially when laid off the first time.)

Anyway, there should be no need to give a potential employer a reason about why you were let go other than the position was eliminated.

Whether you are at risk of getting laid off or not - not having friends outside work is a bad idea.

This feels like it may be an iceberg. Could you expand more on what "reshaping" you're seeing? Are you referring to the mass layoffs specifically or is there some broader context to this comment?

Not sure exactly what this means but it's pretty common for recruiters to check your timeline and try to work around it. For instance, they'll try to expedite you if you already have offers on the table or relax the timeline so it fits with interviews.

...

> The sooner you accept that you will have to do the interviewing equivalent of eating your vegetables, the less you will immolate yourself and, by extension, the opportunity in front of you by dying on some absurd hill. Suck it up and play the game. Sounds obvious? If so, I will politely refer you back to the title of this post.

Those comments seem dissonant. The second sounds like someone who has blindly bought into the first like it's a truth. It's a political struggle and we can do much better.

The hill isn't at all absurd; people before you fought for it and won it before - that's how you ended up on top of it. They didn't do that by accepting defeat as some inevitability, but by seeing the world and imagining something better. (They did the same with technology - how will you be an entrepenuer if you buy into this reactionary, depressive, defeatest attitude?)

Now it's your turn. The future of our society, in significant respects, depends on it.

It depends on you. Your predecessors built everything good that you have. Now it's your turn - no cavalry is coming; there's nobody else. It's you and me. With a little vision and daring, it's incredible what can be accomplished - just look at the world we live in.

I've been laid off before and I share the OP's perspective that it can be a cathartic singular moment in life that presents an opportunity for re-invention.

And please... network, network, network! I know not everyone has this opportunity, but if you leave a good lasting impression and make friends with strong coworkers, over time they will get promoted to higher and higher positions making it incredibly easier to find a job when needed.

No.

Or rather, maybe?

I have been fortunate enough that in a couple decades in this industry, including two major downturns, I've never been in a position that I /must/ find a job on a particular timeline to pay the bills. While my life situation helps with this, I do recognize that luck is a major part of it.

As a result, this line in particular fails to resonate with me. If I take a job doing something that makes me miserable, I will be miserable. Maybe I can put up with it for six months, but what's the point? During those six months, between working full time and being miserable, I will not be effective at looking for a long-term role I enjoy. Better to take a personal bridge loan and keep looking for something that works for me.

We're software engineers. If, like me, having someone pay you to build cool shit is about as good as it gets -- hold out for that, don't settle for doing what you "despise" instead.

We could all get better at facing unpleasant reality; so much more damage is done by being avoidant, mainly to our own character.

The key question is why recruiting is maladaptive, whether the market is hot or cold.

The answer lies in why no one has really addressed the question: recruiting is spoiled by a culture and practice of secrecy.

The goal is to be fair and avoid recruits gaming the system, but the practice ends up nurturing toxic judgments, tending towards the paranoid and the extreme. Paranoia excludes supposedly non-compliant untrustable people evidenced in resume gaps, and extremism excludes supposedly toxic people evidenced by ancient social media posts.

Like defense procurement, the secrecy that is necessary ends up concealing and preserving toxic practices. In both cases, programmatic application of objective standards could dis-intermediate, so the recruiters/procurement bureaucracies resist and claim essential wisdom.

It was an incredibly humbling experience - reaching out to tens of companies and barely getting any responses. Took me 3 months to just secure my first on-site.

I’ve generally always gotten jobs from reach outs while employed - making me feel special - when in reality it was my skills simply lining up with some open headcount at that time.

When you’re laid off suddenly it’s a whole different ballgame. It’s largely luck trying to find matching roles with open headcount. In a downturn this is especially rough (like now).

It taught me some things: don’t stay anywhere too long (it restricts your network), make sure your skills are not too niche, and ensure you are following industry trends so you remain widely employable.

I still member of two active "ex-..." communities. Those are most helpful and useful, especially when other people are getting there after me and it was a perfect cause to get back in touch, meet for drinks or get back on track with common hobby.

After first one I always open my piggy bank and do the things I wanted for a long time but had no time to do. Like getting a sailboat skipper licence and do a couple of gigs like deckhand on a voyage, repair or long haul. Or travel for a distant destination for a month.

Time between jobs is always great to get in touch with own body and mind, like doing a health checkup or visit short-term psychology group.

And of course it is a perfect time to spend more time with parents, relatives and friends.

Honesty really has no place in corporate interactions. The author is way too old to be learning this lesson. The reason you are applying is that you "are passionate about X because of Y" even if you don't give a flying crap about what the org does.

Saving at least 20% or so of every paycheck is good standard advice for rainy days. But, also not to keep any debt.

Lastly, it's not that terrifying these days to not have employment in the software industry. Things will turn around as long as you work on developing your skills. Staying positive is good advice for the short and long-term. Because everything will work out, and we usually stress a lot more than we really should.

I've never considered leaving a job for any reason to be "lonely", nor does it take very long to find another position that suits me well. If I let one of the recruiters I talk to know that I'm looking for work, I've usually got multiple interviews within 3-5 days.

The only thing I'd really agree with is the bit about honesty and transparency - I've definitely been a bit too honest about my faults before and it's cost me an interview or two.

I don't know if I'm an odd duck, or the author is just very poor at networking - but it seems like the latter to me.

Again, it's not about deception. If I were asked, I'd say I don't have any professional internet presence (which is true, I don't. This is me as a person here, not me as an employee.) I of course will link my GitHub, but links from my internet presence only point in the direction of my GitHub, and not the other way around. So if you were really curious, you could dig. Nobody cares to do that, though. I think employers that search are mostly just looking for blatant red flags to try to simplify their lives, and thus it's mutually beneficial to keep a lower profile online even if you don't do anything wrong.

Of course, in my case, it also helps to have a super common name :) But still. Being "just" a pseudonym most places is fine.

One thing I'm doing different this time around is that I'm building a project that could be useful for some friends and might actually scratch an itch. It allows me to get back in the latest technologies and adds something to my portfolio.

By extension wondering how accurate overall job market statistics are; "Employers are scrambling to find workers" while layoffs have been in full swing for months now.

> You’re going to have to grind Leetcode. Yes, even the dynamic programming problems.

One trend I've been seeing is the MANGAs have been moving away from leetcode crap - in my org at one of them, I think almost the entire org is against leetcode questions as an insufficient form of candidate assessment.

> Come up with a more, uh, positive reason for why you’re interviewing instead of disclosing that you were laid off.

Honestly, as an engineering manager on the hiring side, I haven't seen any negative perception in these times when candidates disclose they were laid off - its become so common as of late & often not due to the candidates' fault that it's a non-issue for us. I know a manager trying to extend a formal offer to one such candidate who revealed that they were laid off. I especially appreciate honesty in a candidate when they admit they don't know something & try to set the conversation around working with the info they have as presented to them, creating space for an open conversation around questions being asked instead of viewing it as a Q&A session. Those tend to be the candidates who get the highest marks from me.

I survived it eventually after 6 months but I wish I knew all the truths before that.

After getting through a few of them already, I feel a little more comfortable of the process itself, even if it meant I ended up with rejections. At least with a little boost of confidence around it (that and seeing my financial runway), at least now pushing myself on this has changed my attitude.

For what it is worth though, my own interest is to work with something that I can improve on what I improve on. Except for a couple of industries, I'd do anything almost, hopefully with an emphasis on Java, as I think the space is a bit more exciting than the many years before now (or that I stopped caring over trends and just want to write programs :))

This seems like something that will become especially prevalent this time around given the much higher level to which salaries were pushed during the bubble.

I don't even like tech anymore, maybe it's more fulfilling to start a farm or coffee shop

- Have perspective. Several years down the line when you're in a new company/career/life, you will recognize this layoff was a necessary thing to happen for you to "get there."

- It's going to take a while. Every job I ever got, took waaaay longer than it should have. Things happen. Roles get filled internally, headcount goes away, etc. Job finding is inherently filled with friction, so if it takes 6 months or more, don't interpret that as "I am bad/this will never work" - it's just the nature of the beast.

- Be in sync with your family on what matters. My wife was very clear that she was going to be fine if it took me longer to find a role I was really excited about. We were lucky that we could afford that, and it's good to be explicit.

- There's no stigma in layoffs but you can generate your own stigma in how you talk about it. Don't be bitter and do provide some color. My answer why I was looking was "the company took a big revenue hit with COVID and had to reduce headcount. The strategy was to cut from areas that were further along in technological maturity, such as (my area.) We lost a lot of senior tech talent, including myself. I am really grateful having worked there, though!" This is 100% true to what happened and how I feel, and it's a great answer because it makes is clear I wasn't fired because I was bad, and shows some maturity and perspective.

- Be aware that your next job may not be your perfect job. It should be good enough that you MIGHT want to stay there, but at the very least can be a launching pad for your real next role. When you are laid off, the question isn't "do I see myself here the next 10 years" but more like "am I pretty sure this will be an interesting / worthwhile year and a half"

- Don't be negative. The author posted some spreadsheet about how rough his job search was and then was surprised that a company wasn't interested in him. I don't think this is the same as "truth can hurt you" - more like "companies are on the lookout for red flags, and if you are the kind of person who complains in public, maybe you are going to be a negative culture fit." That's doesn't mean they want yes-men, but there's a big difference between people who feel an obligation to dissent (strong positive) to perceived complainers. Complainers are poison.

One thing we can do to help is have each other's backs by providing references. I've made it clear to colleagues who get laid off that I don't care what the corporate policy says: I'll give you a reference. It's a moral duty.

Really? I would think contributing (significantly) to an open-source project would look better than spending time on leetcode, though I've never tried leetcode.

In the TV series Boardwalk Empire, he said that. I can't find any evidence he ever said it in real life.

However, the poet Piet Hein did:

Stejler man foran et vanskelig valg

og vil ha det afgjord prompte,

er det et såre fornuftigt princip

at platte og krone om det.

Ikke at valget skal ske pr. hazard,

i mens man selv sidder og måber

men: lige når mønten er kastet til vejrs

så ved man precis, hvad man håber.

(His own translation:

Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind,

and you’re hampered by not having any,

the best way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find,

is simply by spinning a penny.

No – not so that chance shall decide the affair

while you’re passively standing there moping;

but the moment the penny is up in the air,

you suddenly know what you’re hoping.)

It doesn’t get easier per se, but you do start to develop a process, and having a process makes the whole ordeal a lot less daunting.

Perhaps the most daunting part for me right now is that I’ve spent the better part of a decade getting hired by people I worked with before, and this is the first time no one in my immediate network has a req open. Still, the value of a network is paramount: To paraphrase another comment here, do good work and be good to work with, and you will have people out there looking for a reason to get you in the door.

Hard disagree. Interviewing is expensive as all hell from the company's perspective. Any company interviewing a rash of candidates is engaging in a weird strategy.

Getting an initial interview is a positive sign that (on paper) you're qualified. Further interviews with the company become a blended signal of your qualifications and being a culture match with the latter becoming more dominant with more rounds.

And then companies wonder why employees are more and more "mercenary"...

Let's be honest, whatever you (any of us) as a SWE were working on previously was probably making the world a worse place also, regardless of what you thought when you first started working on it.

In my opinion the last decade (or two) of tech can be summed up as "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Why there isn't this much problem with having to learn yet another JS framework,

get familiarity with database of the month, learn some tool like docker/k8s/ansible/vagrant/blabla or yet another proprietary toolchain like AWS/Azure/GCP

but foundational cs/programming knowledge is top hated thing, that people even call it "discriminatory for people with families" or something like that

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.

Truth be told, most of the dynamic programming problems in Leetcode are relatively straightforward: find the recursive relation or state transition equation in general, identify the initial condition, and then build up the transition from bottom up. What's much harder, at least to me, are those ad-hoc LeetCode-Hard problems that require insights or clever tricks.

Don't let work be most important part of your life! Companies encourage you to, so they have another cheap way to lock you in. Years of work from home showed me that your (social) life shouldn't mainly happen at work. Better find friends at hobbies/meetups/etc.

I didn't feel like I needed to keep that I was laid off a secret; but I disagree about doing the 8-hour take-homes. They indicate unreasonable bosses and I always walked away. When I was more naive and did those kinds of things, I would often get no callback, not even a "thanks but no thanks."

The biggest mistake is losing your job, then having to prep to get a new one.

That game me urgency like crazy and with a bit of luck I found my dream job in 3 months.

I agree with everything you've mentioned but the biggest +1 for me is that it's lonely. I'd add that all job searches are lonely in my experience.

Uh, no. If you're paying for your own drip coffee, you're working at a convenience store, not in an office. Coffee is for closers and people who write software.

But you will be employed."

I think the author should spend some time considering the implications of these two lines.

In fact, I think we all should.

But you will be employed."

With the same attitude DuPont managers dumped PFAS into the rivers.

> You’re going to have to grind Leetcode. Yes, even the dynamic programming problems.

What are dynamic programming problems?

1. Getting laid of is usually pretty liberating. Everyone knows the company isn't generally doing well, the air is hot with friction, and you probably know you're working yourself into a corner. Getting laid off has happened to me two and a half times now. The first time was in the 2007 crash, and the company was hemorrhaging money and everyone knew it but didn't want to admit it. The second time I happened to quit the same week the CEO was planning layoffs. He teared up thanking me for saving him from having to fire anyone. The third time was one of the worst work experiences I have ever been in, but I didn't realize it until it was over. I called my wife and was excited, not downtrodden. Every day for the next two weeks was full of lunches and drinks and I had to insist on being allowed to pay every time.

2. This is just good advice. The only things you should spend money on when interviewing are dry cleaning and resume paper. I think my longest stretch was about 9 months, and my wife was forced to go back to work during that time despite just having a baby.

3. Yes and no. Some people don't interview well. Based on the author's other writing, he seems like the kind of person who might not interview well. In my career I think I have a close to 30% offer rate on interviews (but I'm very picky about applying for jobs). Yours may be higher, or much lower.

4. This is just always good advice. Set a bar for yourself, be willing to negotiate, and realize that work environment is about 500x as important as what technology you are using. I once got a job at a perl (yay!) shop where I worked for literally 1 day because the environment was so toxic.

5. Most offers for help come from people who don't know how to help. The author's approach here of direct asks is fantastic. Most will flake on you, but those that follow through are true friends.

6. Yeah this was a bad move. Don't talk about your exes on a first date, and definitely don't bring up the ones that swiped whichever direction the bad one is before your first date.

7. If the economy keeps going the way it is headed, ditch this advice in its entirety. Take that job, grasp it tightly to your breast, and don't let go no matter what happens. The job market in a down economy could be romantically described as falling somewhere between a chop shop and a meat market, and the hiring incentives for managers can be pretty twisted.

8. This has taught me to have a healthy relationship with my career. That post-layoff feeling should be bottled and sold next to the stickers that neophyte programmers put on their macbooks. There's nothing more seductive than confidence, and the clarity that a layoff brings is the best test of confidence there is (up there with a cold sales call, a VC interrogation, etc). If you can internalize a realistic understanding of your own skill level and marketability, you'll be an attractive hire, teammate, leader, etc.

1) You should not be broke if you’ve worked a few years as a software engineer. You’ve been earning good money and it is important to save during the good times so you’re prepared for the bad. I’m not saying this necessarily applies to OP, but it’s generally good advice to keep some money lying around for a rainy day.

2) If you feel secure financially and get laid off, it’s a great time to do something time consuming. I have a toddler, so it’s been a lot of fun to hang out and bond with her. Friends have made video games or picked up a new hobby. Most people I know who got laid off who felt secure financially love it.

3) Your network is your best asset. After the layoff, multiple old contacts reached out with job offers. I was very grateful for these, but declined them for the reasons above.

TLDR: being laid off can be a blessing if you’re financially prepared.

> Hard Truth #2: It’s gonna take longer than you think

I was laid off once and had a new (higher paid) job before gardening-leave was over (two weeks) - OP doesn't say what offers they turned down..

Thank you

~

This is the very same recession we've been talking about :)

The approach would be (writing it from memory, will revise it if there is any feedback):

First master the basic data structures and be able to manipulate them rather quickly. We will write many small programs to ensure that a one can perform most of the common operations on a given data structure straight from memory.

Then we will write transformations, i.e. being able to convert one data structure into another.

Next up with be problems that requires a combination of data structures.

We will spend a good about of time in graph problems, the usual data structures used to store / manipulate them and understand some of the basic graph algorithms ( MST, Traversal, Shortest Path, etc.)

We will briefly spend some time on sliding window problems.

Dynamic programming, Greedy and divide and conquer techniques are rather simple, but we need to distill it down to a science so that we can code them eyes closed :-)

Order complexity, how to think about it by looking at an intermediate step and calculating how many operations are needed to get to next step. We will dig a little into the mathematical aspect of it.