The first time was at a struggling startup. We all knew they were struggling and the company was very honest with us and kept us abreast of all the companies that our VC backers were pursuing. I was in some of the interviews with potential acquirers.
Our backers promised all of us that “we would get paid for every hour we worked”. Of course they couldn’t promise us we would not get laid off.
All of us stayed until the bitter end. That day we all got laid off after being acquired for scraps, we went to lunch together and hung out in the office just joking around until the end of the day.
We all had something in our back pocket anyway and from looking at LinkedIn, everyone found a job that was either as good or better within a month. This was 2011.
Our largest customer arranged for me to get contract with them to finish out a project, the acquiring company gave the customer access to all of their code and gave me permission to keep my work laptop and waived my non compete.
They gave everyone a month severance. I was treated fairly and have no ill will toward anyone there.
The second time it was Amazon in 2023:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212
The third time it was a shit show of a company last year. But this is where I have problems with the author
> How do you succinctly summarize and highlight all you’ve done there?
I keep my resume and longer form career document up to date at least once per quarter. I list out the details of major accomplishments in STAR format while it’s still fresh. I have both a technical summary and a business oriented summary for non technical people.
It looks like he learned that lesson too.
> I was being selective and only applying for places I’d realistically want to work
He has a newborn baby. His first priority is to work for any company that will allow him to exchange labor for money to support his family. Even if you do have savings, no need to use it unnecessarily.
I got a 3.5 months severance from Amazon the year before last and my stretch goal was to get an offer before my paid out PTO of 9 days was over let alone dip into my severance.
Of course I reached out to my network first and targeted outreach to companies specializing in my niche (strategic cloud consulting emphasizing app dev). I also spammed my resume to any CRUD enterprise app dev job as a Plan B.
I could always keep interviewing while working. I was working remotely.
I did end up getting a Plan A job offer within 9 days of leaving AWS. But I knew three months in that it wasn’t going to be a long term job.
When the end did come, I was already in the early stages of interviewing for my current job and had an offer three weeks later. But again, I wasn’t going to let the perfect be the enemy of getting any job and I kept applying for Enterprise CRUD jobs until the offer was finalized.
I did work on a side project in 2023. But I got paid for it. A former CTO had some work he needed done.