I knew I was about to get laid off so I stopped caring and started answering questions on stack overflow all day every day instead of working.

10k rep later I got a new job via stack overflow careers that pays twice as much.

Moral of the story? Be efficient... even when you are not.

Do you guys have that one chick / dude who doesn't know jack shit about shit but just like a fukin cockroach always manages to survive every nuclear layoff, all this guy does is come in an watch YouTube videos all day

Got laid off on Friday because of a workforce reduction. When I was in the office with my boss, someone went into my cubicle and confiscated my laptop. My badge was immediately revoked as was my access to network resources such as email and file storage. I then had to pack up my cubicle, which filled up the entire bed of my pickup truck, with a chaperone from Human Resources looking suspiciously over my shoulder the whole time. They promised to get me a thumb drive of my personal data. This all happens before the Holidays are over. I feel like I was speed-raped by the Flash and am only just now starting to feel less sick to the stomach. I wanted to stay with this company for the long haul, but I guess in the software engineering world, there is no such thing as job security and things are constantly shifting. Anyone have stories/tips to make me feel better? Perhaps how you have gotten through it? 😔😑😐

A web developer has started working on my windows.

How should I communicate with it that I don't want a website outside my windows? Will this be considered a covid layoff if I just throw it off the said window? 🤔

P. S. I'm talking about a spider, icymi.

Survived the layoff!

When you work super hard for 3 years to acquire skills to get a job at your Dream Startup

Then finally after joining,
WITHIN 3 MONTHS, unfortunately, you become a victim of MASS LAYOFFS :|
Since your company is shutting down that particular business

The fuckkk :/

Layoffs happen all the time. But when you survive it and come back the next day and see the empty cubicles occupied by very senior devs who were really close to you and mentored you.

Had to go through this twice, 2014 and 2016. Thankfully we still meet up at Hooters every Friday and rant, and that's our version of a 'weekly'

Another year, another layoff 🙃

Going around the building of a large mega corp telling all my internal customers their projects are going from "green" to "red" because I had a layoff meeting later that morning.
Ever see adults cry because their "favorite developer" was getting sacked and they would not see their project in time, or at worse, canceled?

!story

So, this is the story of my lay off from last organisation. It was just 4 months and i was getting good ratings in features development and overall timely completion. So, during this lockdown/Covid-19, one day out of the blue i and my teammate got a mail from HR to have a catch up. We were suspicious about that. My team mate was sure that it is regarding layoff but I was like we are doing well, why the hell they will fire us, and also it's only 2 of us who is handling the whole project, I don't think they will fire us; they are probably gonna discuss about something or may be covid situation. So my teammate was having his discussion earlier than me; after the discussion he told me that he has been fired, he tried to reason with them for half an hour but ultimately they asked him to put the papers.
I was bit scared, but still i was having hope that maybe..
So, the conversation started like this is the meeting..
HR- Hey, how are you. I thought if we can catch up a little?

Me- I'm good, what happened?

Tech. VP- See, we wanted to talk about your performance, from some past months you're not performing well and ...

Me- but i have been here just for 4 months and our team was the highest scorer in task completion last month.

Tech. VP- i know, i dont deny your technical capability. You're an awesome developer and technology wise you can achieve anything but your performance..

Me- ok, (to HR), anything will change your mind

HR- umm(silence)

Me- cut the crap and let me know how to put resignation via mail, bye.

And i cut the call.
The call lasted only for 7 mins, i was proud to not waste time on such assholes.

Such hypocrites are there...

Entering Week4 post-layoff. Week2 of pretty much nothing but playing with my kids, doing house chores, exercising and job searching.

I spent like 3 hours in the gym last Friday. Instructor there turned to me and said "tough divorce?". To what I answered "very happily married, got laid off from work". He said that it would be his second guess.

Even before this whole crap I had enough cash flow-yielding investments to just about make rent. My wife makes enough to make sure we will want for nothing, our old folks have our kids' tuition fees covered, and we have some savings anyway.
But the anxiety-laden period between "send a dozen messages and resumė's" and having the same "greetings, fellow millenial!" meetings with different sets of tech-illiterate boomers and toddlers is becoming a boring nuisance, one that "having a side project to keep my mind warm" could solve.

Maybe I will fix the Stardew Valley Mods API for Android. I haven't done the C#/.NET thing since uni, and my frontend Java game is weak (at best) but how much could have it changed this last decade or so? /s

Maybe I will write a MongoDB Runner for Apache Beam. But I'm afraid that won't yeld enough street cred to be worth it Does anyone knows what it means?

Maybe I will finally be done consolidating a lifetime of cloud storage into a big-kid glacier-level LTS solution.

Dunno, bored here. Need some 20h/week project I can quit as soon as some job appears to be lining up. Ideas?

Best: Got my first dev job a month before I graduated my bootcamp. Was hired till rona layoffs started happening. Found another dev job 4 months later, and just received a promotion from said job just before going on holiday leave.

Worst: Being laid off for those 4 months. Sure unemployment + stimulus got me through financially, but mentally and emotionally I was starting to crack. I had thought I broke through the barrier with that first job and was going to be set. That layoff threw a wrench in my whole plan. In those 4 months unemployed I developed some imposter syndrome. Regardless, I plugged along with my side projects. One company was really impressed with one of them and was using a similar stack for an upcoming project, so luckily they ended up hiring me. Confidence restored.

Survived my second layoff at this company in less than 2 years. Feeling bitter sweet.

When I joined there was about 50 people here and now there is a little more than 15.

I think the way this company has done the layoffs have been humiliating to the people getting laid off. The “higher ups” will request that everybody be in the office for a company-wide meeting around noon. Then at around 11am that day, they will individual take people into conference rooms and lay them off. By the time the company-wide meeting starts, they’ve laid off all the people they needed.

Why lay people off infront of the whole rest of the company? I don’t see any reason

Is there no more jobs for software engineers in market? Because the only thing I'm seeing is layoff, right now!

I wish the companies understand the value of silent and problem absorbing people who are the people supports the company more than the ones who talks more to the death.

Fucking ceo sends out a message about taking advantage of mental health services while her minions go through the employee ranks and purge employees to take advantage of the layoff glut from 2023 tech bloodbath. I wouldn’t need mental health services if you fuckers would leave my job alone and let me get on with it. Absolute scumbags in the c-suite.

The glory days of high salaried devs are nearing the end. Tech layoff numbers are ***king huge.

Has ANYONE ever seen a multi-day layoff? WTF are they thinking?! Best case, no one shows up today with violent motives after getting an invite last night to get downsized.

I was terminated last year from BigTech. Will I ever get another job in another BigTech company?

Not a layoff. Terminated for moonlighting. Lack of judgment on my part. Trying to move past this but the events still haunt me till this day.

Not looking for sympathy. Rather, advice on how to approach job search and background checks in the future. I have big ambitions and don’t want to be an IC forever. I’m hoping this doesn’t prevent me from becoming a manager —> Director in the future.

Is exclusively being assigned bug tickets only for a whole sprint (they're not my bugs) while another dev does feature work a bad sign? I'm a Senior SDE but my domain Knowledge is far weaker than the other SDE 2, so he can get feature work done faster. Bug fixes are general project ones that are either suddenly very critical or lower priority and leads me to keep debugging some other aspect of the system (not much documentation sadly so have to check whole flow slowly to understand it, very financial based).

My manager also just yesterday said as a senior my expectation is to lead a project and we'll discuss the requirements of my role. This is my direct manager, the one who assigned me all the bugs is the project manager, who also acts a bit like an SDE sometimes. The problem is I want to deliver work my main manager suggests but I simply don't get the time due to suddenly high priority bugs occurring (last night 1 hour before I log off, other manager says to find root cause analysis of a high priority bug), this isn't an oncall rota or task either, just normal bugs all the time.

Is this a bad sign? Am I about to be PiPed?

Layoff layoff everywhere finally back on devrant to not see a layoff story.

Has anyone engineered getting layoff before?

I don't know why, but I dread waking up to the job. It all seems meaningless and a waste of time. I know I'm coming from a place of privilege. But what's the point of doing something you abhor and trading your life for money on shit you hate?

My company just announced we're going to have a one week furlough. It's bad, but not as bad as a layoff. If we miss Q2 (which we will with the current state of affairs), then we will have layoffs starting in July I'm sure.

DevRanters, Have you witnessed a mass layoff in your company where you weren't the one getting fired? If yes, what was it like?

Every day I read people ranting about their jobs here, well, when i read this, I am thankful I still have a job:

Massive layoffs: Meta, Twitter, Amazon, Zillow, CNN, Tesla
Stopped hiring: Google, Microsoft

Is a butterfly effect, let's see how many of us will reach, then you can rant about having an "stressing" life

Web Assembly performance layoff

Layoff wave in Germany.
There is a new open-source project on Github, willbeallright-COVID19 for engineers being recently layoff because of the COVID19 situation. The main aim is to help programmers to stay connected to job opportunities. Quite interesting as the main contributor mentioned immediate questions that should be asked after the notification, and it seems to be on point as even here I've seen people searching for that information like What about all the personal items you have on the company computer? How can you get this information back? She is looking for community support so if you have any experience with layoff might be an interesting project.

I knew programming was for me, MUCH later in life.

I loved playing with computers growing up but it wasn't until college that I tried programming ... and failed...

At the college I was at the first class you took was a class about C. It was taught by someone who 'just gets it', read from a old dusty book about C, that assumes you already know C... programming concepts and a ton more. It was horrible. He read from the book, then gave you your assignment and off you went.

This was before the age when the internet had a lot of good data available on programming. And it didn't help that I was a terrible student. I wasn't mature enough, I had no attention span.

So I decide programming is not for me and i drop out of school and through some lucky events I went on to make a good career in the tech world in networking. Good income and working with good people and all that.

Then after age 40... I'm at a company who is acquired (approved by the Trump administration ... who said there would be lots of great jobs) and they laid most people off.

I wasn't too sad about the layoffs that we knew were comming, it was a good career but I was tiring on the network / tech support world. If you think tech debt is bad, try working in networking land where every protocols shortcomings are 40+ years in the making and they can't be fixed ... without another layer of 20 year old bad ideas... and there's just no way out.

It was also an area where at most companies even where those staff are valued, eventually they decide you're just 'maintenance'.

I had worked really closely with the developers at this company, and I found they got along with me, and I got along with them to the point that they asked some issues be assigned to me. I could spot patterns in bugs and provide engineering data they wanted (accurate / logical troubleshooting, clear documentation, no guessing, tell them "i don't know" when I really don't ... surprising how few people do that).

We had such a good relationship that the directors in my department couldn't get a hold of engineering resources when they wanted ... but engineering would always answer my "Bro, you're going to want to be ready for this one, here's the details..." calls.

I hadn't seen their code ever (it was closely guarded) ... but I felt like I 'knew' it.

But no matter how valuable I was to the engineering teams I was in support... not engineering and thus I was expendable / our department was seen / treated as a cost center.

So as layoff time drew near I knew I liked working with the engineering team and I wondered what to do and I thought maybe I'd take a shot at programming while I had time at work. I read a bunch on the internet and played with some JavaScript as it was super accessible and ... found a whole community that was a hell of a lot more helpful than in my college years and all sorts of info on the internet.

So I do a bunch of stuff online and I'm enjoying it, but I also want a classroom experience to get questions answered and etc.

Unfortunately, as far as in person options are it felt like me it was:

- Go back to college for years ---- un no I've got fam and kids.

- Bootcamps, who have pretty mixed (i'm being nice) reputations.

So layoff time comes, I was really fortunate to get a good severance so I've got time ... but not go back to college time.

So I sign up for the canned bootcamp at my local university.

I could go on for ages about how everyone who hates boot camps is wrong ... and right about them. But I'll skip that for now and say that ... I actually had a great time.

I (and the handful of capable folks in the class) found that while we weren't great students in the past ... we were suddenly super excited about going to class every day and having someone drop knowledge on us each day was ultra motivating.

After that I picked up my first job and it has been fun since then. I like fixing stuff, I like making it 'better' and easier to use (for me, coworkers, and the customer) and it's fun learning / trying new things all the time.

McAfee will never layoff its employees due to corona .... cause they make antivirus 😛🤣

I was assigned as an on-boarding buddy for a new hire in finance. I wish I had know they were hiring finance as I would have recommended a friend who had to relocate to Nashville to get her job back with Amazon.

They're hiring finance and sales people, but my company has yet to replace any of the developers who have left since the layoff last year. It's a startup, so I understand them needing to generate revenue more than anything else, but it really doesn't look good for the company.

Company had to do some layoffs here and there. Good I’m not affected. Still a Merry Christmas for me.

We’re only random people living in random places, speaking random languages, eating random food, sleeping, studying and working random hours. Traveling to random points on a sphere.

Just random range is different.
Just random stuff happens on crossroads of two random dots and the entropy speed ups or slows down.

Nothing special at all.
Just a finite state machine iteration.

I mean the amount of effort we put into explanation of infinity is outstanding.

What if there is no infinity at all ?
What if infinity is just misunderstanding of our interpretation of the world around us. It’s just pixels, resolution, gaussian splatting, quantum state, you name it.

Hey man the world is flat. Just put it to the 2d space. How many space you need from a simulation perspective where your patient eyes can only see up to certain amount of light particles per second on a shitty lens.

Propose a world optimization techniques by slowing down subject perception, tiredness introduced. Compress memory, sleep introduced. Limit neurons, cpu power assigned. Deploy on cloud - put it to life. Exit 0 body failure. Exit 1 suicide. Kill -9 killed by tty from ip EARTH.X.Y

What you can do to make the world around this planet alive? Make it blink.

We developers are lazy and I believe that nature is even more lazy than us.

You think you’re going to elevator right now ? You’re going to the preloader. Looking at the window equals playing video from playback. Never goes live, just precomputed fsm. Cars, trains, airplains ? Preloaders everywhere. Highways to split traffic to cities and communication. The road and cities planning department is a matrix maintenance department. And don’t get me started about space.

Space is empty because it’s not even finished. So they put it all behind glass called milky way. You know how glass looked 500 years ago ? It was milky so it’s milky way so we don’t see shit.

If the space would be finished I’ll be starting writing this text from mars, finished it and sent from earth but no it’s light years guys, light years is not a second for a matter. Light year is a second of the the injected thoughts exchange only. Thoughts of the global computer called generative AI that they introduced on local computing devices called cloud.

Even the preloader system is not present, they left us with the one map and overpopulated demo. What a shit hole.I bet they’re increasing temperature right now to erase this alpha build and cash out. Obviously so many bugs here that his one can’t be fixed anymore. To many viruses.

Hope for 0days to start happening so we can escape using time travel or something.

I bet they cut a budget or something, moved the team to other projects. Or even worse solar system team got layoff off because we are just neurons that ordered to do it. And now we’re stuck in some maintenance mode, no new physics no new thoughts to pursue, just slow degeneration. I would pay more for the next run and switch to other galaxy far far away where they at lest have more modern light speed technology.

What do you think about it Trinity ? Not even worth wasting your time for that. No white rabbit this time.

I do not recommend this game at this stage of early access.
- only one available map despite promises for expansions over the years no single dlc arrived,
- missing space adventures
- no galaxy travel mode only a teaser trailers of what you can do in other “universes”
- developers don’t respond to complains
- despite diversity of species and buildings at first sight world looks to generic
- instead of new features bots with mind manipulation, AB testing and data harvesting was introduced
- death anti cheat mode installed

Random learnings/realisations/hypothesis:

i have found a sense of happiness in weird symbiotic environment : being rich in a poor environment and live with a poor-but-secretely-rich lifestyle.

i call it the "sheep-hoodie" lifestyle: being a wolf in a herd of sheeps but not with a sheep's skin glued to your body. rather a hoodie so you can be a friendly wolf , ferocious wolf and a friendly sheep whenever you want to.

my 1 group of friends are in a sheep phase : struggling in their life , crunched on money, not saving a lot or focused on savings and stuff. At least that's what shows up from their discussions. however when we are together, i see that we are always supporting each other, and sharing resources/helping each other while having fun

my another group of friends have a wolf lifestyle:
they are insanely rich, if you want to party/do something with them at 'their' level, you gotta have a lot of cash to burn . they are wolves because they know how to sell their stuff, whom to sell and how to retain the info for success. i don't enjoy much with them as their solutions to life problems end up with something that involves a lot of money than effort.

So my lifestyle is to earn like them, but live like my broke friends. they think that am earning 20% of what i earn now, and am also in lots of debts and family crisis. someday my lie is gonna burst when i buy expensive stuff lol

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#2
i have realised that i have an OCD for silence and psychotic reaction to noise . for me ,
Silent Environment >> sex >> any relationship.
I might react so aggressively to noise while trying to focus that i may end up breaking the closest of relations with anyone

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#3
thinking of having 3 twitter accounts just to fix the problem of devrant not saving content of dormant accounts :
- professional : an id where i will share my professionally stupid questions, achievements, debates etc
- personal/partial-anon : an id where i will share my personal thoughts and stuff. it might also include devrant screenshots / embarrising content that i make here
- true-anon : a full anonymous account for my(some) extreme thoughts, trigger content and explicit researches

my current twitter feed is a mix of first 2, but making 2 seperate accounts might give me more freedom(the level of devrant) to express myself than what i do now (as my followers are also interesting people but mostly related to tech)
guess i should move my tech content there than my personal content.

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#4
making an early opinion about something should only be done to research for truth/content/conversion/hype . final opinion should always be made after you trust something with a research. for eg, initial opinion of Elon Musk was he being a bad guy, but now after seeing his crazy ideas and approach towards twitter, he looks like someone who can truly make it a money minting machine.

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#5
A simple perception towards making money as not being a bad thing does wonders at a management level and life .
liberal opinion of twitter layoff and later changes were emotional and blaming, but thinking from a business approach, his company partners(and whoever he likes) now have special golden badges to feel like VVIP and have an orgasm, while he gave a dummy melon to every person on earth to pay for feeling like a VIP and have an orgasm.
a brilliant tactic to make money without anyone calling the minting of money as BAD. genius

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#6
was randomly checkin Insta, saw an ex-collegue share a random deep thought quote, and i realised that i might have known her for just a week or 2 in college, but she had a very nice nature.

However, she was the daughter of a very rich ass dad and had almost everything in life. she gave a bit spoilt(for me) look, like someone who did ciggs or drink, but her talks then and our chats later just on chat gave me a very nice hustler vibe (the type of people i like: hustling and professional)

I indirectly asked her on a date and she agreed. so, this is something very interesting for me, as i am hopelessly single and full of judgemental opinions/ strict rules. share your tips and notes on how to have a successful date, and stuff that one must NOT do . much grateful if you do not come under rule 29 of internet and share your POV

Does a role reassignment necessarily mean I am on the chopping block/going to be laid off? I was hired as a Junior Software Architect and I ended up doing more infrastructure work (think DevOps) but I wanted to do more actual C++ coding. An email was sent out to the manager/HR by my supervisor and I think for the most part I will still retain the same title - the email just states what my next tasks are (knowledge transfer to other employees) and what my new role will be.