Monday morning I got an email. Simple subject line: “HR Management.” And I already knew. Deep in my gut, I already knew what it was about.
Come Friday, the meeting confirmed it. The HR people delivered the longest, most corporate-speak sentence I’ve ever heard in my life, but it all boiled down to one thing: I was getting laid off. Redundancy.
And it sucks. Like, genuinely sucks. I knew it would feel bad, but I didn’t expect it to feel this bad. My first thought was “okay, I’m still a software developer, I can just find another job.” Right?
But then you start reading about other people’s experiences. People job hunting for months. Some for over a year. Talented people doing everything right and still can’t land anything. And suddenly that confidence just evaporates. I don’t have a year’s worth of savings. And I’m supporting my family financially, so it’s not just about me.
It’s not about the job
I think what scared me the most wasn’t losing the job itself. It was everything around it.
And yeah, of course my whole life depends on my job. That’s just how the system works, I know that. But there’s a difference between knowing it as a background fact and actually feeling it press down on me. When the threat became real, that obvious truth hit a lot harder than I expected.
I like my life right now. I really do. My lifestyle, my routines, the little freedoms I’ve built for myself. All of it is enabled by having a decently paying job. Take that away and everything starts to wobble. The apartment, the stability, the ability to help my family, the peace of mind. All of it suddenly felt so fragile.
That’s the part no one really talks about. It’s not just the career hit. It’s the existential panic of realizing how thin the thread is that holds your entire life together.
I got lucky
That was the headspace I was in for a while. Just bracing for the worst and hoping something would come through before things got really bad.
And fortunately, something did. I found a new job. I know how lucky that makes me. Because for every story like mine, there are dozens of people still out there sending applications into the void, wondering if something’s wrong with them. There’s nothing wrong with them. The market is just brutal right now.
But that stretch of panic and dread and uncertainty? I won’t forget how it felt.
It’s a tough job market out there. I’m rooting for everyone still looking.