Violet Sky

No, that’s not clickbait, I really did get laid off.

The timing was rather amazing. I had my 6 week sabbatical this summer, which I managed to stretch a little further than that by aligning it with the Juneteenth holiday. I returned from the sabbatical, worked a single day where most of what I did was catch up on emails, Slack messages, and the code that had been flying around since I left. The next morning, I woke up, picked up my phone as usual, opened my email, and found a bcc’d email informing me of my layoff.

This did not come entirely as a surprise. The vibes (for lack of a better term) have been off at work lately, Blind’s rumor mill was going steady with specifics about a layoff coming just before August earnings, and my transfer to another team was blocked at the VP level just before I went on sabbatical. I was half expecting to be laid off while on sabbatical, so the fact that I came back and made it a single day is a little amusing, if I’m being honest.

The severance package is good. I’m on payroll until the beginning of October, thanks to Washington’s WARN Act. After that, I get a lump sum of 15 weeks of pay, a post-tax payout of 6 months worth of COBRA, and an accelerated vest. I’m not clear whether that’s my August vest or my November vest, since I’m still on payroll, but I suppose I’ll find out. All in all, the layoff will earn me about $60k, so as long as I can find a job before the end of February, things should be fine.

As for how I’m feeling… there are a fair mix of emotions, but a lot of it is relief. I’ve been very unhappy at work for almost a year now, and would probably have taken FMLA for stress late last year if I didn’t have my sabbatical coming up with travel already booked. The biggest downside is that I like making money and they gave me a lot of it, so hopefully my next move, if not comparable, isn’t too much of a downgrade. Either way, deep down, I know that I never would have taken on the stress of job hunting while still employed at a job that was making me miserable, so to get paid to do it, instead, is not so bad.

I’ve had two layoffs before this. The first one was devastating and left me with lasting financial trauma, while the second one was inconsequential because I had already positioned myself to get a software engineering job, and I just transitioned to full time in the internship I was in at the time. Fingers crossed this third one goes like the last one did. 🤞