You Got Laid Off. Now What?

How to act with resilience when you’ve been let go

 
I joined Etsy in 2015, shortly after its IPO, as a product manager on the seller experience team. After the company struggled to beat investor expectations for a year and a half, then CEO Chad Dickerson called an impromptu all-hands meeting the day of our March 2017 earnings call and announced an 8% layoff, along with his own resignation. I remember the audible gasp that went through the room when he shared the news. I certainly hadn’t seen that coming, and the warm and fuzzy feeling I felt at work vanished in an instant.

Over 120,000 tech workers have been impacted by a mass layoff in 2022—including at stalwart firms like Stripe, Netflix, Amazon, Coinbase, and my own employer, Meta. Losing your job is never easy, but it’s even harder when there are so many workers on the market and many firms have hiring slowdowns or freezes in place. This environment is probably one of the worst labor markets for tech employees in a decade, which is remarkable given that only a year ago, they were in exceptionally high demand and negotiating lucrative offers from employers.

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