Navigating Uncertainty: My Layoff Experience and Path Forward
It has been ten days since I first found out that I had been laid off by my company. I still remembered vividly the flow of events that happened on that fateful night of 22nd March 2023, at around 11.15pm.
Moments before, I had been cracking my head to figure out how to write the code to populate data into the AWS Elasticache Redis and contemplating about the order of Merge Requests that I would be sending to my team the next day for code review. I knew I was almost done with my task and decided stop working and take a rest for the day, so that I could wake up on time the next day, to head to office. Just as I was about to shut down my computer, my mouse curser hovered to the bottom edge of my computer screen and I noticed the red notification dot, indicating unread messages, on my Slack app. Without any hesitation, I opened my slack message to see a DM from one of my teammate.
“Were you impacted?”
Initially, I was puzzled by the message and didn’t quite comprehend it. And then, a shiver ran down my spine as I thought about what “impacted” could possibly mean in that context. The fact that my teammate had sent me a message close to midnight, which never happened before other than the day when a production issue happened, indicated that something serious must have happened. I quickly went to check my work email and saw an email with the title “Your Position Has Been Impacted”. Alas, my hunch about a possible layoff turned out to be correct.
The first feeling I got, upon realisation that I had lost my job, was shock and disbelief. Even though in the past few weeks, my colleagues and I had been joking during lunchtime about the possibility of layoffs and questioning each other what we would do if a layoff happened, deep down we never actually believe it would happen. We all “believed” that our company, which never had a history of layoff, would not do this to us. It was something that happened to other people at other big tech companies. Not us. And in the recent months of Q&As with the senior leadership, we had been given the constant assurance that “there was no plans for layoffs” and the company was in a “financially sound” position. The CEO even said, “unless the economy takes a nose dive, we are safe”. Therefore, my thoughts were that even if a layoff was to happened, it would only happen a few months later. Not now. Not since there wasn’t any major economic event recently, other than SVB collapse which we had earlier checked, didn’t affect my company.
Millions of thoughts raced through my mind as I tried to process the information. I wondered if I was one of the few people in my team or company that had been impacted. I also wondered how the decision was made. Haven’t I consistently gotten a positive feedback and reviews in all of my performance evaluations? I even got a promotion just earlier in January. Why promote me when they were going to fire me anyway? Could it be that they only fired junior engineers like me? Made no sense though, since our pay was lower than our seniors engineers or managers.
I thought to myself that it was fortunate that I went to office earlier that day and managed to see some of my colleagues and friends at work. I never would have expected it to be my “last day at work”.
Then, I felt a tinge of embarrassment. I had always thought that layoffs happened to people who didn’t “work hard enough” in their jobs or had “poor performance”. This layoff indicated to me that maybe I wasn’t doing a good job as I thought I was. This was also my first job out of university and I wondered how my future potential employers would judge me in the future. Would it become a taint in my resume? How am I going to explain to people?
After all the negative emotions and thoughts raced through my mind, I decided to break the news to my family (in actual fact the only person still awake at that hour, was my mum. My siblings and father had gone to bed already). I walked out from my study room and the first sentence that came out from my mouth in Mandarin was, “Mum, I think I just got fired from my company. I don’t need to go to work tomorrow.”
My mother looked at me blankly and questioned, “Why? What happened?”. I shrugged my shoulders and then recounted to her about the email I had just received. At that point, I felt my voice breaking a little but I was able to compose myself. I assured my mother, and myself internally, that I would be alright. It was not the end of the world and I would be able to get through this and get a new job. Fortunately, I was still young and didn’t have any dependants.
Then, I went back to my study room and started scrolling through and replying slack and telegram messages from my colleagues. In the company’s runners telegram chat, which was a group that my colleagues and I created for our weekly Wednesday evening runs, there was a flurry of frantic messages sent by my colleagues. Everyone was saying they just received the Impacted email. Someone then made a poll so we could figure out exactly how many people were impacted. When I clicked on the results of the poll, I realised that everyone, except for 1 person, were impacted.
As I later found out, the entire tech office in Singapore, except for a few engineers from 1 team, had been impacted. Due to various factors, the company had decided to lay off the entire office to cut costs. From then on, the remaining engineers that had not been impacted would be working remotely with their counterparts in another APAC country.
To be honest, after I found out that almost everyone in Singapore were impacted, I felt a slight relief that my layoff was not due to my poor performance. It was rather, because I was in the “wrong” office, which I couldn’t help. However, I later began to worry that it also meant that everyone would then be “competing” with each other to find our next job, and given the poor market conditions, it was likely that it would be a challenge. I was also aware that in recent years, in an attempt to jump on the tech boom wave, the Singapore government had actually increased the intake of students in STEM degrees, more specifically computer science, in the local universities. These students would be graduating soon in May this year and this simply meant more “competition” for everyone.
I went to bed with a heavy heart. I couldn’t sleep that night and just kept tossing in my bed, thinking about the layoff, about my dreams and my future. Everything seemed so pessimistic at that point.
The next day, some of my colleagues texted me that they would be heading to the office and asked if i wanted to come to say my goodbyes. Since I had nothing to do at home, I made the last minute decision to visit the office to meet my colleagues again. Almost everyone turned up in the office and many teams held goodbye meetings. We enjoyed the catered lunch and teatime snacks, snagged some goodies from the office pantry and goods from storeroom for the last time. It was a strange day as it was the first time I didn’t have to work when I arrived at the office. I also felt a tinge of sadness and took lots of photographs of the office as I knew I would never come back again and the layoffs marked the closure of a chapter in my life.
Looking back, were there any signs of an impending layoff?
Yes. If I had been sharper, had more experience, or didn’t have too much trust in the company’s senior leadership team’s words, I might have spotted some signs.
The first time that I felt that a possible layoff might happen was in January when one of my friend at work told me that her team, from another department, had been ordered to be shut down. The product that the team was working on was mainly used by users in the US market. Apparently, it was not generating any revenue. The team was mainly comprised of engineers from the Singapore team, and they were instructed to focus on sun-setting the project and that in March of 2023, they would transition into working with another existing team. At that point, the managers of that team kept emphasising that “this was never about layoffs” and that nobody would be fired. The team that my friend was on, consisted of three sub teams and had around 20 people. The existing team that they were supposed to transition into, was already quite sizeable, perhaps had around 10 engineers? Therefore, it sounded to me like a case of allocating more manpower than needed for a project that didn’t seem to be very big. I was even thinking to myself that, the team was lucky that the company decided to retain them instead of laying off them. This was because, it was a clear opportunity for the company to make them redundant.
Another event that happened was also around late November or early January (I don’t remember exactly when it happened) when all of my teammates, including myself, as well as other teams from the same department (around 300+ engineers) were suddenly assigned to be under another new department to work on a project, termed as “XXXXXX +”. We were told not to mention the project to the public or even to our co-workers in the same company. Apparently, the company was going to switch focus and we were told that most of our projects would be shut down or put to maintenance mode. The early weeks of February till mid March were set to be the transitioning period. I heard news from some of my Singapore colleagues that their teams were instructed to quickly finish their existing work, so that they could move on to work on “XXXXXX +” project. However, it was also a confusing time for everyone because while we were told to quickly wrap up our current projects and not start new initiatives, no details were given about the new project “XXXXXX +”. Save for a few teams that were already told to switch their focus back in late 2022, most of us didn’t know what our new roles in the project would be. All we knew was that we were to wait for more news to be given to us by the senior leadership. This resulted in a situation where most of the other teams were in an awkward position where there were not much work to do. During lunch time, I even overheard some engineers remarking that they spent their work hours playing computer games and not doing any productive work.
Personally for me, perhaps because my team was an internal tools team, our work still continued as usual. Moreover, the project that I was working on, was sort of aligned with the measure of cutting costs for the company, as it removed the need for a third-party platform and contractors costs. Therefore, it was still business as usual for the team and we didn’t face the problem of not having enough work to do. However, we were also told not to start any new initiatives and to wait for more instructions from the senior leadership about our next steps.
The uncertainty had made me feel uneasy. Unlike the previous quarters, I no longer saw a clear pathway or knew what I was going to be doing after the completion of my current project (which was around 90% completed by then). I started having some doubts about the roadmap of the “XXXXXX +” project. Every week during my 1:1s, I would ask my manager about the plan but had no concrete replies, as my manager was also not given any instructions from the senior leadership. I also had a conversation with a senior engineer on my team about it, where we both wondered what was taking so long (a few months) for the upper management to tell us what we were going to do and we agreed that “someone up there” was not managing things very well. Everything was really fuzzy and uncertain. We also wondered why the “XXXXXX +” project required 300+ engineers. Was there going to be enough meaningful work for everyone?
I started to worry a little but I didn’t take my thoughts about a possible impending layoff very seriously. This was because, perhaps I was too naive, I never believed that my company would lay off workers. However, I did start to allocate a small amount of time on my calendar to practise Leet code. This was not because I knew a layoff was going to happen, but rather I was preparing myself for the future to change to a different team (not assigned to be under “XXXXXX +” project) or even a different company where I could have a clearer roadmap of my work and contributions to the company I worked for. However, as I was not expecting an immediate change of company or team, I thought I had more time and I did not really commit too many hours to Leet coding (perhaps a few hours a week?) and was still quite committed to my daily tasks at work.
The third big evidence I can think of would be that the company decided to push forward performance evaluation and told everyone that this round of evaluation was to be succinct, short and crisp. I guess, it was to make sure that the evaluations were done ahead of the layoffs so that they could decide who to “fire” in other offices (As i heard only low performance workers in other offices were impacted).
A series of small events before the actual layoffs also provided hints for the impending layoff. For example, in the early March, we were told that we could no longer connect to the Office network just by connecting the wires to our PC in the Singapore office. All workers had to connect to the VPN from their PC, just like how we would do so if we were working at home. This was probably to prevent workers from being able to connect to the Office network after the VPN access on our laptops have been disabled. However, back then we all thought it was part of an infrastructure change and didn’t think too much. Exactly two weeks before the layoffs, I also noticed that a few planned events for the month of April were removed from the office calendar. For example, the monthly Wednesday barista event, Happy hour event and an upcoming art & craft workshop were removed from the office calendar without any reason. My guess was that the senior leadership did not provide any reasons to the employer experience team and just told them to cancel the events due to budget cuts.
Of course, whether the layoffs had been planned for a few months now remains unknown to me. But looking back at what happened, it must have been in the works for some time. And, the senior leadership couldn’t have told us of the plan because revelation of the layoffs plans would incite fear amongst workers and led to decreased motivation and productivity at work.
How have I been coping?
The first two days did not go very well as I was still in a state of disbelief and worry. However, I am glad that I received a lot of support from my colleagues and friends in my office who also went through the same thing as me. Suffering together with a bunch of people sure feels better than when you are alone.
After the second day, I felt much calmer and at peace with the news. I also learned much more about the differences in the treatment of workers and labour laws in different countries. I guess, now I can say I got to experience first-hand how companies could hire and fire workers in a flash, in Singapore. Being in a small country where the economy is heavily dependent on foreign investments, the lax labour laws cannot be helped as the government have to find ways to attract foreign companies to set up offices here.
I don’t bear any hate or unhappiness anymore at how the layoffs were conducted at my company (sending emails to APAC employees at midnight and causing me to have a sleepless night afterwards :/). I just feel disappointed and wondered if this could have been done better. I am not going to thank my company for laying me off or post anything positive about it on LinkedIn like how other people like to do when they get laid off. This is because, this event did not cause any happiness to me and I am not thankful to it for happening at all.
However, I do have to acknowledge the gains I have gotten from my company in the past 1 year and 9 months of working. After all, it is the first company that I joined after graduation from university. I also grew very attached to it, much more than I would have liked to admit. Some of the gains I got was that, my company gave me my first Mac book (I get to keep my work laptop after getting laid off), brought me to my first company overseas trip for the first time and meet new friends from different backgrounds, gave me a generous work from home allowance every month even though I don’t need it, gave me a pay check that put me in the top 10% earners of my age-group in Singapore, enabled me to apply for credit cards, enabled me to apply for the Singapore citizenship, introduced me to many talented and fun colleagues whom I now regard as my friends, and work on projects to help me develop my technical skills and many more. So, I am thankful for all the experiences that I have gained but not thankful to the company for laying me off so abruptly, causing me two sleepless nights and maybe even grow a few strands of white hair 👩🦳 (Just kidding! I don’t actually know about this for sure LOL)
So, what have I been doing since the layoffs? And what are my future plans?
Right after I got the news, I started applying for jobs on LinkedIn and practising Leet code (because i know I am really rusty and need a lot of time to get back in shape).
My current plan is to keep doing the above until I get a job offer that I am happy with. I know that it is probably idealistic to expect the same pay as my previous job, but I am still hopeful. This is because, I hope to get back on that supposed trajectory that I was on, you know..being in the top 10% earners of my age-group and being rich one day. 🤑 Of course, I am aware of the market conditions, but what can I do? I won’t set my expectations too high and I will just need to work hard and continue to try my best. Hopefully, good news will come soon.
I would have liked to go on a holiday to a far-away destination, outside of Asia, before starting my new job (assuming that I am able to find my next job). However, due to my unique circumstance where my citizenship application process is not yet completed and will likely take a few months to be completed, I am not able to travel out of the country or make any plans for at least 2 to 3 months away from now. Therefore, I am resigned to staying in Singapore and brushing up my interviewing skills. Well, I will just stay at home and spend more time with my family.
Once my citizenship has been resolved, I hope to be able to relocate and work in an overseas country. (Of course, not going to tell the Singapore government about this.) Fingers crossed!
The future is still slightly fuzzy for me right now and sometimes as I scroll through LinkedIn for job openings or am in the middle of a call with a recruiter, I wonder to myself, what’s the point of all these. Sometimes I feel at peace. Sometimes I feel sadness. Sometimes, I feel anxious. Sometimes, I feel lost. I hope that I will feel better soon and meanwhile, I will just continue to strive my best and try not to peer into the future and worry so much.
The end :)
I really wanted to write down my thoughts about this experience since the first day of the layoffs. However, I didn’t do so, because I wanted to give myself more time to process everything and prioritise on working on things that were way more important (like, starting job applications, clearing some office administrative work, going for my 1k health check up :p so I can claim from my expiring insurance). I am glad that today, I managed to finish writing about it, signed my severance package and officially close this chapter of my life.
