r/Layoffs

Yesterday I was working on deadlines.

Today I was told my role no longer exists.

It's strange how months (or years) of hard work can end in a 10-minute conversation.

The tech market keeps telling us to "keep grinding," "keep learning," "build side projects," "network more." Many of us are doing exactly that—and we're still getting laid off.

I'm not writing this for sympathy.

I'm writing this because I'm looking for my next opportunity.

I'm a Java Backend Developer with experience in Java, Spring Boot, Microservices, SQL, Azure, and REST APIs. I'm available to join immediately.

If your team is hiring or you can refer me, I'd truly appreciate it.

And if you're someone who was laid off recently, you're not alone. I hope we all land somewhere better.

Thanks for reading.

My husband was put on temporary layoff since Jan in toronto, canada. Thankfully he found a job and will be starting it this week.

The company he worked for has his insurance.

Since he will now be joining another company should he inform the old company about his termination?

Please advise and share your experience.

[can-on]

Short form..

Suffered horrendous injury at work in March 2025. 2 surgeries and rehab 3 days a week for 16 months. Workmans Comp.

Finally get my full release, ready to come back..just to be told I wasn't budgeted to be back full time,so the company put me on the exact amount of hours I was working the day I was hurt.

For clarity, I was on a regular shift but in a separate dept that I only covered for 5 hours once a week. Regular part of the job.

Because I was technically in a separate dept from my main duty when the injury occurred, they are legally only required to give me the hours I worked in that dept, 5 per week.

Then after telling me there was no allotment for my fulltime position,they call back a former coworker who quit at twice the salary of every one else in the shop.

Further clarity: during my 16 month absence every person in management who had hired and trained me had been pushed out, top down massacre. The new managers had no idea who I was and apparently being on WC had left a bad taste in their mouth.

So they gift me 5 whole hours per week,all that they are required by law,technically.

So now I am desperately applying anywhere and everywhere with residual injuries for life,having to explain the 16 month gap at the same time explaining that I am also released from restriction with visible scarring.

Wish me luck.

My background: 8+ years of SDE experience at small or mid-size companies. Interviewd at 10+ companies, made it to onsite at 5, and struck out on all of them. the market now feels really brutal.

the job market right now is a compeletely diffrent world from before.

This is my 3rd time job hunting
First time was right after graduating, pre-COVID. Onsite at 3 companies, faild 2, got 1 offer.
Second time was during the money-printing era. Onsite at 3 companies faild 2, got 1 offer and jump ship. Back then I only had 3+ y of experience, but Linkedin recruiters were coming at me nonstop, Amazon alone would reach out 2-3 times a week. That's completely gone now
This time made it onsite at 5 companies, zero offers

Linkedin is still somewaht useful. I got premium, and I get 5+ recruiter messages a day.But most of them don't sponsor. Maybe 1-2 sponsoring companies reach out per week. My interview pipeline breakdown ~10% cold applications, ~40% referrals from friends, ~50% from Linkedin Inmail

The quality of Inmail has clearly dropped. Full-time SDE position have noticeably dried up

Interview formats vary company to company, but it's mostly still the old classic trio coding +system design +BQ. Haven't run into any AI-coding specific interviews yet

Of the coding questions i've gotten about 80% have gone fine, mostly medium level, pretty standard stuff. Strongly recommand grinding through problems by category until you're solid on all of them A few companies threw curveballs though, and for those you just have to roll with it.

Interviews feel noticeably harder than before. personnally,I think my system design skills are actually better than they were a few years ago, but i've gotten feedback at several companies that I failed the system design round.

The big difference from my previous job switches
Back then, a lot of companies, like google meta, had multiple openings. you'd interview first, then get matched with a hiring manager afterward. Now, very few companies have multiple openings. Backfill roles almost always already have a "better candidate" lined up, It's an uphill battle on top of an uphill battle.

I was recently impacted by a large downsizing at my employer. The day I was notified I went home and started applying to jobs at other employers I had been watching. I was informed that I had 2 weeks and then i would be exited from the company. I asked leaders why i was part of the downsizing and it was due to not knowing the right people which hurt as I was always informed I was a high performer and I worked there for many years. A couple days before my exit day I was offered my job back with no additional pay or benefits but would be doing the work of 3 people. I accepted my old job back. During the time I was planning on no longer being employed by this company I had 2 job interview requests less than 7 days after being downsized and 2 more since being offered my old job back this is less than 2 weeks from applying. I applied to about 20 roles some were a stretch but most I felt I was a good candidate.

What would other people do? When I was let go I accepted not working there anymore and was ready to move on now I feel like if I get an offer that is even slightly better I should leave and move on. I was told when I was offered my job back there will be opportunity for growth and higher pay, not sure on this as it felt like carrot dangling.

I honestly don't know what to do anymore.

I'm exhausted and mentally drained.

In January 2025, my company went through layoffs. I survived that round, but my manager told me very clearly that if there was another round, I would most likely be affected. It was a small company that had never had layoffs before, so that came as a huge shock.

I rushed to find another job and managed to get one within a month. I actually had two offers. One paid more, but I chose the other because it had better growth opportunities, a stronger engineering culture, and no history of layoffs. I genuinely believed it was the safer long-term choice.

Then something completely outside my control happened. The product I had been hired to work on was suddenly outsourced. The company hired an external vendor and ended up buying their product instead. Everyone working on our product, including me, was laid off. There was nothing I could have done differently.

After that, I decided to prioritize stability over everything else. I joined one of the biggest banks in the US, thinking a large organization would finally give me some peace of mind.

Instead, since February they've been doing RIFs almost every month. Every third Monday I wake up wondering if today is the day I lose my job. And now they're reportedly planning to cut around 10% of the tech workforce.

How am I supposed to live like this?

My parents are old and financially dependent on me. We came from a very poor background, and it took years of hard work to reach this point. My elder sister will get married soon, and after that the responsibility for my family will be entirely on me.

I don't even want anything extraordinary anymore. I just want three months of certainty. Just three months where someone can tell me, "Your job is safe." That's all I'm asking for.

My resume already looks messy because of multiple short stints, all caused by circumstances outside my control. I'm scared that future employers will judge me without knowing the story.

I've reached a point where the anxiety feels unbearable. Some days I genuinely feel like ending my life because I can't see a way out of this constant uncertainty. I don't actually want to die—I just want this fear to stop. If anyone has been through something similar or has practical advice on how to cope with this, I'd really appreciate it.

TL;DR: Got laid off twice due to circumstances outside my control, joined a large bank hoping for stability, but now monthly RIF anxiety is destroying my mental health. I’m supporting dependent parents, my resume looks unstable because of short stints, and I’m desperately looking for practical advice or even just a few months of certainty.

More of my friends have been going through redundancy in the last couple years, the periods in between their jobs have also been increasing it seems.

If you’ve been through this, how long did it take you to find a new role in your most recent search? And if you don’t mind sharing, what industry are you in and did you take a pay cut?

Sure. It happened to me once.

Monday morning we were asked to go to an impromptu staff meeting.

The old Executive Team announced that they had all resigned and they introduced a new Executive Team.

The new President informed us that they wanted to bring in their own team and we were all terminated immediately. All of our long term incentives (stock options etc) would vest immediately and we'd receive termination pay according to how long we'd been with the company (roughly one month pay per year of service).

In addition, they had offers for some of us to work for a transition period as contractors.

It was great!

Most prone to a layoff (rank these 4 companies). I know it is a weird question, appreciate all the types of responses. Thanks! Note: roles such as an SWE or MLE or DS or AIE (somewhere one could work for a decade or so lol)

I've seen way too many family friends and buddies get laid off and have a hard time finding another job.

Although I currently have a job, the pay is just so-so. I've submitted over 1,000 resumes in the past 12 months and have only secured one interview—and nothing else. Is the job market really that bad? Why am I seeing so much news about a 'job boom' over the past few months?

I still might sign the agreement on the 13th, but would still proceed with the EEOC intake as I opened a ER (Employee Relation) case since in a documented meeting with manager was told I was released due to financial reason, I used Cisco's own AI Circuit to prove that I was cheaper to keep than another engineer on the account, HR came back and stated Oh, not cost saving but use of SaC software, again I came back with I'm 3rd on my team of 21 in utilization and customer implementation, after HR said the would investigate I got an email they decided to close the case but would not provide me with the details in the case. This was also public sector and FAA customer believes they broke contract terms for onsite engineer. This is more of an FYI... not really looking for negative bot comments.

I prepared very hard for an interview in the tech industry, slightly outside my core expertise so to say. I mostly have experience on the server side but this was for embedded.
My interview went really great , so much so that the skip interviewer said he had a gut feeling that I’m the right candidate.
I aced coding questions, despite C not being my forte language.
I fared well in behavioral as well.
After 3 longs weeks the recruiter sent me a generic message that they had more experienced candidates. I feel so disappointed , I can’t think of anything but for this failure. I think I’m going in to a depression. How do I get out of this spiral ?

Like the title said, I got laid off last week and my baby will come in a month. What do I do now?

At this point they are just rubbing it in our faces

Pretty much the title, I worked in tech. Mostly as a Data Manager. So lots of AI projects have been coming in.

Most recently I spent about a year training AI and then they just eliminated my position.

How do you get through layoffs without taking it personally because I feel like shit right now.

2 weeks in and I’ve only got 1 HR interview that’s progressing forward, at least last layoff I had 5 job offers I was going through.

Sharing because while misery loves company, it's important to still believe in the possibility that things can turn around. Lots of stories about things getting worse, but it's still good to remember that there can be a light at the end of the tunnel.

Laid off in Dec'25 at Associate director/Sr. Mgr level. Sent around 120 applications, went through about 15 interviews almost all of them clearing HR, and dying after the hiring manager round. 6 months in I hadn't gotten to 1 second-round interview, while some of them were asking for 3-4 rounds and case studies.

This past week I cleared 3 interview processes in parallel so I'm able to get counteroffers.

1. You don't need to be a good candidate for all the roles, you just need to be a great candidate for the specific role, and if that role isn't currently available, you don't have a good shot at getting hired. The 3 roles just happened to be a very specific niche fit to my experience.

2. I probably got taken out of the running from applying for less senior positions. They didn't trust me to stay in a lower role for long (which is correct, I would have kept looking).

3. There genuinely do seem to be a lot more job postings nowadays. I would skim the new ones everyday and it feels like the volume of postings has ticked up in the NJ/NYC area (even though the pool of unemployed is still large).

4. I wasted time the first 2-3 months by using job boards like LinkedIn. Total dead-end because of the ridiculous volume of ghost jobs. My resume response rate became quite high after dropping LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and indeed entirely. I was reliably getting 1-2 interviews a week after sending about 9-12 applications a week. Dramatically worse than what job searched was like 10 years ago, but way better than LinkedIn.

5. I think my higher interview rate was because I only applied to roles opened within the last 48 hours, and every resume was tailored to match the job description. Use any AI tool you want, but all of them suck unless you refresh your context window regularly and review for adherence.

I'm still probably coming out of all this with a paycut, maybe 20% less than what I made before, but maybe the counters can improve that. However I might also be fully remote! I found that the majority of my interviews were for fully remote positions. I had assumed those roles would be flooded because it's open to the entire country, but again, they want a super specific experience fit. So since my problem was finding a job posted that matched me, searching remote roles really increased the chances for an interview.

Anyway, good luck to all of us. Keep focusing on your inputs and try not to worry about the outputs.

Late 50's, had 10+ years in accounting at a F100 company. A tersely worded email was sent out to targeted employees (those 55+ with 10 years) offering a "generous" severance package if an early retirement offer was accepted. I kinda brushed it off and was planning to grind it out for a few more years.

My boss asked me if l read the email. I replied that l saw it, but wasn't interested in the offer. Boss had confidential information that our group was being outsourced (he didn't tell me), but l read between the lines and got the hint that l should take the offer, which l did. That got me an enhanced severance package.

My final day was about 3 months out. I spent quite a bit of time documenting various tasks l was responsible for and transferring knowledge to the offshore employees of the professional services firm taking over our roles.

Quite a few of my colleagues also accepted the offer. I cut back on my spending and retired. None of my colleagues seeking employment have landed anything meaningful 6 months later even with a stellar work history, CPA license, and advanced degrees. The job market is challenging for older workers based on my experience.

(Please be kind as I only want to vent and get some emotional support.)

I was impacted by the massive big tech layoffs.

My colleagues and I had been hearing about it in the news months prior the announcement so we were kinda prepared. I had not been loving my job prior to the announcement so a part of me was looking forward to it, although I did not know for sure if it would happen to me.

Then I got into a meeting with my manager and HR. They told me about it in a sad voice. I dealt with it pretty calmly during the meeting, and told my hopeful messages to colleagues after. I would say I felt elated about the news and the freedom to pursue my side projects with a severance.

Now it’s been a while and I’ve been looking for jobs while pursuing my side projects. I could not help but be sad especially how these recruiters keep offering low-level jobs (i.e. the kind I’d accept 10 years ago). I know they’re just looking to earn a living, but dude?!?!? It’s probably just me being angry about this situation and not really at these recruiters.

It’s just one of those bad days, and I’ll have to take it a day at a time.

Has anyone here applied for jobs at Amazon 6 to 12 months after your redundancy? What has been your experience? Have you received any responses within this timeframe?

I got hired at the local county government back in 2023 after some significant life changing events. This was a godsend at the time and, even though I was put in the wrong position by an incompetent supervisor, I was able to avoid flunking my probationary period and get into an actual entry level position by a stroke of luck. Earlier this year my boss said that layoffs are a potential at some point, but within the last couple weeks it all came to a head. I work in an office with a little less than 20 people and of the 12 non-MGMT staff, 4 of us including myself were told we are being laid off. I have until the end of August to choose to accept a severance package and if I don’t I will probably be laid off without severance anyway. My last day will be the end of August and my severance of two months plus PTO cashout will run out in November. I also won’t have healthcare coverage after August obviously. My wife works for the state and makes about 65k and our mortgage is $2600. I am going to be applying for state positions primarily and I just had the horrible HR meeting yesterday. I’m 33 and live in Washington State if that matters. Any advice, experience, words of wisdom, etc. is appreciated.