harisrid Tech News

Because some of us have been here – once, twice, maybe a few times – either due to our own volition or due to a cornucopia of external factors outside our locus of control.

DISCLAIMER : This article is and may not be well-received by all audiences. Please do not misinterpret anything written here. Evaluate writings with a heavy grain of salt! Especially for folks with familial commitments, visa, or other extenuating challenges.

An Intro

Let’s imagine the situation.

Okay, so you just got laid off and formally released from your role as a software engineer. You’ve been working hard at products, infrastructure, and upcoming development at your company for a while – a year, five, or ten. And out of nowhere, you see an e-mail titled Reduction of Force. If fortuity rests on your shoulders, you get a severance of base salary a few months, unused PTO days, unused formal leaves, and some publicly-traded equity.

But you still think to yourself “Oh no. I’ve been laid off, and I have to find a new job immediately.”

Yep. It’s an easy situation that quickly lends to catastrophic thinking. But rest not, there’s a couple of good ways to think through. Tough times happen, and tough times pass too.

What Other Cognitive Thinking Strategies Can I Leverage?

• It’s a time to re-expand your network.
• It’s a time to practice, brush up, and update your LinkedIn profiles.
• You’re worked for a year or more and you’ve developed and enhanced your software engineering acumen : coding, DevOps, design, and others.
• Perhaps you solutioned 100 leetcode mediums, neetcode.io, or Gayle’s CTCI problems during your past years of employment. Maybe you’ve interviewed across a couple of shops. These experiences engender a huge volume of hours of deliberate practice : you never “unsolve” the problems you solved. The intuition and the pattern recognition stays etched as a permanent mental fixture ( which is a good thing ).

What if I’m not busy enough whilst transiently unemployed?

This also isn’t exactly true?

• Average sleep and awake times : Most human beings sleep for 8 hours and do their day-to-day activities for a buffer or 4 hours, leaving 12 hours of dedicated studying time.
• Time in the loops : Suppose a dev needs to go through four interviewing loops to land their next role ( a very conservative case ), and let’s assume that the on-sites emulate those of big tech companies. Each loop compromises of the following chunks – a 15-minute recruiter conversation, a 1-hour phone screen or Online Assessment ( usually DS&A ), and 4 hours of dedicated interviewing.
• Deliberate Practice Hours : Multiply the time breakdowns renders us 5 hours * 4 loops = 20 hours of deliberate practice ( with DS&A, system design, and other topics ).
• Hiring Trends : Companies never interview during every calendar year day : weekends, night times, and federal holidays. Expect slowdowns during periods such as Independence day week or Thanksgiving break.
• Q4/EOY Slowdowns : Q4 EOY is slower quarter compared to Q1, Q2, and Q3. Hiring typically follows a company’s FY ( Fiscal Year ).

Let’s Circle Back to the Situation

So let’s take our individual who faces three months of unemployment but does four technical onsites taking up four dedicated weekdays. These on-sites also don’t include the time folks can invest practicing their skillsets ( e.g. 30 minutes – 1 hour dedicated daily to their craft ). Let’s also tally up the time spent in “softer work” – networking events, LinkedIn updates, posting online job applications, and resume updates. I can imagine this person investing 10-15 minutes a day in this activity during their period of unemployment – activity which also wouldn’t occur during any dedicated focus time in a company’s onsite loop.

What’re My Takeaways?

In a very contrived sense, a lot of us on social media quickly catastrophize, but we forgot how well-positioned we can be too.