Let's do it right this time?
I got laid off at the beginning of 2025.
The meeting invite titled "Business Decision" with just me and my manager didn't come as a surprise. Everybody knew it was coming. I got the heads-up from a friend a few months prior, shortly before Christmas. Not wanting to sweat the holidays, I waited until the new year to start prepping for interviews. The market was less than great, but at least I was getting calls back.
Too many rejections later, I started to scramble for purchase. I'd take whatever I could get. That's how I ended up back at a company I worked at years ago. It didn't take long for me to remember why I left. The culture had deteriorated even in those interim post-COVID years, and the team I was assigned to could not have been less of a match.
After a month, I started to worry it wouldn't get better. After six, I had given up trying to improve the team. They seemed fine with three grueling weeks of on-call at a stretch, with feature planning that may as well have been a cocktail napkin, with a codebase so brittle that just looking at it broke something. There was also no way to move to another team, and after surviving a massive layoff round there was nowhere to move. I might have misjudged this thing.
I wanted a do-over.
So I left my job at the beginning of July, no prospects. It feels foolish to ditch a decent-paying job in a market that looks like... this, but after a year of misery I need the break.
I'm calling it a "sabbatical", with the thought that I'll take a few weeks to get reoriented, then spend the next several months on self-development. Finally, when I'm ready, I'll dive back into the job market, hoping some of the LLM-fueled mania has died down and that there's still a market for software engineers by then.
What am I gonna do in the meantime? Inspired by a lot of blog posts, including this one, I've got a short-list already:
- Improve my writing -- Writing well seems like a superpower. While I think the bar for writing in software is pretty low, I think with enough practice I could vault myself out of the purely mediocre into the halfway decent. Let's see!
- Finally learn Rust -- Rust has been on my bucket-list for almost 10 years now. Maybe it's finally time to get good at it.
- Finish Genki I + II -- I finished Genki I ages ago, but my Japanese skills have rusted a lot in the last few years.
Here's hoping it all turns out.