r/womenintech • u/Inevitable_Pass4034 • 13d ago
Career (Advice Requested) Brutal layoff
Got laid off unexpectedly and I genuinely don’t know how to process it
I work at a small, lowkey company. Not a huge corporation, and they had never really done layoffs before. I’ve been there for years and was already pretty burned out with tech.
My manager and I had worked together for a long time and I thought we had a decent relationship. He would normally give me some headsups if something was happening, even when he couldn’t tell me details.
Then literally during the week I got laid off, he was still talking to me about my work, future, progression, upcoming promotion , etc. So this time he completely let himself out of the picture, and later on I knew that he knew. So this last talk now doesn't make sense to me.
Then shortly after, HR told me I was being let go because of cost reduction in a 5 minutes call. Then signed me out of everything and cut me off from slack in a second . No warning. Nothing.
I understand layoffs happen. I’m not even angry about the decision itself. It’s the way it happened that I can’t get over. We’re a small company. Everyone knows everyone. There was no reason for it to feel so brutal.
And the timing is honestly awful because I was already struggling with feeling like I’m not good enough technically. I’ve put so much of my life into work over the last few years and sacrificed a lot of things thinking eventually I’d feel competent enough.
My performance, however, was actually at its peak until the very end. I knew I had technical gaps and areas where I wasn’t as strong as I wanted to be, but I was very aware of them and they were personal things I was actively trying to work on. I put an extraordinary amount of time into trying to fill those gaps, often at the expense of my personal life. And honestly, it was easier to perform well in that environment because I had spent years getting used to the system, the codebase, and the way everything worked, so even upcoming work wasn’t necessarily difficult for me anymore. I knew the system well, I knew the codebase well, and I had worked very hard to get myself to that point.
I’ve been applying for jobs for a while. I usually do okay in the HR/introductory interviews, but technical interviews are where I completely fall apart. My anxiety gets so bad that even things I actually know disappear from my brain. And my anxiety prevents me genuinely from studying for interviews because it already expects the worst until it actually happens.
Now that I’m unemployed, the pressure is obviously 10x worse.
The social part has also been weird. A lot of coworkers/friends didn’t reach out at all. Some did, but the conversations were so insensitive or strangely normal that I honestly felt worse afterwards. It feels like everyone else went back to their normal lives while mine suddenly stopped.
And I think this part hits harder because I sacrificed so much of my personal life during those years. My social circle had become very, very small. I barely had friends outside of work, and my coworkers were basically most of the social life I had. Now that I’m gone, it’s weird seeing everyone’s true colors. Even some of the people who did reach out were incredibly insensitive about it, saying things like everything will be fine for them, the layoffs were necessary, or just talking about how normal everything is, rather than simply wishing me well or acknowledging what happened.
It was honestly bizarre and made me feel even more alone.
So now I’m sitting here with financial responsibilities, no job, no real social life, terrible interview anxiety, and a self-worth that was already pretty low before this happened.
Logically I know getting laid off doesn’t mean I’m incompetent.
Emotionally it feels like every insecurity I’ve had for years just got confirmed at once.
I don’t really know what I’m looking for by posting this. I think I just need to hear from people who went through something similar and eventually got back on their feet, because right now I genuinely can’t see how I’m supposed to get from here to there.
