During the first “bust” in 2000 I had four years of experience and living and working in Atlanta - far away from a tech hub. Boring old enterprise dev jobs at banks, insurance companies, etc weren’t affected and I was easily able to get offers.

I worked at a company where utility companies sent us data files and we created, printed and mailed bills.

In 2008 during the financial crisis the next time I looked for a job (my third), I had two offers relatively quickly - one programming point of sales systems and the other that I accepted programming ruggedized Windows CE devices for field service workers.

Fast forward to 2020 at the height of COVID, I got my one and only BigTech job working at AWS (my 8th job).

Unlike the author of the submitted article, when I got Amazoned 3.5 years later, I shrugged, my $40K severance was deposited in my account and I reached out to my network and targeted outreach to some recruiters in my niche and had four interviews and 3 offers within 3 weeks. Why would I waste time getting emotional about a company knowing that the CEO is 6-7 positions up on the career ladder and I’m just a random number to most of the organization?

A year later in 2024 around 9:00 PM I had a “1-1” with my manager invite for the next morning. I already had my suspicions and told my wife that I am probably going to be laid off in the morning. She said let her know how it goes and we went to sleep.

I woke up the next morning, was notified about my layoff asked when I would get my severance and responded to a recruiter that reached out to me about a week prior.

I started the interview process and three weeks later I had a job making the same as I was making at AWS.

I don’t need to “justify” what I’m making. I have a skillset and experience that are in demand and companies are willing to pay me for it because by employing me they get a positive ROI.