This is definitely an interesting turn of events, and honestly, I feel a little strange speaking about this holistically, on a paper and open forum. But, I’m here now to say that on June 1st I was one of the newest people to join the wave of layoffs in the tech industry. I’m also here now to say that on July 31st, I will be starting a new position, a promotion, and in the domain of conversational AI (much cooler and relevant than my previous job).

The catch? It’s at the same company I originally was laid off from. Apparently, when jobs are eliminated at my company, they give employees a grace period of 30 days to find a new job. It’s interesting, they’ll let you go bout they know that the job market is tough so they give you at least a chance to make a ‘Hail Mary’ moment happen.

When I originally got the news, I was drained. I had just come off the cusp of finishing an incredibly taxing project which I was finally writing the completion announcement for. I was brought into a room, and served the news by surprise. Afterwards, I left the office, came home, called my support system, and somehow kept working? I worked like crazy on my volunteer and personal projects.

There was a strange sense of relief to be had with finally being free to get up to speed with all of the things that had been firmly in the category of ‘I want to do this, but I will never get the time to’. This feeling of relief was interrupted by bouts of deep future anxiety.

(Will this be the end? How am i going to go next? Will I have to leave NYC? Should I file for unemployment? How will others look at me? How do I use all this open-ended time?)

I noticed another feeling, a strange sense of excitement. I was already becoming disillusioned with my current job and path, as most are. But I was set, because it would eventually get me to a desirable destination, as unexciting as that is. A complete break from this position, no matter what, would force me into a new system. No matter what, that old path was dead and I had to find something new. S

o, this story is starting to sound like: Okay, I lost my job, and it was somehow good for my direction? So that means I take a radical change, and completely reinvent myself?

That might have happened, but I did everything I could so that it wouldn’t happen. After a couple days to regenerate, I modernized my resume, fixed up my cover letters. uplifted my profile/website, contacted 100s of people for advice and networking, applied to 100s of jobs internally and externally, and pretty much did everything within my power to get a job within my original line, just in a subject area I find more interesting.

You could call it panic, societal pressure, and a whole host of other things but honestly, I’m still trying to figure out why things happened the way they did. Honestly, I think the biggest aspect for me was that I had a plan, and I wanted to stick to it. I didn’t want forces that were ‘supposed to be bigger than me’ to have a say in the decisions I make for MY life. Also, I love living in NYC and figured that having to leave would make me even less likely to take a ‘creative’ route due to lack of inspiration. At the end of the day, it was a difficult time. It was a stressful time. I had to make use of the limited time and resources I had, and shamelessly message and ask countless people to help. But I learned a lot about what I’m capable of, and I’m undeniably in a much better position than I was before this ordeal started.

By the way, I do want to at least mention some of the tools/methods I use:

• My tool at https://github.com/Raiidahmed/Event-Extractor-With-GUI was good to repurpose to crawl job boards like google jobs and LinkedIn.

• Simplify.io was amazing at auto filling job applications and boosting my volume.

• GPT-4 was imperative at making my resume stand out, and specializing my cover letter to any job application (but I still wrote by hand for some important jobs). It was also essential in creating interview plans specialized to the roles I’d be interviewing for.

• Cracking the PM interview still remains the best resource for interviewing behind mock interviews.