Inside The Mind Of An Engineer

I have been wanting to write this story for months, and – spoiler alert – the fact that I’m publishing it means that it ends in good news. For years now, I have been thinking of starting my own blog where I can indulge others in my storytelling, mostly covering life in the tech industry in a relatable lens, to give people a view of inside the mind of an engineer.

I have talked about this idea with a few people, but I never went to execution mode for a number of reasons. One of the things I struggled with was finding a starting point: how do I introduce myself? There are over 8 billion people on this planet, and we all have our unique stories. So which chapter of my life is most relevant to share in an opening post? I finally found the answer after life served me with one of the most traumatic events I’ve experienced professionally. I am someone who has become very comfortable being vulnerable, and to stay true to my nature, I want to start from my lowest point. So we’re starting from the bottom if you will 😉

On May 4th, 2023, I was laid off from Shopify, along with 20% of the staff. I was completely blindsided by it, given that the company had recently gone through a round of layoffs merely 8 months earlier. Additionally, the company had announce publicly in February that no more layoffs were coming. While I go over the series of events that followed, it’s important to keep this in mind: for as long as I remember, I was always enrolled in school/university, or had a full-time job. This was the first time in my life that I didn’t know what’s next from that perspective, and I had zero control over how I got there. The past few months have felt like a lifetime as I believe I exhibited most of what makes me who I am while trying to get back up on my feet. Another useful piece of context before we get started is that this happened while I’m expecting my first child who’s due in September. I had my parental leave all planned to properly onboard to this wonderful journey, and that was suddenly blown to pieces 🙃

🤯 The day it all started

I was woken up by my wife running into our bedroom at 8 in the morning, about 2 hours before I usually start working. “Your manager is trying to call you and I saw on the news that Shopify is laying off 20% of its employees. He says you really need to check your email”. Those are the words I woke up to, words that will be hard to forget for a while. I frantically grabbed my phone and tried opening my calendar while my eyes were still adjusting to the light. After last year’s round of layoffs where one of my reports was affected, I knew that the quickest way to find out was to see if I had a meeting request that I wasn’t expecting; of course, it was the case. To confirm the final nail in the coffin, I rushed downstairs to my work computer and opened an email that started by telling me that today was my last day at Shopify.

I clearly remember when my first self-defence mechanism kicked in: “I’m dreaming, this is not real” I told my wife who was already crying next to me. I also remember being surprised that I didn’t feel the sudden heart drop we all feel when something alarming occurs. This is something I attribute to another self-defence mechanism I’ve inadvertently developed over the years: I tend to vividly play out worst case scenarios in my head. Granted, this is something we are trained to do in engineering to improve the resiliency of systems we build, but this is an exercise I subconsciously practice in other aspects as well. For example, I have played out the death of many people I care about and saw myself react in all sorts of ways. As distressing as this might sound, the reality is that it gives me some mental preparedness to deal with those situations if they occur. All that to say that my brain has already seen a fictional version of myself getting laid off; yes the real thing is still terrifying, no I don’t automagically have a solution, but I’m not in complete shock and I’m able to reason better regarding my next steps.

I took a few minutes to gather myself, and I prioritized saying goodbye to my colleagues. I had 7 reports and worked in a group of more than 20 mobile developers, and I grew close to a lot of them over the years. I genuinely cared about these people, especially the ones I was leading, and it was gut wrenching to have to say goodbye this hastily: I only had a few hours before I was locked out of my account. I received a ton of heartwarming messages from a bunch of people, and I still reflect back to them as they kept me going through the rough times that followed: someone called me their role model, another considered me their favourite manager, while others couldn’t believe that I was part of the layoffs. These messages helped sustain my confidence and self esteem at a very critical point, so if you are one of those people who wrote me back then, I thank you.

Once my work access was revoked in the afternoon, the adrenaline from the rush started wearing off, and the consequences of this layoff on every aspect of my life started becoming clearer with every minute: my salary represented more than half of our household income, and we had recently moved to a new house that would be near impossible to afford on a single salary, especially in an economy on the brink of a recession with high interest rates and inflation. All plans my wife and I had for the birth of our baby in 4 months would have to be reassessed from scratch. I had been making incredible progress in my mental health through therapy as I was battling with a recent anxiety disorder, and there was no way this wasn’t going to take a toll. As the avalanche of thoughts started cascading, it became clear to me that I needed to take a bit of time to process my feelings before jumping into action. This is usually difficult for me to do as I tend to be logic and goal oriented, but it felt like there are some steps I shouldn’t allow myself to skip. As urgent as it was to start looking for a new job, I needed to find my balance first and allow my feelings the space they needed instead of drowning them. I decided to wait 3 days before starting the job hunting process the following week.

There’s one last tidbit from that day that stood out to me: I smiled, I laughed, and I made jokes on several occasions, and I remember it feeling weird as if I’m not supposed to laugh on such a sad day. I didn’t fully understand it in the moment, but this meant that I wasn’t going to stop being myself and shut out core parts of my character because of the perceived notion of this event. Just as I allow myself to be sad and concerned while I grieve, it was equally important that I keep allowing the positive emotions.

🫠 The next few days

I remember the next few days being pretty rough. When I would first wake up every morning, it would take a few seconds before I feel the heart drop from remembering what just happened. Those few seconds were so precious to me as they were the only time I didn’t feel worried. Getting out of bed was a dreadful exercise at the beginning, but there was a part deep inside me that was determined to turn things around. I kept thinking that I had two paths ahead of me: I can either let this experience deteriorate my confidence and break me down, or I can start putting it behind me and focus on what I can do next. This motivated me to start dealing with some “comfort tasks” that kept my mind busy and focused on how to overcome this situation.

I started by assessing our financial situation. I have always been drawn to personal finance, and have been pretty organized when it comes to my family’s budgeting, investing, and spending. I knew it was time to tighten everything up, as there was no certainty on how long it would take before I find another job. So I came up with a minimalistic monthly budget, and applied Shopify’s severance to it, which gave me an idea on how long I had to get a job before things get even trickier. Thankfully, I had an emergency fund set aside, so that gave us even more time. The difference I felt before and after this exercise was significant: without looking at the concrete numbers, I had convinced myself that I was doomed. But I realized that I had more time than I originally thought, and I remember audibly sighing when I saw the final numbers. Still, this was only step zero and there was nothing in me that wanted to stretch this a day longer than it needed to be. After all, our quality of life was going to take a hit, and I really didn’t want to be in a position where I’m still looking for a job once our baby is born.

Two days after the layoff was the day my wife and I had set for the baby’s gender reveal (talk about awful timing). We had friends and family joining us at our house, and we already had all the material. My wife offered to cancel or postpone it, but I strongly refused. This was an important event that meant a lot to us, and from my perspective, canceling it means that I’m letting the pain conquer me. That being said, that day was inevitably strange: I was surrounded by people who were here to celebrate something happy, and I felt like I had to push an impossible switch inside me to focus on that. To make things more uncomfortable, some people knew that I was just laid off and others didn’t. Regardless, I really didn’t want to talk about it with anyone. Not yet. I still had a good time, but I admit to having small moments where I would zone out completely and feel like I’m in a dream watching someone else’s life unfold in front of me.

The other mind-fuckery that occurred during those few days was related to me over analyzing the relationship between the layoff and my role at Shopify. Could I have done anything to prevent it from happening to me? Was it a mistake to become a manager? Should I have done something differently on the project I was leading to avoid this? My confidence and self-esteem felt like they were on a rollercoaster, but I kept reminding myself of what I had achieved at my job recently, the impact I had on other people, and what some had said to me on my final day. This helped keep the dark thoughts at bay most of the time as I kept telling myself that my focus should be the road ahead that I can still control, and not the trail behind me that I already went through.

🧐 Starting the job hunt

The first Monday post-layoff came around, and it was crucial for me to keep my work routine alive. Sure, it wasn’t the same kind of work, but I woke up around the same time on weekdays, and spent 7-8 hours doing tasks related to job hunting. My wife had left me a cute encouraging note on the bathroom mirror, and I instantly decided I was going to leave it there until I find a job.

Knowing the mentally difficult challenge ahead of me, I made sure I had a few appointments lined up with my therapist for the next few months. I didn’t want to lose all the progress I had made with my anxiety, so I wanted to prioritize my mental health throughout this period as well.

One of the first things I did was to post on LinkedIn announcing my layoff and that I’m looking for the next opportunity. This helped attract recruiters who reached out to me with opportunities related to mobile development. What surprised me though was the reaction from the rest of my network: a lot of my connections reached out to me offering support, tips, and some job openings at their organizations. I hadn’t talked to a lot of those people in ages, so this ended up being a mental booster as it showed me that a lot of people cared about my well-being and wanted to help. Through this, I started building a list of companies that I wanted to look into for possible opportunities.

The next thing I had to do was to update my resume. I had barely touched it in the last 5 years so it needed quite a bit of love. To make things trickier, I knew I was going to apply to manager and developer roles; I had been a manager for the past 2 years, but I didn’t want to limit my search to that alone. I still enjoyed writing code and building apps, and tech companies have been going leaner on middle management. This all meant that I needed to have 2 versions of my resume, one geared for each type of position. Once that was done, I was ready to start applying and interviewing.

During this time period, I was following the Miami Heat’s historic run in the NBA playoffs. I’m a die-hard fan of the team and I unexpectedly took a lot of inspiration from what I saw them do: they were the underdogs in every game they played and everyone was ruling them out, but they put on one of their best basketball performances over 2 months and got to the finals. There was constant talk about “playing with a chip on their shoulder” and “being at their best when their backs were against the wall”. This became my own mentality during the next few months as I aimed to exceed my own expectations and prove that I can overcome adversity and defy the difficult odds against me.

1️⃣ Interviews – Round 1

Disclaimer: before diving into the interviews process, I want to note that I will obfuscate company names due to NDAs and out of respect to my interviewers. I will still do my best to share relevant details.

In the span of the next 5 weeks, I had a total of 30 interviews with 10 companies. Those are numbers I was very grateful for, as tech hiring was extremely slow after what seemed like layoffs in every other tech company. These opportunities were a mix of referrals from my connections and recruiters/hiring managers reaching out directly to me. Let me say that in a different way: I didn’t directly apply to any of these 10 opportunities. This goes to show the power that your network can have, especially in the tech industry. While not impossible, it’s usually more difficult to get interviews by applying through “the front door”.

Half of these opportunities didn’t go beyond the initial call for various reasons including having to move to the US for one, salary expectation mismatch for another and so on. Ironically, one of them had a layoff right before my second interview and canceled the role. One of the five remaining ones was a manager position at a software consultancy company. I was rejected after the second interview as they were looking for someone who had more experience dealing directly with external stakeholders. This was fair as it is not something I had done in my career with the exception of one of my internships 10 years ago.

This left me with 4 contenders with whom I got all the way to the final round of interviews. One of them was a small startup in Toronto and the interviews mostly consisted of chats with the CTO and one of the developers. While the domain was very appealing to me, the pay was very low, at less than half of my previous salary. Even though I passed their interviews, I made the difficult decision to focus on the other 3 as their compensation was a better fit for our financial needs.

The 3 that remained had the most involved interview processes: we’re gonna call them company A, company B, and company C.

• Company A took me through 6 total interviews, including 4 heavily technical ones that required a lot of prep, especially that I was somewhat rusty from my previous role as a manager. The company ended up picking someone with experience in both Android and iOS (my specialty is mostly in iOS). I wasn’t too surprised with the outcome and I didn’t see it as a complete loss: the prep I did for all their interviews was transferable to other interviews and helped me shake off the rust.

• Company B was very slow at getting back to me after each interview. They were a small company so I only had 3 interviews that covered different behavioural and technical skills. I was initially told I should hear back within a week, but that didn’t happen and my emails went unanswered by the recruiter for weeks. I ended up assuming I wasn’t picked and moved on, but this was very frustrating as I felt like I deserved some feedback and closure after making it to the end. To my surprise, I received an email about 3 weeks later informing me that they ended up picking another candidate and offered to jump on a call to give me feedback. It turns out that the team was having a hard time choosing between another candidate and myself, and according to the recruiter the result was the “closest she had ever seen in her career”. I rated the highest on the technical skills and they felt like my communication style set me apart. Unfortunately, it came down to the other candidate having more experience dealing with quality assurance so they went with them. If you think being this close hurts, wait till you hear the next story.

• Company C was where the real heartbreak happened. To start off, they were my favourite destination; I loved the product, everyone I talked to was very talented and friendly, and the culture focused highly on the human side of things. After short interviews with the recruiter and an engineering manager, I was given a take-home project to build a small app. It took me around 10 hours to complete and I was initially told that I didn’t pass. However, a week later, I get a surprise email letting me know that they changed their mind after further discussion. Without going into too much detail, they had recalibrated what they expected candidates could achieve within 10 hours, so I successfully moved to their final round which involved different technical challenges and a behavioural interview. The very next day, I was informed that I passed the interviews and that they would like to finalize the process by checking my references and having me chat with my future manager and the CEO. I was even sent a brochure explaining their benefits, and agreed on a salary and start date. While I knew not to fully celebrate until I have an offer in my hands, I still felt like this was it. Both of my references told me that they heard positive signals, and chats with my “future manager” and the CEO felt like steps that were reserved for people who are about to be hired. This process took about a week, and boy that’s a long time for my brain to let loose with that impression. I stopped looking for new opportunities, started thinking of the million things I could finally do again, and basically got myself mentally ready for the layoff nightmare to end.
  The morning after my chats and reference checks were done, while eagerly waiting for an email containing a job offer, I received something that couldn’t be further from that: the recruiter informs me that they had a shift in priorities and need to hire for another team instead to meet their goals. I couldn’t believe it. It felt like the universe was playing a trick on me. In a weird way, it felt like another layoff because of how emotionally invested I got after all the positive signals. I was given more details over a phone call later on, but no moral victory was going to erase that pain.

😤 Regrouping

After being so close to the finish line, I was suddenly thrown back to square one. Even though I learned a lot from every interview, developed good habits, and did a lot of coding practice, it felt very hard to shake off the feeling that I just burned more than a month and a half. Even though logically I knew that I still had plenty of time before it’s time to panic, I started using the weirdest cues around me to pressure myself to find a job asap.

It all began with something as ordinary as cat litter bags. Yes, you read that correctly, and this is not a figure of speech. I’m referring to the very bags I reach for every night when I clean our cats’ litter boxes. As it’s something I did every single night, I challenged myself to secure a job before our supply of these unassuming bags dwindled. It’s weird, I know, but it was my way to infuse an element of gamification into this pursuit and establish a concrete, achievable goal.

Another strange thing that started catching my attention was the Canadian unemployment rate. Each month that added more jobs to the economy made me ask myself “why wasn’t I one of those?”. It was another psychological way to push myself to reject my current status and aim for better.

Then I heard two things from the two most important people in my life, and they hit me right in my core. First, my mother told me that she’s always seen me as this indestructible mountain due to my successful past years, and when the layoff happened, she suddenly felt like that mountain collapsed. On the same day, I was talking to my wife, and she started crying at the fact that I likely wouldn’t be able to spend as much time with our newborn since my parental leave plans were gone. I know that those feelings came from their empathy towards me, but it tore me inside out to hear their suffering because of this situation.

At that point, I didn’t care if it was good or bad, but I narrowed all my focus on finding my next gig. If I wasn’t eating or sleeping, I was applying to a job posting, messaging a recruiter, or preparing for an interview. I realized this could lead to its own kind of burnout, but there was something satisfying and energizing about working towards something I knew I had to conquer.

2️⃣ Interviews – Round 2

I spent the next 2 weeks going through my list of companies and applying to their job openings. It took a while, but I eventually heard back from 6 different companies in a very short timespan. They all had different kinds of interviews and take-home projects, so it was crucial to prioritize things and use my time efficiently. Since they were all progressing in parallel, I started a spreadsheet to keep track of the status and expectations of each stage of interviews/projects. I like tracking lots of things in spreadsheets (like my budgets, investments, etc), so this was no different; aside from the main benefit of staying organized and finding information quickly, I find joy in the positive feedback loop of continuously updating them, and it keeps my awareness level high towards the subject I’m tracking.

In this second round, I ended up doing 23 interviews and 4 take-home projects over 4 weeks. There was an additional week halfway through where I was in France to be at my close friend’s wedding as his best man, which was a much needed break. I don’t know if those weeks were the most exhausting of my life, but they were up there. Closer to the end, I had 11 interviews over 5 consecutive days. As much as I would have loved to avoid such a condensed timeline, there wasn’t much of a choice if I wanted line up the final rounds of the companies I was most interested in. This would help me avoid a situation where I get a job offer before finishing my interviews with other companies I’m also interested in.

2 out of the 6 companies didn’t move forward with me after the second stage, and 1 closed the role before I got too far. This left me with 3 companies, so I’ll mostly focus on them. Luckily, they were my 3 preferred destinations of the bunch.

• Company D is one of the most well-known tech companies and I bet that anyone reading this knows of it. I went through 3 stages of interviews with them, including live coding, system design, and behavioural. I found some of their technical interviews to be very difficult even though I gave myself lots of time to practice, but I expected no less from a company of that caliber. They decided not to give me an offer after the final round.

• Company E had the most involved interview process and I genuinely found it super interesting. There were a few paid deliverables geared to better understanding how a candidate plans and executes relevant work tasks, as well as interviews that felt like conversations with colleagues. The company had a very interesting culture around autonomy and flexible schedules, so they naturally wanted to ensure that the people they hire could succeed in such an environment. Right before I got to the final deliverable, I was told that the team decided to move forward with other candidates.

• Company F is the one I spent the most time preparing for. I felt very aligned with their mission and knew a few people who worked there and had very positive things to say about the culture and general execution of the company. The recruiter was the most transparent with what to expect for each interview which I found very considerate towards candidates. I will purposely skip over the details of the interview process, but it’s for a good reason: it’s the company that hired me so there is no point in keeping it anonymous. I ended up receiving an offer from Square (now part of Block, Inc), which I happily accepted 🎉
  

😌 Conclusion

I was finally able to sigh in relief and felt like the weight of the world got lifted off my shoulders. It was a moment I had been anticipating for months, and it was finally here. I was able to fully look forward to our baby’s due date without feeling like it was a deadline. I also felt very grateful for the people that supported me on this difficult journey and kept me sane at my lowest moments. It was now easier to reflect and appreciate all the positive energy and assistance I received from my support system, and realize how fortunate I am to have those people in my life.

There was a strange emptiness over the next few days after I signed my offer: for months, I had been used to waking up with urgency to prepare for or attend interviews. I could suddenly direct my energy towards literally anything else, but like all habits, it wasn’t quick to break. I ended up creating a long to-do list of all the things I had been putting off lately, mostly related to house projects, baby prep, and finances. If you know anything about me, you know I love my to-do lists, so much so that I read a whole book on perfecting them 🤓 One of the first things I did was install a smart lock that I got the day before the layoff and kept in its box; it was a silly game I played in my head as I purposely didn’t want to reward myself with it until I found a job.
I also rebooted my social life and could finally allow myself to see people I hadn’t seen in a while. Life was back on track, and I’ll forever have an experience engraved in me that will remind me to be grateful, especially when things get tough.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading my story. I think that layoffs tend to be mysterious for most people and you don’t really know what they entail until you go through one. So I hope that what I shared unravels some of this mystery and encourages people to talk about them more. If you’ve been recently affected by a layoff, I hope that my story makes you feel like you’re not alone.
On the off chance that company executives or decision makers come across this, I hope that it gives more perspective on the impact of layoff decisions. I won’t pretend that they can always be avoided, but I’d like to navigate away from the narrative that “people who get laid off will be okay because they have the company on their resume”. This kind of thinking waters down the extreme effect layoffs have on people’s lives and their families.

Finally, this is supposed to be the first post of many. I intend to keep publishing posts about different subjects in the tech industry, and help you view them from inside the mind of an engineer. If you’d like to be notified of my future posts, subscribe with your email below.