'I'm open to leaving the industry altogether'
Nearly a year ago, I was laid off with around 200 other devs at SOE. It surely came to a shock to me because the people I was sharing the room with were highly skilled developers like myself; not temps or part time testers. Many of us kept thinking, "They must be moving us over to a new title or something. I mean they can't be letting go of these people, right?"
Wrong.
People who had been at the company for over a decade were being handed their pink slips. I'd managed to dodge the last few big layoffs at the company for the nine years I worked there but eventually the law of averages caught up with me. Like you mentioned in your article, many of us who were laid off suddenly had zero access to our computers. We couldn't log into them without an IT person standing behind us and we sure as shit couldn't take anything unless there was (in my case) an Art Director standing behind me telling which art I could and couldn't take for my portfolio (This royally sucked by the way).
A lot of us felt numb at first and then later felt betrayed. We put all our sweat into the products this company produced and then they just cut us loose like faceless cogs in a machine- we didn't do anything wrong; we just ended up with shitty luck that morning.
There was some news going around that the lay offs of so many long term employees was because of a financial issue. That the people who got sacked ended up on that unfortunate list because of how much they made. Who knows.
They did go above and beyond what was necessary for a company who just laid off a bunch of people. They let us go two months before the actual lay off date so that we could look for work while still being paid a salary and have benefits. They cashed out our PTO and also gave us pretty nice severance checks. They also sent out mass emails to help some of us find work.
But really, in this economy, and the challenges of facing off in a hyper-competitive industry; it was difficult for many of us veteran developers to find work.
I'm looking for work in the industry, but I'm also very open to leaving the industry altogether if I can. I can't even start a family and plant roots because of the fear that I'm going to be jobless in the next fiscal quarter.
