By April 2023, hundreds of thousands of tech workers had been laid off. The shock had worn off, and what remained was more complicated: the anger, the doubt, the strange mix of relief and terror, and the very practical question of what comes next. If you’re reading this because your name was on a layoff list, because you took a severance package, or because you’re watching someone you care about go through it, this is for you.

The first thing you need to know is that this isn’t your fault, and it’s not personal, even though it feels that way.

The Emotional Reality

When your job ends suddenly, it does something weird to your identity. We spend so much of our time at work, so much of our mental energy on our jobs, that losing the job feels like losing a part of ourselves. If you were someone’s IC, their architect, their go-to person for the hard problems, and suddenly that role is gone, it leaves a hole.

That’s normal. It’s also disorienting. You might feel anger at the company, grief about the loss of stability or colleagues you cared about, relief that you’re out of somewhere you were unhappy, guilt that you survived when others didn’t, or a strange kind of freedom. You might feel all of those in the same day, sometimes in the same hour.

Layoffs are loss, and loss comes with grief stages. You’re allowed to be angry. You’re allowed to be sad. You’re allowed to feel relieved. You’re allowed to feel conflicted. All of those are normal. What matters is not getting stuck in any of them.

The First 30 Days

The practical stuff needs to happen while your head is still spinning, so let’s do that first.

File for unemployment immediately. Don’t wait to see if you’ll land something right away. Unemployment claims often have waiting periods before benefits start, and you want that clock running. It takes twenty minutes online. Do it this week. You’re not admitting defeat; you’re securing a safety net.

Understand your COBRA or health insurance transition. Your benefits probably end at the end of the month, or 30 days from your layoff date, depending on your company. Get the COBRA paperwork if you need it, or find a marketplace plan. This is annoying administrative work, but it’s critical. Healthcare interruptions are expensive and stressful.

Resist the urge to broadcast your layoff broadly. Your close friends and professional contacts should know, but “announcing” on LinkedIn that you’re “excited for the next chapter” right now comes across as desperate, and it brings out the recruiters. Update your LinkedIn status to “Open to opportunities,” but don’t post a tearful essay about how grateful you are for the experience and how you’re looking forward to growth. Save that for later, when you’ve had time to process.

Don’t immediately panic about money. You have severance, probably. You have unemployment coming. You have savings, hopefully. You have time. The pressure to take the first offer that comes through is real, but giving in to it is how people end up in bad roles they’ll regret for the next two years.

Take a few days off. Seriously. Don’t jump straight into job hunting mode if you can avoid it. Your nervous system is activated. Your brain needs some downtime. You’ve been through something disorienting. Give yourself permission to sleep, take walks, see friends, do nothing. This isn’t procrastination; it’s recovery.

Explaining the Layoff in Your Next Interview

This is the part that people worry about most, and it’s actually one of the easier parts because layoffs are so common now.

When you get asked about why you left your previous role, you say the truth: “The company did a round of layoffs, and my position was eliminated.” That’s it. You don’t apologize. You don’t over-explain. You don’t try to convince them you were valuable and only happened to get caught up. You just say it matter-of-factly.

Here’s what you don’t do: blame the company, blame management, blame market conditions, or perform gratitude for the opportunity to grow. You don’t say, “I was grateful to be laid off because it forced me to reassess my career.” You don’t say, “It was actually a blessing.” That’s what people say when they’re still processing, and it signals to an interviewer that your judgment about what’s a blessing versus what’s a crisis is unreliable.

You just say the truth. The position was eliminated. It happens. You’ve moved on.

Then you pivot to what you’re looking for next. “I’m looking for a role where I can focus on X” or “I want to find a team that values Y.” You’ve had time to think about what matters to you, and now you’re being intentional about the next move instead of just picking whatever seemed closest.

Interviewers expect this now. They don’t think less of you for being laid off. They think less of you if you can’t talk about it straightforwardly.

Rebuilding Confidence When Your Identity Got Tangled

This is the harder part. If you spent years being someone’s principal engineer, or the systems architect everyone relied on, or the person who knew where all the bodies were buried, and suddenly that role is gone, you have to rebuild your sense of competence in a different context.

One way to do this is concrete. When you interview, you’re not interviewing for the job you had; you’re interviewing for a new job. You get to reframe your accomplishments for a different context. The incident response skills that were your specialty can become “I’ve designed and led response to complex infrastructure failures.” The documentation you built can become “I’ve owned knowledge management and operational visibility.” The mentoring you did can become “I’ve built high-performing teams.”

You get to tell your story in a way that emphasizes what you learned and what you’re proud of, not what you lost.

Another way is to spend some time thinking about whether you actually want to go back to the kind of role you had. Sometimes layoffs give us permission to ask questions we were avoiding. Did you actually like being the go-to person? Did you want to be more hands-on technical? Did you want to move toward management? Did you realize you didn’t like the company, but you liked the work? Use this time to think about that honestly.

Reassessing Whether You Want What You Had

This is the most important thing most people skip over. The layoff hit your company, not you. But the layoff also disrupted your sense of what your career was supposed to look like, and that disruption is actually useful. You get to ask yourself: did I actually want this job, or did I just have this job?

If the answer is “I want basically the same role but at a different company with better management and healthier hiring practices,” great. You know what you’re looking for, and you can find it.

If the answer is “Actually, I’ve learned a lot from this role and I think I want to move in a different direction,” even better. You have time and a bit of financial cushion to be intentional about the next move instead of reactive.

If the answer is “I have no idea what I want,” that’s fine too. You’re allowed to not know. You’ve been in a role that had certain parameters, and suddenly those parameters are gone. Of course you don’t know what you want yet. You get to experiment and figure it out.

The people who suffer most in the aftermath of a layoff are the ones who immediately try to replicate the previous role at a new company. They’re running from something without running toward anything. If you take a few weeks to figure out what you’re actually running toward, you’ll make better decisions.

The Opportunity Hidden in the Crisis

Companies that did mass layoffs did them because they overbuilt. The ones doing the cutting had grown without discipline. They made bets on continued growth that didn’t pay off. They’re not the most well-run organizations.

The company you join next doesn’t have to be like that. You can look for signals of sustainable growth, reasonable hiring practices, clear role definitions, and leadership that doesn’t panic-hire and panic-fire. You can choose to work somewhere with more breathing room and less chaos.

You can also choose to do work that matters more to you. A lot of people spend years doing work they’re good at but don’t care about, then suddenly the job ends and they realize they could have been looking for something more fulfilling the whole time.

Grief is real. Anger is real. The loss is real. But so is the opportunity to be intentional about what comes next instead of just following the same script you’ve been following.

You’re Going to Be Okay

The anxiety after a layoff is partly about immediate circumstances, partly about identity, and partly about a loss of control. The immediate circumstances are usually manageable if you’re methodical about them. The identity piece takes longer, but it does resolve. The control piece is the hardest, because layoffs are a reminder that you’re never actually in total control.

What you are in control of is how you respond. You’re in control of being thoughtful about what comes next. You’re in control of talking about this straightforwardly instead of hiding from it. You’re in control of asking yourself what you actually want instead of just replacing the status quo somewhere else.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been through this in the last few months. You’re not alone. The industry will keep hiring. Your skills are still valuable. The role you had is gone, but you’re not.

Take some time to sit with that. Then start looking forward.

Related reading: For deeper perspective on navigating major workplace disruptions, see The Discomfort of Starting Over and What the Twitter Chaos Teaches IT Professionals About Company Culture.