A year ago I wrote some thoughts on preparing and weathering a layoff. I reread it this week after meeting a fellow in a hotel lobby. I was there with my wife and son because we had lost power in the recent ice storm that struck the north east. We lost power for several days and needed to find warm places to stay. He was there for the same reason.

He was a tech writer for a Massachusetts company for ten years. He had been laid-off just a week ago. He was going through loss and anger at being forced to go away. His income was taken away along with pride and purpose. You could see the pain on his face and it struck a chord within me.

My layoff was not an easy time, especially the months just after the layoff, because I felt terribly betrayed, bitter and lost. It was winter and its hard for me to be cheerful when the days are short, grey and cold.

I lived in a condo about an hour north of Boston and fortyfive minutes away from my old job and the friends I had worked with for nearly three years. I was single and a little overzealous in my love for writing code, so my work became my life. One day I was evicted from my life and things felt pretty bleak.

I watched in 2002 as every other department had significant staff cuts. The development team wasn’t going to be touched because we were in the middle of releasing a “game changing” product that would seal the company as the leader in its space. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that layoffs in engineering would follow the release. It was of a question of when it would happen rather than if. I stopped spending and saved everything I could except for going out for dinner and drinks with friends.

The year leading up to my layoff was tough. Everyone was working long hours and weekends for months on end. Vacation time had been canceled. Getting more than one or two consecutive days off was difficult.

I was a principal developer and had several critical components to develop. I was always writing middle-tier core code that nearly every other component called. I designed the entire security component and wrote all of the method level security methods. I also wrote the interface and all the components for our content management system, which also included a fairly complex collaboration model that managed an editorial process for content publication.

Writing so much core code gave me a false sense of security. Who would seriously layoff the only developer that knew both security and document management. Getting rid of that developer would be a huge setback to any project. Of course, you have a lot more time to learn what that developer wrote after you release the product and have six or eight months before your next release.

The first round of engineering layoffs occurred in October of 2002 after a September release. We all knew who was being laid-off too. The management team scheduled reviews and raises for all the employees that they were keeping. There were eight people that didn’t have reviews scheduled. It was terrible to watch one of my good friends break down and cry every day for two weeks as she waited to be let go. She was the sole income for her family of of four. They were kept on for about three weeks before they were let go.

The second round consisted of a couple of great UI designers and a few people in another office that I never met. The UI designers built a really amazing user interface and kept a product with dozens of web pages looking cohesive and made the work flow from one task to the next logical and elegant.

Round three had lost five people, myself included. There was a product manager that was pushed out. All five of us were hard working and had made significant contributions to the product.

I found out about my layoff about a week ahead of time because the VP of Human Resources left a memo on his desk with the five names and a helpdesk guy was called in to work on his laptop. The helpdesk guy saw the names and told me I was on the list. I found out in the parking lot while another friend of mine and I were heading out to grab dinner and drinks. That was a night of very heavy drinking.

That following Monday the VP of Architecture called me into his office. He wanted to go over the document management system and document how it worked so we could teach the other developers how to work on it and improve the system. I smiled and said “Ok, but if you are going to lay me off, please do it on a Friday. I don’t want to have to drive all the way down here on a Monday and then drive back.”

There are statistics that show that suicides occur more often if you lay a person off on a Friday than on a Monday. I wasn’t going to commit suicide over that job so I was planning my weekend ahead of time. I had an idea for a new product and just needed time to write it. I knew I would have plenty of time to work on it now.

I spent the week writing up documents and having daily talks with the VP of Architecture and his chief architect. I liked both of them. It was hard knowing that I wouldn’t see them again. The meetings would go on for hours and then I would work on the document. In the middle of the document I wrote something like:

“I’ve spent this week writing all this documentation but I know you are not going to actually read it. It is really pointless for me to be doing this and if I drew some diagrams you may have a shot of comprehending the mess you are in. Unfortunately, the only tool I has is powerpoint, which isn’t known for its high quality diagraming technologies. Good luck!”

That was the extent of my sabotage. I finished everything on Thursday and went home knowing that the next day was to be my last.

I got in around eleven AM and asked my friends if we could go to lunch. I mentioned something that it was important and meant a lot to me. I told one of my friends that I was going to be laid off that day and he thought I was nuts until the VP of Architecture swung by and wanted to meet with me.

I wandered into the VP’s office and was handed my package, which I read through and tried to keep calm. I was gasping for air every time I spoke. I could hardly get the words out when I needed to ask a question about health insurance, severance or my remaining time off. My heart was pounding so hard. Then I got up and asked if I could say good bye to my friends. I was allowed that honor because I had put in so much time and effort, everyone else was walked out the door with little time to clean up their desk.

I swung by a few desks after lunch and said my goodbyes. I went home and drank a bottle of wine and watched some bad science fiction movie. I had to watch it a second time the next day because I didn’t remember anything from the previous viewing.

I started writing code that Monday on an application analytics platform. I wanted a tool that could tell me the features and the order that customers executed in a given product. This would tell me which features customers actually cared about and would let any developer prioritize the heavily used features over the rarely used. I wanted the reports to be web accessible. I needed a way to collect the data from an arbitrary application and dispatch it back to some import server that would dump the data into a database. I needed an analytics engine to convert the raw data into summary information. It was something big enough to keep me really busy.

It was a great project for me in that I didn’t know UI development at all but knew EJB 2.0 inside out and was also decent with database work. I spent a year writing code and living off the money I had saved.

I buried myself in work for weeks. I would get up at around eight AM with no alarm, eat breakfast, write code till two PM, shower, eat, write code until eight PM, eat, watch a movie and go to bed. I edited my spending habits to food, utilities, healthcare and mortgage. I had to cut the house cleaning service. I cut beer and going out for meals. I stopped buying stuff almost entirely except I did buy a new desktop computer to build my new application.

I kept in touch with many of my friends via email but I was pretty dedicated at developing my own project. It’s not entirely true that I was dedicated. I was incredibly hurt by being laid-off and the way I dealt with that emotional pain was by hiding in work of my own design. I was angry at the company where I had sacrificed and worked so hard. I had given up weekends, nights and even dental appointments because I felt needed and couldn’t let the team down. I had hardly dated or done anything with people that weren’t in the company. It had become my life as many of us would go out to dinner or hang out together regularly. I missed my friends terribly.

I worked on my project for about three months before I hit the wall. I looked like a wreck. I would shave only every couple of days. I was dressing as a flannel clad Hugh Heffner though I wouldn’t go outside in that outfit. I hardly went anywhere except to the supermarket. Most of the light bulbs were burnt out but I knew where everything was even in near total darkness. Only the kitchen was kept up lighting wise. I did keep the house pretty clean though.

Things got to a point where I couldn’t code well anymore. I was getting wrapped up in simple problems and looking for really innovative and exciting solutions. I realized that the solutions were not practical anymore. They were complex and strange but looked like they would work really well. I was losing or had lost perspective. It was time for a vacation.

I didn’t go anywhere. I stayed at home and cooked. I was a terrible cook and that’s why I ate out so often. I ate out every night before the layoff. Was it expensive? Only marginally so since factoring the cost of electricity, food, water and cleaning that dinner out only cost me a buck or two more per night. That came out to somewhere between 30 and 60 dollars I could save if I cooked at home. I cooked dinner every night and ate the left overs for lunch.

I ended up going to the supermarket pretty much every day. The idea was that I only bought what I could carry in one trip from the garage to my kitchen. I also didn’t know what I would feel like eating from one day to the next. It felt better to be around people anyway.

I watched “The Recruit” one night and an idea lodged into my head that I hadn’t been reading very much fiction in the past few years. I wanted to read some Kurt Vonnegut because of a reference in the movie to ice-9. I was hoping to cheer up by reading his works. I got in the habit of going out to lunch and reading while I was at the restaurant. I was able to go to a different restaurant pretty much every day and that was fun. I cheered up a lot, especially after changing out all the lightbulbs.

Spring was rolling in. I went back to hammering on the keyboard to build my application. There was a UI, a middle tier and a database that were coming together nicely. Writing the UI is rather difficult for me still but that’s where UI development really started. The product was almost in a demonstrable state.

My schedule changed a little. I was still up at 8, breakfast, shower, Babylon 5, code, lunch, code till 7, cook, eat, movie and bed.

Reading Vonnegut was brining me down so I thought I would cheer up with a new author. I wanted to read something that had influenced the way literature was written. I reread Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”, which is still one of my favorite books. I started reading Hemingway and read three of his novels before stopping. Why? Why did Hemingway’s chicken cross the road? To die, alone, in the rain. That’s why. Don’t read Hemingway if you are feeling down.

I was feeding data into my application using some test cases and now I wanted to get the system more automated. I used Java byte code injection to instrument a target application. Getting injection working is simple but getting it to work in a wide range of applications and perform was far more difficult. I spent a bit more than a month getting everything to right.

Looking for a job was also a big aspect of my life. I would hit the web and visit a number of job sites like HotJobs and Dice. I also talked to a recruiter and worked with him. I had only one interview in six months. It was with a CMGI company. The company went out of business a month later and sold off all its assets. All the employees were out of work.

You could go on to HotJobs and do a search of Java development jobs in the summer of 2003 and get back zero results in the Boston area. Right now you can find around 110 on HotJbos and 438 on Dice. I kept looking and submitting resumes to meet unemployment insurance requirements, but there was no chance of actually finding a job at that point. Congress kept extending benefits out to a full year. I thank God for that.

A friend of mine and I decided to launch a company with my product and look for some kind of financing. We met with SCORE, which was a complete waste of time. They are fine if you want to start a restaurant but they are out of their league with tech startups. Things have changed in the way software is developed, financed and sold such that their experience is not generally relevant.

We did get a few chances to pitch the idea to investors. It didn’t go anywhere. They would nod and think that it was an interesting idea but they were not interested in investing. All the entrepreneur wannabes should take note of this one statement: Investors invest in people, not ideas. We did not meet their vision of investment worthy individuals.

I was not put off much. I kept working because there was nothing else to do. I did spend more time during the summer goofing off though. I had Friday lunches on the deck of this restaurant and have a beer too. I decided that I could reintroduce beer into my nightly diet.

That summer I got a number of charity requests. Calls from my old college asking for money. I told them that I was on unemployment and couldn’t afford a donation this year. They suggested that I go on a payment plan. How can a person even suggest going on a payment plan to fund a charity like a college when you are concerned with paying your mortgage, healthcare and being fed? I haven’t talked to the college since.

I put up a dating profile on Match.com that August. I changed the profile’s “about me” section about once a week hoping that I would eventually write something interesting and get a nibble. It worked too, I was having a number of email conversations and that was fun.

Fall started and I launched the product on the web. I was not about to give up on the idea so I just took a different direction. Nibbles? No, I could count the downloads with my fingers. Still, it was getting out there and every download gave me hope.

In October I traded emails with this one gal that winked at my on Match.com. She was a little goofy, brainy, had a great sense of humor and she stuck by me as fall turned into winter. Our dates were so fun. She would go to her work and I would keep working on my project. Life was becoming so much better.

January marked the end of unemployment insurance. I had plenty of savings still so I wasn’t very worried. I was emailing more resumes and kept developing the project. I had a few interviews and they actually downloaded the project. The UI was pretty bad looking back at it, but I was getting back into the groove of being interviewed and it helped get me in through the door.

One morning in April I saw a job on Craig’s List. I put in the resume and went from my home office to the basement to do some work. I got a phone call from the recruiter I sent the email five minutes to and she was scheduling an interview. I got the job and a surprise: I got my old salary after being out of work for over a year! It was a miracle as far as I was concerned.

Working on the project kept my skills sharp. I had gone deeper into a number of technologies and worked with many new ones. It was wonderful to have a new job thanks to the project.

I didn’t stop with the project though. I showed it to this one guy and he showed it to another and pretty soon we were raising money. It took a year and we raised $750,000 by the end of the Summer of 2005. It was huge. He was the key, he was going to MIT Sloan School of Business and he made all the financial connections. I kept writing code.

The experience of being laid-off was devastating at first. It was so gut-wrenching to be evicted from my life that I can’t put it into words still. I can’t explain the anger at having given so much and then be told that we don't need you anymore. Being laid-off is a crueler thing than most people can understand.

It worked out in my case though. One could argue that it was the best time of my life and that only the first three months were really bad. That actually isn’t true as I still reflect on it with bitterness and I’m not sure I’ll ever be free of it.

We read a lot of advice on how to keep your job during a recession too. Many say to be the critical employee that the company cannot afford to layoff. Companies layoff C-level staff all the time and they are supposed to be the most critical employees in the company. Only a few companies will see the value of a developer being greater than some executives.

I have only four pieces of advice. The first is to save your money. The second is to find a way to keep your skills sharp. The third is to find a purpose to drive you forward everyday. The fourth, and most important, is to be thankful for what you have because there are those that have far less.

There is a growing fear that we are going into another recession if we aren't already there. The mortgage finance issues, the massive losses that came to the hedge funds, many consecutive bad trading days, rumors of Yahoo about to layoff folks and so on. The picture we are given is one that things are relatively bleak and that soon we will be homeless, jobless, the wife or girlfriend is ditching us and the dog is looking like he's ready to go on the road and run with the pack.

The more immediate fear, for us developers, is being laid off because the company isn’t doing well for one reason or another. It is reasonable to be scared but it is unreasonable to do nothing. Now is the time to start planning for a lay-off and hopefully it will never come for you. But I can assure you that some people reading this right now have been laid off in the past and it will probably happen to you too at some point. It isn't the worst thing that can happen to you but you really don't want to experience it without some kind of parachute.

First, layoffs are common. In the late 80's and early 90's Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and Wang went through massive rounds of layoffs and saturated the market with developers. It was difficult to get a gig during that period because of such tremendous competition. Of course, many of the laid off guys founded new companies and hired old friends.

Second, most people remember the "Dot-com" bust that hit its peak some time during 2001- 2002 and 2003 was the start of the recovery. We should also remember that it was preceded by the mobile phone and telco bust that happened a year or two earlier. The network hardware companies also took a beating as Dot-com companies stopped buying. A lot of people were out of work but there were still jobs to be had.

You'll hear a lot of stuff about how to avoid being laid off over the next few months. Some will say that you need to work really hard and work on truly critical code. Work so hard on critical items that the company can't afford to lay you off. You'll hear things like "keep your head down and just do what you are told" and "avoid arguing at all costs." Don't take time off, don't say no, don't be too senior, don't be paid too well, don't be too junior, don't be average, don't stick out and be sure to stick out and get noticed for your work.

The truth: layoffs are fickle. You can be laid off for a number of reasons completely out of your control, that of your manager and her manager. There is no such thing as a person who cannot be laid off. You see C-level executives get ousted for just having a bad quarter or they fell out of favor with investors. Are these people any less critical than even the best developer or architect? If they can go, then so can you. The company, its investors and directors believe that they cannot succeed unless they make cuts and they can make cuts for unusual reasons regardless of how it will impact the company. They believe that another employee will learn the work and pick up the slack, even if the product comes out later. It's true too, someone will learn the code and go from there.

With that, let's talk about what to do before a layoff. I'm not a financial or credit adviser so take what I'm about to say as my opinion alone. You should contact an investment or financial adviser if you have any personal questions.

Saving some money every paycheck is critical. That money is incredibly valuable later on down the line if you get laid off. The cushion it provides is incredibly valuable, especially when you see your unemployment insurance check. Some experts say that you need to have at least one year's worth of salary saved. This is obviously difficult, but every penny counts.

Homeowners are especially vulnerable. In some states unemployment insurance may max out at only $1600 a month depending on your annual income. Is your monthly mortgage payment more or less than that amount? How about your monthly living expenses: food, utilities, medical insurance and car related costs (gas, state taxes, insurance)? Can the unemployment insurance cover all that? No? Then you need savings and you need to start today.

One thing homeowners can do is refinance to a lower interest rate, but you usually need to be working to be eligible. It may be worth your while to refinance and save the difference from your old payment and your new one.

The day you get laid off is terrible. It truly sucks. They hand you lots of paperwork and try to get you to sign everything. They can often withhold severance packages until you agree not to sue them later. Some companies don't give severance except to executives who negotiated it in their employment agreement. Other companies give as much as 6 months pay. It varies but it is not required. They can't withhold COBRA- your health insurance plan. Most of the paperwork is pretty standard, of course, talk to a lawyer and be sure that you are comfortable signing away some rights.

The next thing you have to do is call the state and get your unemployment insurance going. Most states require employers to put money into a pool as a part of their payrole taxes. The state then pays the money back to laid off staff at whatever the state's rate is. Don't worry so much about how much money your company paid into the fund, that doesn't impact your payments. However, the company's unemployment insurance rate often goes up for every layoff. It takes time for the state to process your unemployment request as they have to get in touch with the employer and verify the circumstances of your unemployment. Being laid off and being fired are completely different in many states and it affects what your unemployment insurance rate will be.

 Some states let you do the unemployment insurance registration over the phone while others require you go into an office. You may feel like a failure in some way, but you are not. Layoffs are supposed to be about the financial failure of the company, not your ability to perform. If you were a poor performer they could have fired you or forced you to quit. You are going to that office to get what taxes paid for. It is owed to you.

The drive home after being laid off is terrible too. You may have a wife and kids to tell and that's a hard thing to face. You may be single and you have to figure out how you are going to tell your parents and friends. Its really depressing.

Now you are laid off and you have to sit at home. You may have to make some cuts, like go out to dinner and lunch less, buy less beer or buy cheaper beer, buy less expensive clothes, go to the movies less or rent fewer movies. The trend is clear: buy less if you can.

The first week of unemployment is hard because you may miss your friends from work. It can be painful because one day you are having lunch with friends and then the next you are not allowed to see them at the office anymore. You have been evicted from people that are important to you and a routine you live by. Sure, you can still catch-up with them and have lunches and such, but it isn't the same. Even the strong and reclusive people become depressed by these circumstances.

Looking for a new job is your new job. It can be difficult for a number of reasons. First, being pushed out of a job can leave you bitter and that shows up in an interview. You have probably interviewed people that seemed angry and didn't hire them.

Second, layoffs at the height of a recession can leave you with few job options. I checked for jobs through Hot Jobs during the Dot-com bust and saw very few postings and sometimes no postings in the Boston area. Do a search today and you'll find hundreds of Java developer positions in the same area.

Recruiters can be supremely helpful when they are being employed by companies. They may be in a drought during a recession too though. Next are the online ads. I often wonder the value of ads on HotJobs and Dice whether the companies are showing off or are really hiring. Craigslist.com seems to have ads from employers actively hiring. Of course, your professional network is gold and you really should tell people about your situation. They may get know of a company that's hiring and get you in front of someone.

I've painted a bleak picture so far and now I'm going to talk about some of the joys of being out of work. Yes, being unemployed and scraping by can be a wonderful life-changing thing that may bring you a lot of happiness. And provided you can weather the financial drought, could be the best thing that ever happened to you.

Bear in mind that you are a developer. You have all the skills to write your own application from scratch. You can start your own company. You can work for yourself and now is a good time to start. Your skills will stay sharp and you can explore areas of application development that were not available to you in the past. You can learn things outside of your old job too, like learning sales, marketing and finance. It can be an incredibly valuable learning experience.

You don't have to start your own company though. Consider working on an OSS project fixing bugs and working your way up to being a mainline contributer. The minimal goal is to ensure you don't lose your valuable development skills.

There are lots of fun things you can do on the cheap too. You can go out for a walk, a long walk, every day. Reading is something you have plenty of time for. And of course, you can code for several hours a day on things you are interested in. You can also spend some time blogging (aka writing skills), cooking and gardening. You could probably paint your house too. You can go on long drives and hikes.

One obstacle to overcome is the notion that you must get hired at your old salary, old title or even get a promotion. It happens, but many developers will tell the tales of how employers snapped up highly skilled laid off folks on the cheap.

I talked to a manager at a defense research company during the beginning of the Dot-com crash who was excited by the layoffs happening in the area. She was looking forward to hiring a couple of new people at lower salaries. I lost interest immediately because I currently had a job and a front line manager probably shouldn't be so excited by how labor costs were coming down thanks to the misfortune of others. Moreover, they shouldn't gleefully take advantage of the laid off when there is actually no financial benefit to the hiring manager. An argument could be made that the manager can now hire a better engineer for the money, but that engineer probably has enough sense to leave when the market rebounds. These managers are looking to cut labor costs and a laid off person has almost no room to negotiate salary or benefits.

There are some guys out there that haven't been laid off and they attribute it to their stellar performances and that's great, good for them! The risk is that you simply never know what is going to happen from one quarter or week to the next. Preparing for a layoff is sort of like a squirrel preparing for winter, you hope it will never come, but you are ready if it does.

Now some of this sounds like words of experience. I've been laid off and it wasn't a good time for about a week and I was bitter about it for a lot longer. A few days after being laid off I started writing a lot of code every day, reading voraciously, dating more, watching a lot of movies, cooking, spending a lot of time outdoors, looking for a new job every day and met my future wife. I had saved ahead of time and had a low mortgage. I look back at that time as being one of the best times of my life, but only because I had the savings.