Celebrating my one-year layoff anniversary | iiro.dev

Exactly one year ago, while visiting Riga, I got laid off.

Now, I’m back in Riga to celebrate the anniversary and to write this blog post.

I worked at the company for a bit more than four years. Near the end, I had a feeling that things were not going that great, so I started preparing for the worst.

I’m very happy the layoff happened. Here’s that story.

Honeymoon phase

I joined the company in early 2021, before we had any customers.

What we did have was investor money, a big pre-launch waitlist, a strong design team, and technical problems I was excited to work on, including collaborative realtime rich text editing, offline-first sync, polished UI details, animations, and more.

Our website won multiple design awards. We were also one of the poster children for Flutter. They featured us a few times, and we got a ton of positive buzz around our app.

Initially it really felt like a dream job.

I still miss many of my coworkers. Some of the best engineers, designers, and managers I have ever worked with are from that company.

Burning out

Along with other things I won’t dive into, one of the problems was that I became one of the go-to data plumber sync garbage men.

It’s a janitor’s job. If you do your job perfectly, no one notices, but if you make some mistakes, everyone notices.

Most of the time, I ended up doing hard bug fixes and feature development around the offline sync and realtime document collaboration. That, of course, meant that I usually did not get the cool, bounded, shiny new projects to demo in the biweekly all-hands meetings.

Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash." src="/images/one-year-layoff-anniversary/stressed_man_computer.jpg" loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1000" height="667" />

Roughly how I felt every time when opening my work laptop. Photo by Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash.

Doing this for years really got to me. I felt I was burning out or at least very close to burning out most of the time.

In the past, I was always the person who was able to do really high quality complex work very fast, but after 2 years or so in this job, I felt like my dev superpowers were wearing off. I lost my mojo. I was scared that I would never be able to execute on the same level as I used to.

My reptile brain had associated my work laptop with some kind of magic bullshit machine that made me feel sad and stressed out whenever I opened it, so I had to force myself to open my laptop on most days.

Oftentimes, I went to bed, only to dream about working. And then my nice work dream was interrupted by my alarm clock and I had to wake up, only to start working for real.

Building a nest egg

Fall 2023, I felt like things are probably not gonna go great.

We had been working on the product for 3 years at that point. It was still in private alpha, and I was not that confident that it would resonate with the ~30k people on our waitlist.

At this point, I was burning out pretty hard. I was worried that if I switched to another job, I would not be able to do good work there, and that I would be fired from there pretty fast. This made me feel like I was stuck in this job, and my only option was to save up for the rainy day.

That way, in the future, I would be able live off from my savings to properly recover between jobs, so that my brain would be fresh and excited for whatever would come next.

The bug-infested murder apartment

With the fancy-pants Principal Engineer’s job title, I was used to living in big apartments that were very nicely designed. Some of them even had a sauna inside the apartment too.

That had to stop, at least for a while, if I were to build any kind of nest egg. I had sold my used Toyota Camry, started cooking food mostly at home, and otherwise downsized my spending. Cutting on rent costs was the next logical thing to do.

In October 2023, I moved to a very cheap 15sqm apartment in an old wooden apartment building. I had to sell most of my stuff to even fit in it.

No sauna either. Truly the darkest chapter of my life.

The corridor and the front door to the cheapest apartment I have ever lived in.

On the moving day, I talked to one of my new neighbors.

I asked him if the other neighbors are friendly, and how is it to live in the apartment building in general.

I have lived here for a long time and aside from having seen someone get killed here , I have no complaints. It is pretty good, neighbors are nice. You are definitely overpaying in rent though.

My rent was a couple hundred euros per month, and that was like three to four times less I used to pay previously.

The apartment was pretty charming inside, even though it was tiny. The bugs and me never became friends though.

Eventually, some bugs started crawling on me and waking me up regularly in the middle of the night. I always kept doors and windows shut, but I guess there were some cracks in the walls and floors.

At some point, I had enough of the bugs. I...