On Failure (& Layoffs)

At the end of last year, 2025, I was laid off from a job that I really loved and where I thought I was doing well. In 2024, I was laid off at the end of the year, too. I don’t think I was doing as well in that job, but I was following orders, at least. The previous year, my contract didn’t get renewed a week or two before the whole business unit was taken out back and given the Old Yeller treatment. And then before that, I was laid off just after the new year after being assured that there were no layoffs coming.

SPOILER: There were, in fact, many layoffs coming.

—> Superficially —>

It's been turbulent and kinda not so great.

—> Drilling deep into the mantle of my maladroit mental bedrock —>

I feel like a colossal failure trying to tread water with a charlie horse and full plate armor.

A failure? Wait, moi? But I thought I was good at things! Or at least not bad.

Well, I suppose you can’t argue against the raw proof of it:

• I wanted to keep working at my jobs.
• My then-employers wanted the precise and exact opposite.

That sure has the effluvium of failure on it, I’d say. The funk of flop. The malodor of career misstep. But, if that is indeed true, does that mean I’m a failure?

And that’s the backstory. That’s why I’m thinking so much about failure. Like, a lot. I’m just trying to make sense of my own feelings and where I go from here while sharing some delightfully absurd metaphors with whoever else is feeling like the only short guy at the pole vaulting party.

Contents

• Why Am I Writing This
• On Repeated Failure
• Now
• The Future

Why Am I Writing This

When you get laid off, especially if you liked that job from which you have been suddenly and irrevocably separated, it’s not uncommon to feel like you got blasted with a precision-guided artillery strike. It doesn’t contain explosives, however. Oh no, it’s something much worse, much darker than a few paltry and unstable combustibles. Inside these WMDs one finds the meanest of modern weapons: you know, the category that could reasonably be prefixed with “psycho-”.

Self doubt. Fear. Impostor’s Syndrome.

But - and this is critical - you may not even get to learn why you were laid off. You just have to go. Like, now. Access cut off during the call. No slack or email adios. Just a call and dead air and posture like a deflated balloon.

It’s sort of like getting slapped and then, immediately after the sinusoidally smarting waves of irrational rage wear off, you realize the hand that slapped you was covered in poison ivy. And bees. Angry bees.

The pain is only just beginning.

What I’m getting at, in the most delightfully indirect way of course, is that you may have some idea of why you were selected, especially in cases like a RIF (reduction in force, for the unitiated/un-forcibly-exited) where managers and directors just have to pass up a list of lucky contestants who won the right to chuck those pesky health benefits in the dumpster. But you, poor foolish flower plucked in the height of spring, you are left to wonder without knowing. That lack of certainty is like the unseen uppercut coming in behind guard, a chin just waiting to be thrust toward the sky before you crumple into a cross-eyed heap. Just raw, mainlined anxiety.

• “Was I doing worse than I thought? Am I totally unaware?”

• “Did I make someone mad? Did my coworkers hate me?”

• “Could I have saved my job if I made some different choices or just worked more at night and on weekends?”

…and my personal favorite, always on repeat…

• “Am I just not very good at this? Did I try to level up too quickly? Do I suck as a developer?”

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to draw that conclusion after failing in the same fashion so many times in a row. It’s that special “disappointingly more times than one in a row” bit that I keep tripping over, cursing at and throwing into the nearest briskly moving body of water only to rediscover it, blustering and beaming, right on the middle of my path. Again.

(That smug little bastard.)

Speaking directly to the heading, I’m writing this to learn and to push through obstacles that, it appears, I’ve laid partially in front of myself. A functional spike strip on the only road home. Saran wrap on my preferred privy. Yikes. Oof, even.

On Repeated Failure

Repeatedly failing in basically the exact same way is instructive. Unpleasantly so. It feels like someone screaming the winning lottery numbers into your ear through an old, rusty bugle that is full of spit. Or getting gently clubbed repeatedly in the amygdala with a paint-by-numbers kit.

(Okay, that last metaphor is a stretch…)

Things you may, or may not, learn:

1. There’s certainly a common thread in each failure, and you (I) suck at sewing.

2. You probably didn’t take enough time to ruminate on the why for the failures. Needed more time in the third and fourth stomachs, methinks. Gotta let those nutritional nuggets settle.

3. You might be purposefully looking away, avoidant. Like a kid spewing “la la la la la” with his fingers in his ears. Just about as funny, too. I bet that kid is wearing a t-shirt that they say is “vintage” but it still feels current to me. Ouch. (Now get outta my yard, young’un!)

I’m sure there are some equally pithy observations that weren’t obvious enough to end up on my wonderfully ordered list, but we can see a throughline:

(…walks with purpose and moxie toward the camera and dramatically removes sunglasses you didn’t realize I had on…)

There’s gold in them thar hills.

With a little self-awareness, we can take account of what failures were ours and what failures were with our exes. Here are a few observations on the types of separations that could occur.

Sometimes the job is fine, you think you understand each other well enough, but then you get an email for a meeting with a cryptic title that smells - clearly - distinctly - unmistakeably - like an incoming unemployment insurance claim. That termination, in my (coping) opinion is probably a bullet dodged. Not to say that you/I may not have made mistakes and earned our exit, but that separation strategy is the job equivalent of getting broken up with via singing telegram or eating those jellybeans that have nasty flavors mixed in. Poor taste, vaguely amusing and difficult to swallow.

Sometimes the job is not fulfilling and the separation is a mercy killing. You ignored the red flags during the hiring process and still took the job. When the documentation in all the repos didn’t work at all and the dev environments don’t work without a top tier sorcerer casting a protection spell on your SSD, you told yourself that it was fine and it couldn’t get any worse. When you didn’t get to work on any of the things you were hired for, you shrugged internally and tried to be accommodating and… Dude, are you even listening to yourself? You got sold a timeshare with a lemon used car in the garage and took the call for the extended warranty. Take the L and move on.

And then, of course, my favorite - the shoelaces tied together underneath the lunch table. You loved the job, you thought you were pushing to grow, working on things that matter, building new relationships around the company, but the end comes quickly and suddenly. Maybe there’s an email and then a Zoom call. Maybe you are read a carefully arranged, edited and HR-approved Dear Jo[h]n Openshaw letter. Maybe the messengers are legitimately sad to send you off. Maybe they are stoic. You try not to cry. Or maybe you do.

No jokes here: losing something you love hurts and it is right and good to grieve.

Now

Right, so let’s review:

1. You feel super shitty. ✅
2. You feel like you suck aggressively at what you do. ✅
3. You feel like you may never be whole again, a human donut. ✅

Rejoice, dear friend! You are human and feeling feelings and on the road to whatever lies beyond the next loping hilltop.

If, however, at this point you feel nothing:

Rejoice, dear friend! You perhaps hated that job in the same way that my wife hates ASMR (with tyrannical, acidic hatred)? Or you have a hide on you tough enough to make a pangolin jealous (consult your physician, please)? You’re free to go; let yourself out as you please.

(…or you’re a sociopath…?)

Having said that, in low times, I find myself dropping any pretense at humorous deflection and doing the most direct and unapologetic analysis of self.

(Inner Speech Interlude)

Be honest. Be harsh. You’re already at the bottom, so digging a bit deeper won’t feel so different, will it? And when you feel you’ve found something that is meaningful, something you can learn and work on, decide.

Truly, I cannot emphasize this enough - decide and abide

My own notes from this last bout of flaying of the self:

• Better to communicate clumsily than to say nothing when words are needed.
• Do not rest on laurels in PR review if there is pushback without satisfying resolution. Push.
• Ask for the help you need, but act like it may not come in time.
• Promise only what you are certain you can deliver.
• Do not wait for feedback - pursue it.

The Future

(re-engaging humor gland)

This last subhead is gross, seriously. Even so, I chose these headings in a brief and inadequate outline I shoveled out a week or so ago, and I’m not swerving now. We plow heedlessly forward, fellow flailing wayfarers!

Actually, that previous paragraph kind of summarizes things, weirdly enough. We can shudder at what we did before. We can throttle ourselves and decry our weaknesses and failures. We are human and frail and prone to totally blowing it. That’s okay with me. I can learn to live with it as long as I stand up one more time.

It kind of has to be okay because I want to believe that I will be better now and tomorrow than I was the day or month or year before. I just have to decide and abide. Let’s do that.

Cheers, love you ♥