I was laid off in Q4 2022. It was my second job out of college, and I was 8 years into my career.

I had been mostly happy at job 1, where I stayed for 5 years, and only left because they were onsite-only and I was moving back home to be closer to family. It was a pleasant job with little stress and catered lunches. I gained 15 lbs, bringing me to just barely not underweight.

At job 2, I stayed for 3 years prior to the layoffs. I lost 15 lbs due to the stress and was underweight again. The place was toxic and I got given a bad performance review in early 2022 because I got put on a shitty project in 2021 and didn't have the soft skills to dodge out of it like many others did. I then spent all of 2022 booking it to get back into good performance graces (because I really wanted to keep vesting my equity grant, which was stock-denominated and had appreciated quite well). I accomplished this by the midyear mark (got a good check-in rating) and was hoping to get an "exceeds" designation at the next full perf review. Instead I (and several other peers) got laid off because my stock grant had appreciated TOO much and I was very overpaid. I was 1 month into my parental leave at the time of the layoff. And since then the stock price has dropped ~50% so fuck me, right? It's private equity so it's not like I was ever even being overpaid in actual USD-liquid stuff.

So I pulled some strings in my network and got hired at the same cash comp (and with equity too but :shrug: as to how much that'll be worth) pretty quickly and scheduled myself to start about a week after my parental leave would've ended anyway.

I was paid throughout my parental leave (since it was a protected leave) and got severance too, then started my new job a week later.

That was about 4 months ago. Getting laid off ended up being fairly profitable due to the ~0 gap in employment and the severance. I can't say I really had a great time though and it kind of ruined the holidays and made it hard to enjoy month 2 of my parental leave (in addition to all the other things that makes parental leave hard to "enjoy", anyway, like, yknow, the sleep deprivation and baby blues/depression etc).

I think overall I just feel numb. I like my new job well enough and it's nice that it's a lot closer to the work I want to do (my last job was more soft-skills-y and project/product manage-y and not enough coding for my taste, whereas my new job is very technical which is what I love). And while I enjoy the day-to-day work and don't feel burned out, I just don't give a fuck about it as a whole anymore. There's absolutely 0 emotional attachment. Maybe that's better than how attached I felt to my prior 2 jobs? I felt like an owner who cared. (But I still enforced good WLB - despite how stressful it was, I never let myself work more than ~30 mins late and I never started more than ~15 mins early).

But I do intend to do this for years (my new company is a good place, with a good reputation, and I'm college friends with many of the devs and some of management), and it's what I'm going to do with ~50% of my working hours. So I do want to care a little, you know?

But I don't.

(And I'm not depressed - I'm familiar with the screening due to post-partum depression and I don't have any of the symptoms, and I still look forward to things etc and don't feel "numb" to anything else in my life).

I'm hoping that as time goes on, I'll continue to finish emotionally processing the layoff and some of my defensive not-caring-about-work will recede a little bit. And I still love software. So, we'll see.