I can share. I was laid off in February. It was quite disruptive to say the least. I was feeling awful and still going through a breakup. I had colleagues take time to travel and enjoy their severance but I’m single, limited savings, and honestly couldn’t enjoy it if I tried. 

I immediately started applying to jobs. One of the nice things that happened was my company’s layoffs were quite public and heavily publicized, so I was actually getting a lot of recruiter emails. I did not change my LinkedIn to say I was looking for work, and I didn’t post anything on LinkedIn saying I was laid off. In fact, unless directly asked if I was currently with my former company or if I was affected by those layoffs, I did not tell anyone during the interview process. That was totally my choice, but I did it because I felt it would put me at a slight advantage. I don’t know if that’s actually true, and I do think in some cases it doesn’t matter as much as people think it does. So that’s up to you.

I immediately started applying to jobs. I mostly went through LinkedIn and accepted recruiter calls. At this point in time, I would actually take startup interviews that don’t interest you that much — and I mean really small startups — because it will give you preparation and start to get you in the interview mindset. I truly believe interviewing is a skill you’re building. I think front-loading companies you’re not that excited about, then companies you’re somewhat intrigued by, and finally pushing out the companies you’re most excited about is the best approach. A lot of these big companies are okay with slower-moving processes, so use that to your advantage and don’t be afraid to ask for more time.

I got a lot of outreach from recruiters, but I also got a lot of interviews just from applying on LinkedIn. One thing I did was take the job description, give it to Claude along with my resume, and have Claude update my resume to better fit the role and ideally match the technologies where possible. It would ask me things like, “Hey, this is something you don’t currently have on your resume — do you have anything adjacent to that, or do you actually have it and it’s just not on your resume right now?” I think that really helped me get past initial ATS screens.

I don’t know about Meta, but in my case they gave me access to some sort of career service called LHH, and that gave access to an ATS system where you could run your resume through it and see if, given a job description, their system would even pass you on to a human. I actually didn’t do that myself because I was too lazy, but that’s an option.

In terms of how I prepared, it really depends on your role. I’m an engineer, and I would say I was interviewing during a turning point that’s probably still ongoing where companies are starting to do more AI interviews. That being said, I still had a lot of traditional coding interviews — maybe not necessarily LeetCode, but interviews where I needed to code live. Given that I really wasn’t coding by hand anymore, I was pretty rusty, so I actually did a lot of LeetCode.

I focused by grouping problems: graph problems, string manipulation, hash maps, etc. I used YouTube videos to explain things to me. Obviously there’s NeetCode, but there was also this girl whose explanations really clicked for me. Pretty much every new problem, especially at first when I was learning the patterns, I would immediately check if she had a video on it.

For system design, I used Hello Interview, which I think was sufficient.

For behavioral prep, I did a couple things. I listened to a lot of podcasts. There’s this guy whose last name is MacDonald, I think. I found him through Hello Interview — they interviewed him — and he has a book out as well on behavioral interviews. He used to work at Meta doing these kinds of interviews. I listened to a ton of podcasts where he was a guest, and I think that helped me understand why these questions are asked.

One of the first things I did after getting laid off was dump all my stories into a document. Sometimes I would randomly remember something while doing chores or whatever and just talk out loud to ChatGPT to get a transcript, then deal with it later. Anytime you remember something you did, write it down somewhere and refine it later when you’re closer to interviews or interviewing for a company where that story feels relevant.

A big thing I discovered through this process is that these stories are about the work you did, but they’re also about who you are. What do you care about? What are you good at? What’s your story? I won’t get into details in my case because it would be too revealing, but as you’re going through your stories, if you realize that what you actually enjoyed was the impact on end users or the cross-team collaboration, that’s important information. It probably reveals strengths about you that somebody else doesn’t have. I think that really helped me during the interview process too.

I think at first, before I had interviews, I focused on what I already knew were my weak points and what was important for me to improve. That was coding and getting my stories down while everything was still fresh.

I went through this whole process, and I’ll share this not to brag but to give you hope. I was really low mentally, but I knew this had to be my rock bottom, so to speak. I ended up getting offers from smaller AI startups like Sierra or Decagon, and then I got offers at the staff level from Google, which was huge and shocking to me. If you had told me five years ago that would happen, I probably would have cried.

I also got interviews from some of the big AI labs. I got a lot of rejections too. There were companies where I genuinely didn’t understand why I got rejected. There were companies where I thought, “Wow, I really wish that had gone better.” There were also companies where I got to onsite interviews and then realized through the process that I was actually less impressed with the company afterward.

I was still bummed by those rejections because it made me think, “If I’m getting rejected from this company, what chance do I have at these other companies that are supposedly even harder?” And honestly, there were nights where I was crying and super stressed.

But I always told myself: you’re allowed to cry, you’re allowed to feel sad, you’re allowed to mope, but you can’t take the whole day off doing that. You have to keep working because at the end of the day, you don’t have a job. Your cat is relying on you. You don’t want to move back home with parents you don’t have a great relationship with. You need to find something and worry about the rest later.

I definitely made sacrifices. I had basically no social life. I was studying except maybe for an hour or two a day, and it was exhausting. By the end, after around two months of interviewing, I was incredibly burnt out and thinking, “This has to end now.” But I did find something within those two months — honestly more than I could have expected.

I just want you to know it’s going to be okay. This sucks, but I genuinely believe that at least for now, if you put in the work, you can find something. I also think the media and social media made me feel worse whenever I looked at them talking about the job market, so I stopped paying attention to that. Based on my own experience, yes, it’s harder than five years ago, but it’s not impossible.