I got laid off twice in a year. How am I now employed again? Reflections on Tech Interviewing in 2026

How do I still have a job?

AI Disclosure (I think it’s more honest to just put it in front): Used it to learn good article structure. But typed the whole article by hand.

The past few years have taken the tech industry down a strange path.

Covid threw the entire world in for a loop. When the offline world couldn’t meet face-to-face, suddenly the online world became very important. I think I am not unique in my experience as a mid-level dev (as I was at the time) when I got a massive pay-rise, mostly to keep me from switching to a company that paid their guys better.

But the tech industry’s reckoning has come. The layoffs are brutal, the headcounts dropping hard. It is my personal belief (like many others as well) that a lot of the layoffs we’re seeing are a continuation of the post-Covid layoffs stemming from the Covid hiring spree. AI has exacerbated it, and maybe it will come full circle someday, with software engineers becoming more in demand for… reasons. Hopefully!

I faced this firsthand when I got laid off last year AND this year. But twice I lost my job, and twice I bounced back into a better job, and after some reflection I think I know why.

If you are a tech industry worker that is nervously looking for a job, or recently lost your job, I hope this article will help you realise why you too can bounce back just fine.

In this economy? Really?

When I was shown the door a few months back, I was floored.

Jobless? In this economy?

I had heard stories of people losing their tech jobs and taking more than a year to find their footing again. But I have a family. I couldn’t afford that. So I tried to cling to the job, but to no avail.

I did what any panicking ex-tech worker did. Threw my resume at every LinkedIn posting that vaguely fit my skills. Reached out to my recruiter network, even companies that I had applied to before.

And like every other interviewing techie in the world, I got rejection after rejection. I’ve had my share of interviewers who would lazily throw a Leetcode test at you, or make you jump through hoop after hoop only to give you a generic rejection letter without any follow-up.

I knew I was feeling the burnout a couple of months in. Sleepless nights of wondering when it was all going to come to fruition. Not knowing if I was selling myself short, or walking into a trap. All while trying to present the “best” version of myself to everyone I met.

The “best” version of myself

When you enter an interview, what sort of questions would your interviewer ask you? (let’s put aside the technical interviews for now)

Maybe you’d expect “tell me about yourself”, or “what projects have you worked on”?

Now do that 10 times for 10 different companies. Would you give a different answer every time?

A clever interviewee would tell you to tailor their answer to the company.

How different would your answers be then?

Most would struggle with anything beyond a moderate variation. Everyone would feel the fatigue.

I remember a time when I struggled to articulate what made me a good engineer. Yes, I did plenty of stuff in production, and I could tell you about when things broke and how I had to go in and fix them. But I couldn’t paint a coherent picture how that made me a good engineer.

When I was forced to answer those interview questions, I began to see a pattern; that the interviewers who I impressed were the ones I was open and honest with, even if that meant telling them in the face what I thought they wanted from the role and whether I thought I was a good fit. I didn’t have to “fake it till I made it”, I simply told them who I was (mostly the better stuff, of course!). That was the trick that I had to realise for myself, is that while interviewing is about giving the “right” answer, your “right” answer has to be anchored in your experiences, your skills, and what you learned on the job.

To answer honestly and (hopefully) convincingly required me to take a step back and take stock of what I had done, what I had learned and become good at doing. The vast majority of skills in tech are not learned in school, they are learned on the job. Yet it took me becoming jobless to realize that identifying my engineering abilities and putting them into words was table stakes now.

This gave me a great strength: Once I neatly arranged a mental model of what I was and what I had done over my career, most of the generic interview questions were quite simple to answer.

You are your most important asset

Let’s try this.

When you do a job, you are selling your time, applying your particular set of skills in exchange for money. It’s like renting out a house.

So when you’re in an interview, you’re like a homeowner showing people around your house.

How you arrange your interview is the same as how you arrange the things in your house. Maybe you have a great living room or kitchen, but nobody’s gonna see it under the massive pile of clutter strewn about, or if you forget that you have a spacious study room that you haven’t used in a while, nobody will know or take that into account when deciding whether to rent or buy your place.

Likewise if you want to present the strongest version of yourself, take stock of what you are and what you’ve done. Identify what people want, see what you’ve done in the past that could align with it, and press on it! You might surprise yourself with what you find.

As for myself, it took being kicked out of a job to figure this out. Would I recommend burning cash and fretting over how to feed my family for months on end? Absolutely not. Would I do it all over again if that’s what it took to learn this lesson? Absolutely yes.

Thank you for reading!

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And if you want more insights into the tech industry, follow me as I explore the weird world of tech interviewing.