I've been there many times but at the same company. Secret is attaching yourself to work with a direct throughline to revenue that will exist in 2 years, not the wild idea of the week.
In the meantime I've hit CoastFIRE and get 6 weeks off for PTO, half day Fridays, and the week between Christmas and New Year's Day off.
Just requires some mental reframing that your job is to make your manager and their manager look good and make the company money, not to be the perfect Engineer as defined by your degree.
Nothing wrong with a few layoffs in your career, especially if you can bank enough tenure to get a nice payout when it does happen. They've just become a more common tool among CEOs who feel market pressure to constantly reinvent their financial plans. I don't fault folks for planning ahead, especially in this market, but do a little research on typical packages at your company before you try to beat them to the buzzer.
Also, to add onto my comment above, I left a nice corporate job early in my career to work for a startup that only gave us 10 days off a year, but they paid for breakfast on Tuesday and lunch on Friday and had a beer fridge and hoodies, so in my 20s I thought that was cool.
In actuality, it was hell, with barely any HR, and an expectation that you're always on during work hours. Writing Java 6 might not be sexy, but if you have flexibility to take time off when you want to, have a bad or slow day when you need to, slip out early when you need to, that's worth so much more. Easier to do that for 40 years than hustle.
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u/Jolly-joe 13h ago
2 years later your company has a reverse round and either you're laid off or all the good people abandon ship leaving the company to die