A layoff is administered like a process and experienced like an event. Somebody schedules thirty minutes, reads a script written by a lawyer, and disables your badge. For them it is the twelfth conversation that day. For you it is the thing you will be explaining in interviews for the next year.
I have not been laid off. I want to say that up front, because a lot of what gets written about layoffs is written by people who have never had to file for benefits and it shows. What I have done is sit on the other side: reviewing candidates who were let go, deciding how much a gap in a CV should count, watching what the market does to good engineers through no fault of their own. That vantage point is useful for some of this and useless for the rest, and I will try to be clear about which is which.
A caveat before anything else: most of the specifics below — severance norms, health coverage, unemployment insurance, notice periods — are jurisdiction-dependent and this article leans toward the US and Indian contexts I know best. In much of Europe, statutory notice and redundancy consultation rules change the picture entirely. In India, notice-pay practice varies wildly between an MNC and a Series A startup. Check your own law and your own contract; do not take internet advice about employment law as applying to you.
The first few days
Do not sign the severance agreement in the room. This is the single most common mistake, and it is understandable — you are embarrassed, you want it over, someone slid a document across a table. Almost every agreement gives you a review period, and even where it does not, "I'll read this tonight and come back to you tomorrow" has never cost anyone their package.
While you still have access, or immediately after if access is already gone, collect the things that will be hard to recover: contact details for colleagues you want to stay in touch with, your own performance reviews, and any non-confidential record of what you actually shipped. This last one matters more than people expect. Six months later, writing your resume, you will not remember the numbers, and you will not be able to ask.
Then read the agreement properly, and look specifically for: what you are giving up by signing (usually the right to sue), whether there is a non-compete or non-solicit and whether it is enforceable where you live, what happens to unvested equity, whether accrued leave is paid out, and what the deadline is for any health-coverage election. Where the stakes are large — significant equity, a restrictive covenant, anything that smells like discrimination — an hour with an employment lawyer is cheap relative to what is on the table.
What is actually negotiable
Severance is more negotiable than most people assume and less negotiable than the internet promises. Both things are true.
Where there is genuine room: the notice or transition period, continuation of health coverage, the date your equity stops vesting, outplacement support, whether you can keep a laptop, and — often the most valuable and least requested item — the exact wording of what the company will say about your departure to anyone who asks.
Where there is usually no room: the formula itself, if this is a large layoff. When 400 people are being let go on the same day under a single approved budget, nobody has authority to give you a bespoke deal, and pushing hard mostly just exhausts you. Individual or small-group terminations are the opposite; there, discretion exists.
Ask plainly, once, in writing, without threat: state your tenure, name one or two specific contributions, say what you are asking for, and say you are ready to move quickly. Then accept the answer. The theatrical negotiation scripts you find online — hinting at legal action, dangling your knowledge of confidential matters — are more likely to end the conversation than improve it, and HR has heard all of them.
How long this actually takes
Nobody can tell you how long your search will take, and anyone offering a confident number is selling something. It depends on your seniority, your specialisation, your visa situation, your location, and how much of the market is hiring for what you happen to do.
What is worth internalising is that the aggregate picture is less catastrophic than the discourse. Tech layoffs have run at elevated levels for several years now — TechCrunch's running tracker is the most convenient public record of the pace — and yet the people in those numbers have overwhelmingly gone on to other jobs. ZipRecruiter has surveyed recently laid-off workers about how the job they found compared with the one they lost, and the picture is mixed rather than grim: a large share land somewhere equivalent or better, a meaningful minority take a step down, and reemployment is the normal outcome rather than the lucky one.
One expectation to adjust downward: the idea that being laid off is a chance to jump to a much higher salary. That was closer to true in 2021 and 2022, when changing jobs carried a large pay premium over staying put. By 2025 that gap had narrowed substantially. Plan for lateral. Treat better than lateral as upside.
Structuring the search without letting it eat you
Two failure modes. The first is doing nothing for six weeks. The second, more common among the conscientious, is treating the search as a ten-hour workday, applying to sixty jobs a week, and burning out by month two with nothing to show for it.
Volume applications to public postings have a low and falling hit rate — not because a machine rejects you, but because a role with 900 applicants is a lottery regardless of your merit. The conversion rate on a referral, or on a conversation with someone who actually works on the team, is different by an order of magnitude. This is not a networking-guru platitude; it is just the arithmetic of how many resumes reach a hiring manager unfiltered.
So weight your effort accordingly. Four hours a day is plenty, and most of it should go to people rather than portals: former colleagues, people two steps out in your network, the author of a paper or library you have used, anyone who has actually seen you work. The message that works is short, specific, and asks for something small — fifteen minutes, or an opinion, not a job.
Keep the rest of your life running. Sleep at normal hours, leave the house daily, and tell a few people what happened. The isolation does more damage than the unemployment. If the low mood persists past a few weeks rather than lifting between good days, treat that as a medical matter and not a character flaw.
On the gap, and how it reads from my side
Candidates over-explain the layoff constantly, and it is the wrong instinct. When I see an end date that coincides with a well-publicised cut at that company, I think nothing of it. A layoff is information about a budget, not about a person. A single line — "my team was cut in the March restructuring" — is a complete answer, and the sooner you move on from it, the better you come across.
What does register is a long gap with nothing in it and no account of it. Not because you owe anyone productivity while unemployed, but because I have nothing to ask about. If you spent four months learning something, building something, caring for a family member, or recovering, say so in a sentence. Any of those are fine. The vacuum is the only version that costs you.
And be careful about accepting the first offer purely to stop the bleeding, if you can afford not to. Before you sign, get the total compensation in writing, understand the vesting schedule, confirm any remote arrangement in the contract rather than the conversation, and ask directly whether the team you are joining has had layoffs and how the company is funded. A company in trouble will usually answer that question evasively, and the evasion is the answer.
The part that is not advice
Being laid off is not evidence about your ability. It is mostly evidence about a spreadsheet. That distinction is easy to state and genuinely hard to feel, particularly if your work was a large fraction of how you thought about yourself — which, in this industry, it usually is.
The search will be slower and more demoralising than this article can convey, and then at some point it will end, usually through a conversation you did not plan. That is not optimism. It is just what happens to almost everyone.
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Taresh Sharan
support@sharaninitiatives.com