This market is rough. Got backstabbed by my co-founder and laid off with the engineering team due to him having a manic attack. Trying to see what part of the bell curve I’m on. Got laid off in February and coming up on 3 months without a job. 300+ job apps submitted. 3 initial interviews, but since been ghosted. Senior-advanced level roles. Applied for PM, soft arch, soft eng, TPM, and solutions arch/eng. Background is in VC backed AI startups as a founder and early employee. Please share how long you’ve been laid off (please only respond to the poll if you’re actively looking). Also please share your role, YOE, and previous TC in the comments for added context. TC $125K 8 YOE #tech #layoffs
Backstabbed how exactly ?
This
He promised a raise and added equity that’s been an agreement for 2+ years. Partly why I took a lower TC initially. Then literally the next day after our discussion about raises for everyone who’s been there from the start, he laid off 75% of the (already tiny) engineering team because the product isn’t finished (because he’s a terrible manager and majorly changed priorities literally every week due to unrealistic promises he made to customers). So he fired the engineering team to focus on engineering…but hasn’t and won’t hire more engineers because, even though we just raised a round, he thinks it’s smarter to hire more sales execs. Make that make sense.
Be a serial entrepreneur. Start again!
Working on this. Though it’s tough with no bootstrapped runway
Dude pick a role and go in on it, you can't possibly be interviewing at a top level for every role under the sun. Even if that's what you did as a cofounder.
I’m casting my net wide to see what sticks…? A lot of roles overlap in background but are simply different in semantics and day-to-day
You're not wrong. But you'll find that companies don't want a jack of all trades, they want a specialist in one area.
Damn dude it’s rough and 2025 looking to be even worse
It’s bad. Yes I’m a TPM so slightly different market but it’s still BAD. Not quite 2005 bad but 2nd only to that in my 20+ year career. I’m five months in and nothing on the horizon right now. I could see this taking another 3-6mo easily.
It’s rough, even for experienced people- I’m in my 40s here in Seattle with over 20 years of deep experience in tech, management and business (everything from IC, PM, Director etc) and I’ve been out of work for 8 months, been applying to hundreds of roles, including startups - so far been getting about 1 serious interview per month (after hundreds of applications and many referrals) but have not been able to convert on anything, even with my AI experience - I even spent 3 months waiting back and forth just interviewing for a contract job as PM for a IT staffing agency for a Costco IT project for 160k (my last role was CTO at 250k) where I was way overqualified and still couldn’t get an offer, sigh Every referral I’ve sent has been crickets, the few startups want me to work for free, tried variants of my resume, and different approaches and networking and even recruiters are mostly silent, getting ghosted is the norm as well It’s disheartening of course, my wife has gotten enough work lately to keep us going on her much smaller salary and unemployment and healthcare has run out this month So soldiering on, working on some side projects with Gen AI and training -and hoping something comes up Good luck to all who are looking! And for those interviewing have some empathy for the jobless, it’s tough out there
It really is. Similar boat. 46 with 23 yoe in tech. Formerly Google with AI experience. Five months now and nothing. The competition is too fierce now. >100 resumes for most any role within hours so if you’re not in that batch, best of luck. Even if you are, you end up with at best a 1 in 3 chance of landing the role. Just went thru a full round of interviews/onsite with my ideal company and yesterday got the news they chose another. Honestly about as down about this whole situation I’ve been so far.
Are you interested in a startup gig
Always
5YoE, Canada, about 3 months unemployed, had one startup offer that I turned down because they didn't seem serious, and a bunch of tests, couple of interviews
Going to be unemployed next week