I've been in your shoes multiple times. It sucks, and it's easy to blame yourself (or relatedly, for others - like here in this very thread - to encourage you to blame yourself). Don't fall into that trap. It won't help.
The only productive thing to do is to take things one step at a time.
1. Apply for unemployment if you haven't already. It won't be anywhere near what you were getting before, but it's better than nothing, and with a layoff it should be an open-and-shut case for approval (especially in places like California that almost always err on the side of the former employee).
2. Just because you don't have an employer doesn't mean you don't have a job. Your unemployment benefits are contingent on you documenting that you've applied for some number of jobs, which you're hopefully already doing, so keep doing that.
3. Just because you don't have an employer doesn't mean you don't have a job. Open-source contributions, side projects, whatever you can do to further demonstrate your value to prospective future employers (and - preferably - make the world a better place in the process) - now's the time to start cranking on those.
4. Obviously, you'll want to trim expenses as much as possible. The lower your costs, the longer your runway.
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In terms of finding that next job, it's gonna be a brutal affair. It took me months, and I ended up compromising and moving down on my career ladder for a bit. You might have better luck, especially if you were previously getting offers regularly, but I'd say 3 days is a bit too soon to be too disheartened.
It seems like your best bet right now is going to be in the medical world (e.g. hospital IT), and in fact that's exactly where I'd be applying right now should my own job go under. As a bonus, if you really do want to "fuck the virus", I can't think of a better way to put your technical skills to use.
> Open-source contributions, side projects, whatever you can do to further demonstrate your value to prospective future employers
That's what I was talking about. Why can't we all as a community figure out some platform where we can help those developers who [temporarily] lost their jobs? We all use lots of open-source tools without paying a dime. Wouldn't it be great to have a platform where they can still contribute to open-source projects during a transitional period? Platforms like Patreon and Github Sponsors are aimed to help authors, but not contributors.
That was the whole point of my comment. I wasn't asking for an advice and certainly wasn't ready for people telling me how incredibly lucky I am.
Indeed it would. Things like Patreon are still usable even if you're "just" a contributor, but it'd be nice if there was one of these patron platforms that better showcased open-source contributions. GitHub Sponsors is a step in the right direction, but there's still a waitlist to be eligible for sponsorships after, what, a year?
Of course, in all likelihood, if jobs are drying up then so will such sponsorships, be it on existing platforms or entirely new ones.
It might not help now but I would highly advise you learn how to budget better and grow a sizable emergency fund.
I genuinely have a hard time believing someone is living paycheck to paycheck (even in the bay area with two kids - where housing is extremely expensive) on a senior software engineer salary at a startup. ($180k/yr) I know people who manage it. It's not a comfortable life but it's stable and they can still save. I mean, they have to. They're not gonna be able to buy their options when they quit if they didn't save.
Genuinely wondering, do you think that this insight simply hasn't occurred to him? The obstacles to someone spending less money are generally more complicated — even when they're within the person's control at all — than simply "start budgeting better." You're being condescending and providing no value.
Also, I bet that you know more people living paycheck-to-paycheck than you realize.
I've met enough people in this field who are completely inept when it comes to anything that doesn't involve typing code.
There's this duality where we appreciate there are many out there who truly cannot downsize their lifestyle to accommodate, and we should sympathize. But of the people I know personally in these scenarios, all of them could easily budget better. And again, in my personal experience, its always a pretty simple evaluation and decision. Its deeply frustrating to see someone I know complaining about how tight things are, but then buying a better car than me, better computer than me, better phone than me. Going out to eat all the time. Etc ad infinitum. So while certainly there are factors outside our controls, I'd wager a lot that the average high salary earners (e.g., HN crowd) do have simple budgeting choices they aren't making. I won't presume much about OP, this is mostly in response to your comment about it being condescending. It is. But, in reality, for many and perhaps most high earners, it really is simple, and sometimes people do need to be called out to realize it.
Nonetheless shouldn't the society tell you something like this?
OP, I'm sorry to hear about your situation. I hope you can find a new position soon. Try to stay positive - this too shall pass.
It is a hard job. We are expected to know everything related to software: you have to know a bit about graphics design, UI and UX, be a writer, a project manager, site reliability and devops engineer , infosec expert, understand encryption and networking, be a QA specialist, know back-end and front-end, understand hardware, operating systems, databases, distributed systems, know concurrency, be a manager and a lead and a good team player, be an expert of a few and be familiar with a dozen of programming languages, understand different paradigms - OOP, logic and relational, functional, stack-based, etc. You have to be consistently and continuously learning new things. You cannot ever stop. And we love that.
Very often you have to pay the price for that love. You get neck and back problems, RSI, myopia, excess body fat, swollen hemorrhoids, gastritis, depression, etc.
And you can never expect to hear praise for anything you do. Programming is extremely subjective when it comes to evaluating the quality of work done. It is so easy to criticize. I have seen people criticizing code written by Linus Torvalds, John Carmack, Richard Stallman, Rich Hickey, and others. No one ever said: "look at this piece of code; this is so deep and profound, it should be carved in stone."
That never happened to me before. I have never once fired, laid-off, or furloughed. And I don't know how to cope with this. The market has gotten very tight since the beginning of the crisis. Usually, my email would explode within hours whenever I make myself available for hire. Now I'm into the third day of my unemployment and still have no prospects, no interviews, no offers.
Just a couple of weeks ago, I was tweeting about how concerned I was about seeing so many developers losing their jobs. I was hoping we'd figure out something, maybe a way to help them. Now I'm looking for a job myself.
Fuck this virus. And fuck those politicians who didn't take it seriously. And fuck those people who still support them.