What 20 years in tech has taught me about performance, and what losing my job taught me about being human

The morning I got that email everyone in tech dreads, I did what any self-respecting tech professional would do: I opened LinkedIn.

Within an hour, I had updated my headline to “Open to Work,” messaged three former colleagues, and started drafting a post about my “exciting new chapter.” The playbook was clear. Network aggressively. Optimize the resume. Treat the job search like a sprint.

I’d seen hundreds of these posts. I’d even liked a few, silently grateful it wasn’t me.

Now it was me.

What I didn’t do that morning, what didn’t even occur to me, was sit with how I actually felt. That would come later, in a therapist’s office, after I’d burned through weeks of performative productivity and finally admitted that something was wrong.

The Playbook Doesn’t Account for This

My layoff had capped off what could easily be described as a challenging year. The layoff wasn’t expected, but I knew my performance wasn’t top tier that year. In one year my mother had developed dementia, my daughter had been born with heart issues, and then I’d lost my place in a company I loved.

Losing my role in AWS felt like more than losing a job; it was really about losing a key portion of my identity. Being part of Amazon and AWS in particular was a job I had absolutely loved, working on projects that mattered with people who were some of the best I’d encountered in a workplace.

After 10 years in big tech at Microsoft and then Amazon, I thought I understood how to handle setbacks. I’d navigated reorgs, difficult managers, impossible deadlines. I’d been promoted. I’d been passed over. I’d learned to compartmentalize, to keep moving, to focus on what I could control and what I loved the most: building platforms that scaled.

Losing my job should have been just another problem to solve and unlike many I got a generous severance package. It should have felt more managable than it did.

But here’s the kicker: layoffs don’t just take your paycheck. They take your colleagues who feel like family or friends, your reason to get up early. They take the version of yourself you’ve spent years constructing the version of you that knows the right answers, who delivers results, and who knows exactly where he fits.

I didn’t realize how much of my identity and even my support system was tied to work.

What I Did Instead of Feeling It

The first few weeks, I was a machine. Applications sent at a rate that was almost inhuman, 40 to 50 applications every week. Networking calls scheduled. Skills gap analysis completed and resume polished. I treated unemployment like a project with deliverables and a timeline of yesterday.

My beautiful wife, a psychologist, watched this unfold with a patience I didn’t deserve. She knew I was suffering, but she kept showing a kind of love and patience that few people have. My mood had been awful and my patience lacking while we had a new daughter to tend to at the same time, one with a seemingly endless list of medical appointments.

Despite all that, anytime she would ask me how I was doing it was the same predictable thing: the F word, “fine.”

She would nod patiently and smile, but she could see the truth.

The truth was, I wasn’t fine. I was waking up at 3 AM with my chest tight. I was snapping at small inconveniences. I was cycling between manic productivity and complete paralysis, struggling to start the simplest tasks. I told myself this was normal. Temporary. Just the stress of transition.

It wasn’t until a phone screen went poorly, not because I wasn’t qualified, but because I couldn’t focus, couldn’t articulate basic answers, couldn’t stop my leg from bouncing under the desk that I realized I was stuggling. It wasn’t until my wife said maybe you should see that therapist again that I realized what was obvious to her that I really needed to do something different.

Walking Into the Room

I’d been to therapy before, when my mother’s dementia pushed her into a nursing home, but I had stopped goin as I felt better. It had helped, and just as I’d started feeling better, the baby came with challenges followed by this job loss a few months later. I felt odd going back, as if I hadn’t learned enough the first time or just like the first time, as a man, I should have had a magical solution to this problem. Like a lot of men, I started working out more because the internet and society will tell you all men need is success or a rocking bod, so obviously since my success was lacking, working out more would fix everything, right? Obviously.

That’s the lie, by the way. You can’t white knuckle or exercise your problems away, nor can you expect that just because you went to therapy once before, you’ll never need to go again. Needing support again doesn’t mean the first round didn’t count; it means you’re still human and bad things that really hurt can still happen.

My therapist said something in our first session after I lost my job: “Roderick, I’ve heard your story and one thing that stands out to me is you always bounce back. You’ve faced a lot of serious challenges from your childhood to this moment now, and you just need to remember you own the story. Don’t tell yourself a lie that you can’t rebuild, because you will, even if you don’t know what it looks like.”

What We Actually Talked About

I expected to spend our sessions strategizing about the job search. Instead, we barely mentioned it.

We talked about identity and how I’d fused who I was with what I did. We talked about the pressure I put on myself to have answers immediately, to never appear uncertain, to perform competence even when I felt lost. We talked about grief, because losing a job is a loss, and losses need to be processed, not optimized.

When we talked about the grief of losing my job and compared it to the grief I felt of losing my mother’s personality to dementia, I realized that the nature of this problem was different than I imagined. This problem wasn’t purely professional or financial; it was mental and spiritual as well. The answer was to accept my uncomfortable feelings, to take refuge in my faith, and to accept that some things we cannot control.

Another thing that stuck with me: I’d been treating the job search like it was urgent because urgency felt productive. But urgency was also a way to avoid sitting with uncomfortable feelings. Every application I sent was a way to tell myself I was doing something, even when what I actually needed was to do nothing. To feel. To let the loss be real before I rushed past it, and maybe to even pray or meditate.

The Statistics Nobody Wants to Be

Here’s what I learned while I was supposed to be networking:

Men are significantly less likely to seek mental health support than women. In 2024, only about 17% of men received any mental health treatment, compared to nearly 29% of women. We’re also four times more likely to die by suicide. Men are also more likely to die after retirement because many of us tie our identities to our work.

Why do men seek help at lower rates? It isn’t because men don’t struggle. It’s because we’ve been taught that struggling is weakness. That asking for help is failure. That the appropriate response to pain is to push through it, fix it, or ignore it entirely.

I spent weeks trying to LinkedIn my way out of a mental health crisis. It didn’t work. Therapy and prayer, those two together, really, truly helped.

What Actually Helped

Therapy helped. Not because my therapist gave me answers, he didn’t, but because he gave me space to ask better questions.

Questions like:

What would it mean to take a job that pays less but fits better?
What parts of my career was I holding onto out of ego rather than genuine interest?
What do I want my work life to really look like?

I’m not going to pretend I emerged from unemployment as some enlightened version of myself. I still checked LinkedIn too often, often enough to annoy my wife. I still felt the panic when another week passed without an offer. I still had bad days were I felt miserable.

But I also had someone helping me notice when I was spiraling. Helping me separate “I lost my job” from “I am worthless.” Helping me remember that my value isn’t determined by my employment status, no matter how many years I’d spent believing otherwise.

The Part I Almost Didn’t Write

Losing my AWS job wasn’t the first hard thing I’d been through. I’d lost a job early in my career that led me to bankruptcy and cost me the home I owned. That younger version of myself panicked and was too ashamed to ask for help, leading me to make decisions that hurt me in the long run and led to those terrible outcomes. But this second job loss, years later, I didn’t panic. I asked for help from all the people I knew could help. I focused on my mental well-being, my spiritual well-being, and doing the next right thing. I didn’t let ego get in the way.

The white-knuckle strategy worked for about three weeks. Then it didn’t.

If you’re reading this and you’ve recently been laid off, or you’re worried you might be, I’m not going to tell you that everything happens for a reason or that this is secretly a gift. That’s toxic positivity, and a load of you know what.

What I will tell you is this: the job search can wait. It will still be there tomorrow, and next week, and next month. Your mental health might not be as patient, and showing up to an interview a mess could cause you to lose a great opportunity.

What I’d Do Differently

If I could go back to that first morning, the one where I immediately opened LinkedIn, I’d close the laptop. I’d take some time to meditate or pray for a moment to be present with the loss while connected to myself and my higher power.

I’d let myself feel the shock. I’d tell someone I trusted that I wasn’t okay. I’d make an appointment with a therapist before I made an appointment with a recruiter.

I’d remember that I spent 20 years building skills that aren’t going to disappear because I took two weeks to process a major life change. That hiring managers can wait. That my mental health couldn’t.

I’d remember that going to therapy isn’t giving up on the job search. It’s making sure I’m actually capable of showing up for it.

Roderick is a technical program manager with 20 years of experience at companies including Amazon, Microsoft, and ServiceNow. He writes about mental health, career transitions, and what it means to be a man who asks for help. He lives in Florida with his wife, a psychologist, and is the founder of Mente360.

Related: If you’re a therapist supporting clients through job loss, career transitions, or grief, explore how Mente360 helps you document and communicate effectively so you can focus on what matters: your clients.

Resources

If you’re experiencing a mental health crisis, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.

If you’re looking for a therapist, the Psychology Today Therapist Finder can help you search by location, specialty, and insurance.

I Got Laid Off and Went to Therapy Instead of LinkedIn