A few years ago, my wife showed me a video of some personal finance guru explaining that you should never quit your job, but you should always get fired. This was because especially when you work anywhere for a long time, you build up a liability for the company to pay you severance, to give that up and just walk away is often a mistake.
It seemed a bit over the top, but has now worked for me twice within one year.
Well I’ve written extensively about how to get hired, how to get promoted, in some cases, and for me this year, success looked like getting laid off, hired, then fired, then hired again all in the same year, and collecting severance for both.
Here’s how I did it.
Hire me as CTO or tech lead for your next project.
Focus on growing the business, never worry about the tech again.
Slide into my DMs on X or Substack. Select portfolio at Deca Labs.
Over-Employment
I had the sense that my big tech job was on the rocks.
We were coming up on year three of the same annual Q1 mass layoffs and this year it seemed like it could be even bigger and even impact me.
Despite all my efforts to remain in the good books and still ship good work, it seemed like increasingly that was not going to be relevant in this new round. AI psychosis was spreading and everyone was going on in leadership about how Opus 4.6 changed everything. And we now we’re being expected to ship more with less.
That was when I made the hard decision to decide to start seriously interviewing for jobs, something I hadn’t done in almost a decade.
The first few interviews were a bit rough, I’ll admit, but pretty quickly I was getting job offers and starting to negotiate hard to retain my full-time remote, high base pay, and even payment into my corp.
Getting paid into my court meant that I could accept lower compensation packages, but on an after-tax basis, still end up way ahead.
On one cold winter evening I told my wife my plans and said that the one company I had the best offer with wanted to do their final full day interview day in New York City, and that I wanted to fly there that night.
She agreed, and I packed my bags. The interviews went well, though I got complaints from one guy that I was slow to set up my environment, but then ultimately still got the right answer.
Final negotiations in person with the CTO went well. He seemed impressed. The founding engineer really liked me. And within a few days, they extended a final offer and even custom agreements from their lawyers to let them hire me. Through my corp, which is they were reluctant to do.
Now I had a choice, do I keep my current big tech cushy job or do I do the honorable thing and give notice, quit and start the new one?
