How to Survive a Layoff, Starting Before It Happens

The equity exercise deadline is the one that catches people. It's often 90 days after you leave, and plenty of people only find out once it's passed.

Half a million people have been through a tech layoff in the past four years. What they learned fits in a three-part checklist, and the part most people skip comes before anything happens.

Before: watch for the warnings

Layoffs lag. The warnings come first.

• At the company: hiring freezes, executives who leave and aren't replaced, sudden scrutiny of small expenses, a new CFO with a cost mandate, consultants running "org reviews", missed quarters blamed on "macro headwinds".
• In your own job: your project gets deprioritized, your manager is suddenly hard to book, a reorg leaves your function's place unclear, or your tasks turn up in an AI-tooling rollout.

Whatever the signs say, keep your own record of what you've achieved, with numbers, because you lose access to everything the day it happens. Keep two or three references warm. Take the recruiter call even when you're happy. And hold some personal runway, since the median search now runs 3 to 6 months.

The day HR sends the invite

If it lands on your calendar:

• Don't sign anything that day. Severance agreements come with review windows, often legally mandated ones (in the US, workers over 40 get 21 days or more). Read everything, and see an employment lawyer if the numbers are large.
• Get the specifics in writing: the severance amount and schedule, healthcare continuation, how your equity is treated and when exercise deadlines fall, payout for unused PTO, the reference policy and whether you're eligible for rehire.
• Negotiate the edges. Mass layoffs fix the cash, but the departure date can move (which matters a lot if you're close to a vesting cliff), and so can extended exercise windows, outplacement and keeping your equipment.
• File for unemployment right away. You paid into that insurance, so there's nothing shameful about using it.
• Collect colleagues' personal emails and ask for LinkedIn recommendations before access dies and memories fade.

After: run the search like a pipeline

Take one real week off. Panic applications are bad applications, and the average search is a marathon.

Then get organized. Pick two or three kinds of role to target instead of "anything". Work referrals and direct outreach before portals. Give the week a shape, with mornings for outreach and applications and afternoons for skills and projects that close whatever gap the market keeps flagging (usually AI fluency).

Expect ugly numbers. Visible postings draw hundreds of applicants, AI screens the first pass, and some listings are ghost jobs that were never real. A dismal response rate says more about the channel than about you. People getting hired now mostly get in through other people: referrals, communities, open-source maintainers, former colleagues. Spend your hours there.

Being laid off between 2022 and 2026 carries no stigma with anyone paying attention, because hiring managers have spent four years watching healthy companies cut excellent people. It happened to you. It wasn't a verdict on you.