Celebrating my one-year layoff anniversary
The author marks the one-year anniversary of being laid off from a startup where they worked for over four years. They recount the initial excitement, growing burnout from handling complex sync tasks, and the steps taken to build a financial safety net, including moving to a cheaper apartment. The post reflects on personal growth and the mixed emotions surrounding the layoff.
- ▪The author joined the company in early 2021, working on collaborative realtime editing and receiving multiple design awards.
- ▪Responsibility for data sync and bug fixes led to chronic burnout and a loss of motivation.
- ▪Anticipating job instability, they began saving money and downsized to a cheap 15 sqm apartment in late 2023.
- ▪One year after the layoff, they returned to Riga to reflect on the experience and celebrate the anniversary.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Celebrating my one-year layoff anniversary Jun 29, 2026 Human-written Exactly one year ago, while visiting Riga, I got laid off. Now, I’m back in Riga to celebrate the anniversary and to write this blog post. I worked at the company for a bit more than four years. Near the end, I had a feeling that things were not going that great, so I started preparing for the worst. I’m very happy the layoff happened. Here’s that story. Honeymoon phase I joined the company in early 2021, before we had any customers. What we did have was investor money, a big pre-launch waitlist, a strong design team, and technical problems I was excited to work on, including collaborative realtime rich text editing, offline-first sync, polished UI details, animations, and more. Our website won multiple design awards.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at iiro.dev.
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