EP13: Day in the Life of a Meta Software Engineer - Layoff Edition

Hello and welcome or welcome back to the channel. I know it's been a long time since my previous work vlog but a lot has happened so I'll just give a quick update on life in general. So I did this huge home project where I replaced the floors throughout the entire house. The painting is partially done. The thing took forever. It took like months to complete actually and I didn't have access to my house for like a month. Not a month but like a week or two. And I redid my entire work from home setup. What else? Oh I got promoted somewhere along the way. And speaking of work, the past few weeks, past maybe two weeks, has been really really busy. I've been working like every single night actually because of this really high priority project that's kind of related to AI. So this week I'm actually trying to kind of chill a little bit. Anyway that's a quick life update. I'm about to make a drink and then get to work. I originally had a different topic planned for this part of the vlog but the latest round of layoffs happened between recording and posting so I wanted to share my experience with the layoff. The layoff actually landed during my recent vacation in Korea which I had scheduled before the layoff was even announced. I didn't want to let the layoff take away from my ability to enjoy my time off but I also didn't want to travel with uncertainty so I brought my company phone with me so that I could find out if I was impacted when the emails went out. Luckily I ended up surviving the layoff. At this point I've come to accept layoffs as part of the job description at big tech companies but the layoffs never really get easier. Every time a huge layoff hits it definitely tanks my motivation and honestly I don't think it ever fully recovers. I was feeling a bit burnt out leading up to the layoff and the severance package was very generous. Honestly I kind of hoped that I would be laid off because it would give me permission to mentally recharge over a long break. I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. I wish companies would give people an opportunity to volunteer to be laid off and then work backwards from there to meet their quota so that people who genuinely desire to stay get a better shot at doing so. Should companies do this? Let me know in the comments down below. So it's about 11 30 right now and I have a meeting at 1 so I'm gonna go drop off something at UPS and then pick up some food along the way. Right now I am walking over to the UPS. A really good poke place that I like is basically right next to it so I'm just gonna grab poke there for lunch. It's pretty cold. Holding this camera my hands kind of freezing. Meetings are wrapped up for the day. I'm just gonna lay down for five minutes to recharge before I focus on coding for the rest of the afternoon. So I just finished working and I just got changed to get ready to do some exercise. I was planning on also cooking tonight but uh what can I say I'm just too lazy right now so instead I'm gonna order food and just work out while I wait for the food to get here. One more thing before I start working out. I recently started using this rosemary oil blend that my friend recommended. I don't know if it actually works for me or not but I've been using it. It's supposed to like make your hair thicker or whatever. I actually do quite a bit of I guess self-care stuff but I don't really talk about it on this channel so if you're interested in learning more let me know in the comments. So I thought I was gonna take a shower but guess what my shower head broke. See what I mean? Luckily for me I still have the original shower head so I'm gonna try to fix this thing like right now. It's gonna be real bad if I can't because I definitely sweated and I still have rosemary oil in my head so let's go. So I guess that's that. It was a lot easier than I expected and it doesn't look like it's leaking so I'm not gonna try to tighten it anymore. Now I'm just gonna put some moisturizer on, dry my hair. I actually have to use a straightening iron these days because my hair is like it's just too long for my eyes so I actually have to curl it and probably get a haircut within the next week or two. All right let's see if she likes the tree. Look it's your new cat tower. You want to go up to the top platform? Puppy here. There you go. No? Come on. I got you an extra tall one so you can go up higher please. Well I guess it's not happening right now. It's actually past midnight right now so I'm gonna go to sleep. Good night. One more thing real quick. So while I was in Korea, I did do some vlogging so if you're interested in a potential Jeju island vlog, do consider subscribing to my second channel which I will link down below.