I accepted a position at a start up around three months ago. This company was located in New York and I was located in California. They mentioned that I could work remotely for now but I would eventually have to move out to New York. I was okay with this, as I always dreamed of working in New York.

They had me work as a contract worker for the first month to see if I was a good fit. Once that passed they hired me full time, and I worked remotely for around a month and a half, then moved out to NYC last week. However, just this Friday they told me that I was laid off, they said it had something to do on their end. This was totally out of the blue and I didn’t believe them at first. At the office the day before we were talking about how I would get a week off for Christmas.

I’m in a total panic right now. I’m in a city I don’t know without a job and I have about 5 weeks to find a new position or I have to move back in with my parents in California. I’m not even sure if I should include it on my resume, as having only worked three months at my first job might look bad.

The job market for tech is so rough right now I’m terrified. I’m really hoping for any advice on how to go about this, what should I do?

  • @IphtashuFitzEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    I can’t agree more with regards to career development. When I graduated from college way back in 1990 I wanted to do software development. It took me six months of job hunting that resulted in only 5 interviews and a single job offer to do telephone tech support for a business products software company.

    I spent two years doing tech support and used that time to learn the internals of the product and even wrote some programs in C that demonstrated some of our platforms integrations for our business clients. I was eventually noticed by a couple senior software engineers who started mentoring me and helped me move from tech support to software development full time.

    After a decade or so of software development I transitioned into a DevOps role in a similar manner - started doing some of that sort of work on my own, got noticed, then encouraged to change roles. I’ve been doing that for close to 20 years and am very happy where I am now.