After the RIF: First Days

I lost my job on Tue, Feb 11, 2025, in a RIF that I didn't see coming...

I am a late-career professional and had hoped to retire from that company in a few years. Now, I’m job-hunting.

I am an early riser. I set my alarm for 5:45am. most mornings I'm up between 3:00 and 4:00 am and turn my alarm off. After I feed the cats, I head to my desk… but since that fateful day, my task is to labor through a job search instead of doing what I love… writing software… CODE.

With the help of a long-time friend, I've spent the last week re-writing my resume. It's been a real challenge… a pain. It seems that the "rules" for writing a resume have changed completely since I was last in the job market. So, I can’t just add my most recent job experience to the old resume and recycle it. It seems like resume-writing has become a "game" where you must “quantify” unquantifiable accomplishments so that the ATS (Applicant Tracking System) can be “objective” in evaluating your resume. Oh, and be sure it’s not more than 1-2 pages in length, never mind your work history which should be limited to the last 10-15 years. Make sure that everything important about you is visible in the top 1/3 of the first page since that is all the recruiter will read. The rules and recommendations are endless, but they are designed to get the ATS to pick your resume over the hundreds, maybe thousands of others that applied for the same position.

I'm trying to fight the depression that is creeping in on me, a gray-haired professional RIF-ed in what should have been the golden years of a successful career. My wife has been a God-send to keep me out of the “poor-pitiful-me” syndrome.

So, I’m working on establishing a routine, but it's tough. The part up to sitting down at my desk all feels the same. But once I sit down, I have to really think about what I am going to do today. After pushing through the morning, I find myself napping in the mid- to late-afternoon hours because I’m just worn out from the tedium of all of this job-hunting.

Meanwhile, I am networking and applying for “interesting” positions. We’ll see where this all leads.

Note: I used BeamJobs (https://www.beamjobs.com) Resume Writing Assistant which has helpful AI-based reviews to get you to good place. It doesn’t do everything for you, but it will gently lead you into a good result. A 1-year subscription is less than $100.