I recently got laid off from Atlassian. I was a SDE 2. I have about 5 years of exp in SW engineering and honestly I never thouht I'd be in this position... especially after having worked at Microsoft before this. I left a good team at Microsoft for more $$$ and now I'm sitting here unemployed for over a month wondering if I made the biggest mistake of my career. Not sure but it looks like it...
I was working at what I thought was a normal pace... doing my job, completing my work and expecting a performance rating of 3. Instead my manager pushed my rating down to a 1 and told me I wasn't being proactive enough. And the reason???? Apparently I wasn't working 10 hours a day like everyone else. Seriously... since when did putting in a normal workday become a performance problem????
What makes this soooo frustrating is that I left Microsoft where I was actually happy with my team and the work I was doing... all because I thought moving to Atlassian would be a better financial decision. More money, better opportunity... you know how it goes. Now I'm questioning that decision every single day. I guess sometimes the extra money just isn't worth it.
And now the job market is making things even worse. I've been unemployed for about a month and I'm honestly willing to take a paycut at this point... I have several EMIs and loans to pay, and I'm the ONLY earning person in my household. But smaller companies look at my previous CTC and tell me they can only offer HALF of what I was making... and some aren't even interested in interviewing me because of it. Meanwhile the larger companies aren't calling me for interviews either.
So basically I'm either too expensive for the smaller companies or not getting noticed by the bigger ones... despite having Microsoft and Atlassian on my resume. How does that even make sense????
I've also been dealing with some personal problems and depression, which makes this whole situation even harder. I'm preparing for interviews every day... studying, practicing, trying to improve my chances, but there's always that fear in the back of my mind. How long can I afford to be unemployed??? What happens if another month goes by... or three??? The loans aren't going anywhere and the bills certainly aren't stopping.
Sometimes I keep thinking maybe I should've worked harder at Atlassian... maybe I should've just done those 10 hour days like my manager wanted. But then I wonder whether that would've actually changed anything or just delayed the inevitable.
I know layoffs are happening everywhere but it's a very different feeling when you're the one without a paycheck and other people depend on your income... I wouldn't wish this uncertainty on anyone.
I'm curious whether other Atlassian employees have experienced something similar, particularly SDE 2 engineers. Are managers really expecting 10 hour workdays and giving low performance ratings to people who don't meet those expectations? Has anyone else been pushed from an expected 3 rating to a 1??? And for those who left Microsoft or another big tech company for more money... did you end up regretting it?