Today, I was cut in layoffs. I’m so gutted because I loved this company, & my team was the best; I’ll miss my team most.
Now, as I look ahead, I’m searching for a staff/principal role where I can help other developers level-up through mentoring, tooling/infra, architecture, & improving DX. I’d love to work with a company contributing to open source & even to the #PHP programming language itself.
Update (27 Feb 2024): Thanks, everyone! I’ve accepted an offer. Please see update in thread below.
@ramsey you are one of the greatest engineers I've ever had the pleasure to work with and I too will miss our team the most. Together, you, I and the rest of platform were the GOAT.
If anyone is able to hire both myself and Ben we absolutely promise to you that we will bring your team to unfathomable heights. 🙇♀️
I know others are not so fortunate, and many have been out of work far longer than I was. I cannot imagine how I would have kept it together much longer.
Give everyone a healthy measure of grace. It’s rough out there.
If I can be of help to anyone (e.g., networking/contacts, advice for resumes/interviews/job offers, referrals, etc.), feel free to ask. I will try to help where I can. (2/2)
@ramsey Wow gosh, glad you could find an offer that suits you!
I'm looking for the same kind of opportunity right now, and having a hard time finding a fit, even though I haven't been laid off (I actually resigned 4 years ago after 3 burn-outs in one of the most known Symfony-related company because of issues with its upper management, and been a freelancer since).
I hope your new adventure will go well and that you found peace with this harsh layoff! 🕊
@kniziol 1. Mainly LinkedIn, Otta, and Indeed.
2. Primarily US-based; if not US-based, I need a team with significant US timezone overlap, and I need a company that offers US health insurance benefits.
3. I learned that no one cares about GitHub projects or open source contributions—at all.
4. I spent all day and most evenings job searching. Reading descriptions and filling out applications takes the most time.
5. No. They don’t offer any feedback because they’re afraid of liability.
3/ Not my experience (and yes, I know I'm a bit weird, but so are you). FB 1000% hired me on my OSS chops, and I didn't even touch anything vaguely PHP related for my first two years there. (Granted, that changed...)
Yahoo and Mongo were slightly different stories as I had inside contacts there, so harder to draw a clean line, but FB was pretty focused on the OSS stuff IIRC.
Environment today is VERY different though. It's not the salad days of our youth, brother.
@pollita@ramsey@kniziol I think the BIG difference today is that most mature tech companies are really numbers-driven.
Unless the company is explicitly developer-focussed (e.g. Microsoft), doing OSS work during office hours that doesn't directly benefit the company's bottom line is unwise.
Working on Psalm negatively impacted my career for a number of years, even though the expertise I acquired ultimately got me my current job.
@derickr@ramsey@kniziol I can't imagine the set of circumstances which would be required for me to cross paths with @jmikola were it not for PHP. Even less, @ bjori.
@ramsey someone from Germany had an interesting job offer at the beginning of the week that I saw. If I can find it, I will repost it. Not sure if you’re able to relocate.
@ramsey Sorry to hear it, Ben. Best of luck in finding a new gig (and here’s to a world, one day, maybe, where we wouldn’t have to spend so much time and effort on guaranteeing the bare necessities of life so we could all just work on things that make all our lives better).
@ramsey we are building an open source e-commerce platform. based in Germany, with colleagues in whole Europe, Vietnam and the US.
strongly established in German speaking countries and other European countries, we are currently expanding into the US market.
If this sounds interesting, let me know 😁
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