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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lord Zardoz" data-source="post: 4511328" data-attributes="member: 704">I have been laid off (or close enough to it) three times, and I work as a game programmer.  I will not mention the companies I work for due to it being a 'small' industry, and having no desire to burn bridges.The first I was laid off, time my boss had called me at home on a Saturday, but I was away visiting a friend.  I asked him what it was about and he said it was not important.  I was then called the next weekend, went into the office, and was informed that I was being laid off.  There had been a pretty heavy round of layoffs a few months before hand, but I had thought I was well clear of it.  They kept me just until the project I was working on was in late beta.  They told me the reasons were purely economic.  I later found out that they had told my former co-workers that it was work performance related (which none of them found plausible).  The way in which this was handled by my boss left me with no respect for him, and a desire that lingers to this day to set him on fire or something.I spent the next 15 months out of work trying to find a new job.I then got hired by a new company.  Great work environment, and a boss I got along with great.  However, due to factors that happened at the company level, the project we were working on slipped past its deadline, and then past the next most likley release date.  The last 6 months of that project was a 6 day a week, 11 hours a day death march.  We finally had a release candidate accepted, but the publisher opted to not send it to manufacturing.  This left the company in no position to secure new development work.  At that point, more or less everyone was 'laid off', since the company had to go out of business.  This was not really anyone at my companies fault, given the situation with the scope of the game we were trying to get done, and the time / budget we were given.  My boss could have either made it a full 2 and a half years of very hard crunch, and finished it and had everyone quit, or he could have let everyone keep things as normal as possible, hoping that we would finish and keep most of our employees for the next game.  I still get along with that boss reasonably well.I spent the next 12 months trying to find a job, and got one that sucked.  It lasted only 2 months.  I then spent the next 3 months after that looking for yet another job.  At some point during this process, I came to the conclusion I really sucked at job interviews.I was then hired by a very large company.  I worked there for 18 months, and enjoyed the work environment.  Due to some goofiness in their project cycle, I ended up between projects for a few weeks.  A bunch of large projects had ended, but nothing was going to gear up any time soon, and there were no good fits with anything in production.  I was then laid off in May.  The reasons for that chain of events fall somewhere between mystifying and retarded.  This was primarily an impersonal decision made by a large company.  While I would probably consider working for them again, I do not have a very good opinion of their HR practices.I spent the next 5 months looking for work.I just started a new job with 'very large companies even bigger competitor' this past tuesday and happily, I have a 39% pay bump over what I was making at the 'very large company'.Anyway, I can say that being out of work for very long periods of time sucks a great deal.  After 6 months, its hard to have an honest answer for 'what have you been doing since you left your previous job' that does not sound bad.  The time you spend waiting to hear back from your latest job lead is also increasingly frustrating.My general advice to anyone would be to live well within your means and make sure you have a damn good cushion of cash to land on in the event the rug is pulled out from under you.  Ideally you should not have to live only off that cushion for very long before your unemployment benefits kick in.  In addition, not having to panic about your next rent payment the moment your current job ends does a great deal to defray the immediate stress of losing a job.END COMMUNICATION</blockquote>

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