Man, March 2021. That whole time felt like trying to drive a bus with square wheels. I remember looking up those stupid career things, not because I believe that star garbage, but because I was just desperate for some kind of sign that things weren’t gonna totally explode in my face. Spoiler alert: they did.
The Setup: Seeing the Cracks in the Wall
My “practice log” for that period basically starts with the sheer volume of meetings. We were supposed to be the “lean, mean, get-it-done” team, but every day added two new stand-ups, three sync-ups, and four people arguing over a YAML file. I logged it all in my private doc. I started seeing these huge warning signs flashing, and they had nothing to do with planets.
- Sign 1: The Layoffs Nobody Talked About. The number of people mysteriously “leaving the company” was accelerating. Every week, someone I actually relied on was suddenly gone. Management acted like they just moved to a farm upstate. Total BS.
- Sign 2: The Scope Creep. We started the year building a simple API. By March, we were also handling the full frontend migration, setting up the new database cluster, and trying to figure out why the CEO’s personal laptop kept crashing. Our original mandate was just thrown out the window.
- Sign 3: The Money Freeze. I put in my request for some basic equipment—a new monitor—and it got rejected faster than a bad PR. Then the travel budgets got cut to zero. Now, when a company starts penny-pinching over a $300 screen while asking you to work sixty hours a week, you know the bottom line is looking ugly.
I started my planning practice right there. I didn’t wait for the official pink slip. That’s the key thing I want to share: You gotta start moving while the ground is still shaking, not after the earthquake hits and you’re buried.
The Pivot: My Personal Drill and Practice Run
My first action log entry from that month was simple: “Stop relying on current income.”
I knew I couldn’t just jump ship without a parachute, so my immediate practice was running a parallel life. From 6 PM to 11 PM, I turned into a different developer. While my main job was a mess of Java and legacy systems, I started dumping all my energy into learning the modern stuff—specifically, that whole Kubernetes and cloud infra mess that everyone was hiring for. I had to teach myself. No official training, just me and a stack of badly-written online documentation.
I spent weekends building a small side project, a totally useless but technically complex little microservice that did nothing but prove I could actually provision infrastructure and deploy a whole stack. I logged every single error, every successful deployment, every stupid late-night bug fix. This wasn’t about building a company; this was about building a resume that proved I wasn’t just stuck in the past.
Then, the inevitable happened. Late March 2021, I get the call. They tried to dress it up as a “restructuring initiative,” but we all know what that means. I was out. My planning process, though, had already prepared me for the shock. It wasn’t a sudden disaster; it was the predicted end of a failing project.
The Outcome: Cashing in the Practice
The real shift was immediate. Because I had spent the last eight weeks logging real, practical work on new tech, I wasn’t scrambling to update a dusty old resume. I already had my proof. I had fresh code and a story of transition. The interviews I went on weren’t about explaining why my old job failed; they were about showing off what I had built on the side.
I remember one interview where the guy asked me about dealing with a broken cluster. I didn’t give him some academic answer; I just walked him through the log of my personal project where I broke and fixed my own little cluster three times in one weekend. That sold it.
What I ended up with was a job that paid way better, used the exact tech I had spent two months learning, and actually had a nine-to-five structure—none of that frantic, always-on nonsense. The funny thing is, my old company tried to call me back about five months later, begging me to consult and fix some of the exact problems I had flagged internally. I just laughed and said, “Nope. I already made my plan, and you weren’t in it.”
So, the takeaway from that March 2021 warning sign practice? Don’t wait for the boss or the stars to tell you when to move. Watch the company’s pulse, log the failures, and quietly start building your exit ramp on your own time. That little bit of planning is what saves you when the whole operation goes sideways.
