Chronicles of Unemployment
July 25, 2026
I resigned from my second job where I was there for 3+ years and was unemployed for a period of 3 months. Here are some bits and pieces of my experience. Will keep this updated as I relive those moments.
Ecstasy that comes right after leaving a job you wanted to leave for a while is one of the great pleasures of life.
The Crash that comes after sends you to the deepest part. You will be miserable and heart will be racing in waves like the tides on full moon.
Even if you are not financially vulnerable, your mind still thinks you are in danger. It wants to get a job ASAP. But it’s irrational.
You end up applying for jobs you would have never applied for — low money, rude interviewers, abnormal office timings — all for going back to the “normal”.
You get emotionally tired after giving so many interviews. You don’t really want to apply for jobs. Let them come themselves, you say.
Few recruiters will be rude but most don’t care about resignation or a small career gap.
As I spent lot more time in LinkedIn, it messed with my head a little bit. So many people giving gyan on how to make your resume, why you are failing in interviews, how you are supposed to use AI and how systems are supposed to be designed. So many opinions with very little evidence. Just having a SDE-2 position in FAANG doesn’t mean you got good and original opinions. All such opinions had one goal: Increase views and nothing else. So, ignore them for your own good.
Recruiters shouldn’t be the ones screening resumes for engineers. A non-tech person can’t understand what a tech engineer role needs. So, so many recruiters search for signals that are just laughable. They can’t connect what the project someone did with the need they have in their own company.
I had joined a company on a temp basis. I saw head of engineering (who leads 30 engineers) lecturing for an hour about what a Claude skill is. My mind couldn’t comprehend what’s happening. It’s just a README. Is the bar for leadership that low, or do they have nothing better to do?