I recently got laid off. The experience itself wasn’t entirely surprising—layoffs happen—but the way it was handled left me feeling disrespected, frustrated, and, frankly, exhausted.
I worked at Orion Innovation, a company that provides technical services to its clients. I had been working on a team dedicated to Grange Insurance, but the path there was a bit more complicated. Originally, I was part of Grange’s internal IT department. Then, a few years ago, they decided to outsource the entire IT operation to Orion, and that’s how I ended up at Orion. Even after the transition, my work remained the same. I continued developing and supporting the same applications and projects for Grange, just under a different employer.
On June 5th, the VP overseeing the Grange account at Orion scheduled a meeting with me. During the call, she informed me that I was being “rolled off” the Grange team, and that June 30th would be my last day on the project. An HR coordinator was also present and said she would try to find a new internal project for me. I was told I’d be assigned a recruiter to help explore other roles within Orion.
This is where the situation began to unravel.
First off, there was an unspoken assumption that if I wasn’t working on an AI or cloud-related project, I was somehow not valuable. The VP literally said there were no AI projects for me, as if my skill set began and ended with AI. But here’s the thing: AI is just a service. Integrating AI into applications still requires substantial backend knowledge—APIs, data flow, deployment, security, performance. The idea that I could only work on AI projects because I had once done so shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how software development actually works.
Over the following weeks, I did everything asked of me. I applied for internal roles. I updated my resume. I completed my Orion profile. But… crickets. No follow-up. No recruiter contact. After multiple emails, all I received were vague reassurances like “someone will reach out to you soon.”
Finally, on June 19th, I met with the HR coordinator again to “touch base.” She asked me if a recruiter had contacted me about a role with PwC. I had no idea what she was talking about—I didn’t even know who my assigned recruiter was. She seemed surprised and promised to check on it. Nothing happened that day… until 6 p.m., when I received a phone call from someone, who didn't even introduce her title (I later found out she was a Delivery Operations Manager).
She said I had an in-person interview the very next morning—June 20th—in Edison, NJ. I live in Jersey City and don’t own a car, so this meant taking a tram, a train, and a bus—about a 1-hour 15-minute trip one way. More importantly, I already had a personal appointment scheduled that day from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. I told her I couldn’t make it. She insisted it would be quick—first 30 minutes, then 15, then 5. I eventually gave in when she moved the interview to 9 a.m., hoping I could squeeze it in.
Later that evening, I realized the commute would still make the rest of my day too tight, so I texted her around 7 p.m. to cancel. She panicked and started calling and texting frantically, telling me I “had to attend.” I reminded her about my prior commitment, and she said she’d try to move the interview to a virtual meeting at 1:30 p.m.
I agreed, reluctantly, even though it still overlapped with my other appointment. But the lack of empathy and urgency shown by this recruiter was astounding. I was not even given 24 hours’ notice for this interview, no job description, no role title, no location—just “a project with PwC.” When I asked if it was remote, the response was simply “yeah yeah.”
On the day of the interview, my doctor called me in at 1:20 p.m. I texted the recruiter to cancel again and apologized. Her response? Panic, followed by more frantic texts like “nonononono this is not good” and “you said you’ll be there.”
I was done.
I later received an email saying the interview had been rescheduled for June 24th at 10:30 a.m., in-person again. I was asked to send a confirmation email with an explanation of what happened. So I wrote the email, clarifying everything and confirming my attendance.
When I arrived at the office that day, I met the recruiter and was taken to a conference room. A man walked in with a laptop and joined a Teams call with two other people. No introductions, just straight into the interview. They started with questions like: “Is Python an object-oriented language?” and “Why?” I’ve been working with Python for 4-5 years, so I said yes—it is OOP, because everything in Python is an object: numbers, strings, functions, classes. Apparently, they didn’t like that answer.
They continued asking overly simplistic questions, then moved on to “general system design”—without any context or problem statement. I tried outlining the architecture of a Gen AI app I’d worked on, but again, I was met with frowns, tilted heads, and obvious disapproval. At one point, they claimed and insisted that the load balancer should go behind the API gateway. (If you're a backend engineer, you probably just rolled your eyes.)
Then came a question about what AI-related projects I’d worked on. I mentioned a couple: a student grade card processing system that used OCR (image-to-text AI), and a GenAI project that incorporated LLMs and indexing tools like AWS Kendra. Their response? They said OCR wasn’t really AI.
At that point, I found myself giving a mini-lecture: OCR is a classic domain of AI, part of the broader field of computer vision, and has been around long before the current GenAI hype. It's AI in action—detecting, interpreting, and converting visual patterns into structured data using machine learning techniques. But again, I was met with skeptical expressions.
The interview, originally scheduled for 30 minutes, went on for 1 hour and 15 minutes. At the end, the in-person interviewer said they just wanted to understand how I reason through system design—not to “grill” me. Honestly, it felt like a bizarre pop quiz led by people trying too hard to appear technical.
After that, I didn’t hear anything for days. So I emailed HR to ask if I was still being laid off on June 30. I got a vague reply saying they were still waiting on feedback and that I’d get a severance package with two weeks' pay. A follow-up meeting was promised for Monday.
That Monday came and went with no meeting, no updates. I emailed HR again around 1 p.m. She said she would check for any open roles one last time. One recruiter called me just to confirm: no roles. Shortly after, I received the severance documents.
And that was it.
No acknowledgment of the years I’ve given—three with Grange, two with Orion. No sincere thanks. Just a rushed, chaotic, and disrespectful process that left me feeling like my time, knowledge, and effort didn’t matter.
I’m writing this not just to share my story but to say this: Don’t let companies treat you like this. You deserve better. You deserve clarity, respect, and at the very least, honesty. And if you're a manager or recruiter reading this: do better. We remember how we’re treated—especially at the end.