One Year Out: A Layoff Recovery Update

A year ago, I was a few weeks into a new job and still waiting for something to go wrong.

That's the part I didn't write about in the series. It wasn't quite imposter syndrome, as I've never really doubted my technical ability. My former coworkers and clients made sure of that. The messages I got after the layoff were not "hang in there." They were "they just lost the one person who actually understood this."

Instead, what I didn't know was whether the market could see it. Whether being genuinely excellent at something most hiring managers can't evaluate was just another way of being invisible.

And underneath that was something quieter and harder to name. My departure came with manager misalignment, a script read without eye contact, and no warning. You don't always know what story got told after you left the call. You can't defend against something you can't hear. That not-knowing followed me into every application, and every moment of silence after a process went cold. Was it the market? Was it the role? Or had a version of me I didn't recognize gotten there first?

None of that made it into Phases 1, 2, or 3 because I was still too close to it.

If you're new here: last fall, I wrote a three-part series about getting laid off from Microsoft. The short version is I lost the job, lost the identity, survived the fall, and landed somewhere better. The series ends with me spinning next to my motorcycle in the sun. This is what happened after.

The Search Went Better Than It Should Have

I want to be straightforward here.

I applied to a lot of roles, but I also had multiple offers within two weeks of seriously searching. The job market is brutal right now (and has been for a while) for a lot of people, and my experience was an anomaly. The stars aligned, my network showed up, my specialization was in demand at the right moment with the right people paying attention.

I'm not going to dress that up as a struggle that it wasn't.

What was hard wasn't the search itself. It was the uncertainty that runs underneath even a fast search. You don't know which offer is the right one. You don't know if moving quickly means you're missing something. You don't know whether the reputation fear I mentioned earlier had quietly closed doors you never saw open. Speed doesn't dissolve any of that, it just compresses it.

I also knew, even while it was going well, that most people in my position weren't having the same experience. If your search is taking months and you're doing everything right, you're not failing. The market is just doing what it does, and it isn't doing it evenly.

The Step I Needed Before the Next One

About a month in, I started a role I knew wasn't the destination.

It was a step back by most measures with a smaller title and a narrower scope. But it was in my domain, with a team that needed real Purview expertise, and I needed something that wasn't freefall.

I rebuilt their Purview program from the ground up. I designed the end-to-end sales process for their Purview practice and built the collateral to support it. I created things that didn't exist before I walked in. And somewhere in the middle of all that, I remembered that I was good at this, and people could see it plainly even if they didn't understand the day-to-day work I was doing.

That role gave me something the job search couldn't: proof that the identity wasn't gone. It had just been buried under a year of being in the wrong environment.

It was never meant to be permanent. When I was ready to put my career back on the path I'd lost, I started looking again. This time from a position of clarity, not desperation.

Where I Finally Landed

The engineering role closed out after about a year. It did what it needed to do. I left with a rebuilt program behind me, a sales process that didn't exist when I arrived, and a clearer sense of what I was actually looking for next.

That's when a deliberate search for the role I would have had to wait years for at Microsoft.

I started at that new role four days ago.

What made it the yes was specific. They needed someone who knows Purview deeply enough to work with legal, HR, and directors in the same week without losing the thread. Someone who understands that deployments are rarely textbook and that strategy matters more than following the steps in order. The role was challenging and they knew it.

And then there was the work-life balance conversation. One of the interviewers was a former Microsoft person who told me, genuinely, that I would probably get annoyed with how slowly things move if I didn't set that expectation going in.

I had to stop myself from laughing. After a year of rebuilding someone else's program from scratch while also implementing it with clients, slow and intentional sounds like exactly what I need. I'm not worried about the pace. I'm ready for a company that moves deliberately as long as it's actually moving.

The domain is the same. Microsoft Purview, security architecture, data protection. The size of the problem is not.

This is the step I would have had to wait years for at Microsoft. It didn't come from grinding through the corporate ladder. It came from getting laid off, landing somewhere that let me rebuild, and then being ready when the right thing showed up. I'm not sure I get here on the path I was on before March 2025.

That's the part I'm still sitting with.

The Identity Piece Was Slower Than the Search

I wrote in Phase 2 about losing "E.C. Scherer, the Purview SME for US Education." I knew losing that identity was a hit. What I didn't know was how long the echo would last, or how many forms it would take.

The reputation fear was the quietest kind. Not a specific accusation I could point to. Just the knowledge that I didn't control what had been said, or to whom, or how it landed. Every process that went cold without explanation fed it a little. The not-knowing doesn't announce itself. It just sits there, making you wonder.

Even after I started my engineering role, I'd catch myself over-preparing for one-on-ones. Documenting things nobody asked me to document. Phrasing things carefully so my contributions couldn't be devalued or dismissed. My nervous system hadn't caught up yet, and that hypervigilance doesn't disappear the moment you get a start date.

What resolved it wasn't a single moment. The consulting and engineering work helped first: you can't rebuild a program from scratch and still believe you're the liability. The current role helped next, in a different way. Being evaluated by people who understood what they were evaluating, and having them say yes, answered something the job search couldn't.

Figuring out who I was outside of that specific job and that specific title happened slowly. More like the gradual loosening of something I hadn't realized I was still holding.

Somewhere in the last twelve months, I stopped bracing. That sounds small. It wasn't.

What the Year Taught Me

Landing somewhere good takes longer than anyone admits out loud. The polished LinkedIn posts make it look like competent people get picked up quickly. Some do, but a lot don't.

The job market for specialized practitioners is not rational. Fit matters, timing matters, and being great at what you do is necessary but not sufficient. I knew that before the layoff. I know it differently now.

The personal identity work doesn't wait for you to be ready. You don't get to stabilize fully before you have to show up to interviews and perform competence on demand. You do it while you're still figuring out who you are without the old title. That's just how it goes.

And sometimes the step that looks like a step back is the thing that puts the ground under your feet again.

If You're Still In It

The reason I wrote the original series, and the reason I'm writing this one, is that freefall is easier when you can see someone who landed.

So: I landed. It's good. It took longer than I wanted and shorter than I feared.

If you're still in the search, still in the identity piece, still doing the slow work of rebuilding trust in yourself and in workplaces, you're not behind. You're in the part of the process that doesn't have a clean timeline.