‘Trying to make sense of it’: Techie gets 55% hike, then laid off after a month

Amid stories of layoffs in the IT sector, a techie has taken to social media to share their experience.

In a post on Reddit, the techie wrote that they joined a company with about a 55% salary hike but were suddenly laid off. According to the post, the management cited vague reasons before terminating their employment.

The post read: "I recently joined a company where I was offered 6.5 LPA in hand, up from my previous salary of 4.2 LPA in hand. The interview process was quite rigorous — I cleared about six rounds, including two rounds focused on DSA, two on system design and database internals, one with the CTO, and the final HR round.


I started working as a backend developer, and initially, everything seemed fine. The team seemed happy with my performance, at least until the end of the first month. Then, out of nowhere, my manager called me into a meeting and said, ‘We’re not using the code you’ve written.’ I was confused because, to my knowledge, my code was running in production and being used actively.

Just five days after that conversation, I received a termination letter — with no clear explanation. It’s been 15 days since then. I haven’t even started looking for a new job. I feel completely blank, like I’ve forgotten everything I know.

My tech stack includes Docker, AWS, Linux, Python, Node.js, and Golang. I have 2 years of experience. The irony is, they’re not even hiring for backend roles anymore — which makes me question why they hired me in the first place if they weren't sure.

Right now, I’m just trying to make sense of it all."

Commenting on the post, one Redditor speculated: "Here’s what I think potentially happened:

• They got somebody cheaper?
  
  
• The manager wanted to get their own person into the role?
  
  
• They didn’t have the budget they originally thought they had."
  

Another user, a product manager, suggested the company may have hired the techie for a short-term project and let them go after completion. "Could be one of the above three, or maybe they just wanted someone to complete a small one-month task.

In my project, we frequently require small, specific work that usually lasts only 1–3 months, like building and maintaining a custom Power BI dashboard and reporting. So we get someone from within the organization (a large service-based firm), get the work done, and then roll them off the project," the person wrote.