Software Engineer Layoff

You have severance to negotiate, a 401(k) to roll over, COBRA mail arriving in three weeks, a mortgage that doesn’t care about your W-2 status, and an emotional load nobody warned you about. This book is the operational playbook for the eighteen months that follow.

Thirteen chapters. Sixty-five worksheets you fill in with your own numbers. Two dozen phone scripts for the conversations you have to have — with HR, the EDD, your mortgage servicer, the COBRA administrator, a CPA, a therapist. Real statutory citations to the Internal Revenue Code, the California Unemployment Insurance Code, the federal Mortgage Servicing Rules, the ACA. Dollar-quantified decisions at every fork.

Two worked-example characters carry the math: Dave Merritt, 47, individual contributor in Sunnyvale; and Anna Reyes, 58, Senior Engineering Manager at a different firm, laid off the same week. The rules at 47 and the rules at 58 diverge enough to need parallel treatment — both are here.

Most readers who run these worksheets end the eighteen-month window with a household balance sheet larger than at month zero. Not because the layoff was good. Because the layoff forced a reset that pays back over the decade.