Coping with Free Time

In one capacity or another I've been working on or with the same product since summer of 1997. When working at Verity a good number of our customers were using the Verity Search engine with Netscape Enterprise Server 2.0 and the just released 3.0. When Verity announced that the support department was to be cut at the end of the year I made a smooth transition to Netscape. Since then I've supported, sustained, developed, and product managed the server for three companies and at east a half dozen brand changes (there was Netscape Enterprise Server, iPlanet Web Server, Sun ONE Web Server, Sun Java System Web Server, Open Web Server, and I wouldnt be at all surprised to hear of a GlassFish Web Server any moment).

Developing and selling a commercial Web server against very good free competition like Apache HTTPd and lighttpd as well as the commercial elephant in the room, Microsoft IIS, was never easy. After so many years with this product and three companies it is particularly hard to come to terms with being laid off. It's hard, after twelve years, to simply stop thinking about the server, the customers, the processes, the fight and start thinking "what do I do now?"

Penelope Trunk at the Brazen Careerist has an excellent article about how to talk with people you know who have been laid off (and admit it, you know someone who has been let go and you have no idea how to talk with them about it).

For those of you from Sun that may be going through a RIF (mine was the first wave of the announced ~20%, so I suspect there are more of you that will be going through this soon), Katy Dickenson has an excellent post about what to do the day you get your notice. Do everything she says while you still have SWAN access. It will save you a world of annoying paperwork later on.