If you’ve been laid off before, you can likely vividly remember exactly how you felt shortly after – anger, guilt, feeling like you’re replaceable.

While they hopefully only happen once in your life (or ideally never!), there are a few ways you can prepare yourself for a potential layoff.

“Our values can be fluid and change over time. The values you held 5 years ago may be vastly different than what they are today. If they haven’t changed that much, that’s OK! As time passes, we may start to form different opinions about the places we work, the importance of different factors around work, and the field(s) we are a part of.”

We talked to two Commit Engineers, Sim Brar and Toly Kudrevatykh, who chose to follow a management track partway into their careers, only to switch back to being independent contributors. We asked with them about the thought processes behind their decisions, what it was like managing people, and why they chose to return to the IC path.

In our First Line of Code series, Commit co-founder Beier Cai talks to prominent tech founders and leaders building the next generation of companies, to hear about their career journeys and lessons learned from their early days.

Commit talked to Software Engineers who have built their careers at early-stage startups to understand the frameworks for how they choose whether working at a startup was right for them.

We talked with Commit Engineering Partner, King Choi, about his experiences with Commit’s coaching pilot program, part of our ongoing series on our approach to learning and development.