I Got Promoted to Staff Engineer. Five Months Later, I Was Laid Off.

Chào các bạn, hello friends!

In April 2023, I got promoted from Lead SRE to Staff Software Engineer at Workpath.

Five months later, I was laid off.

I told myself it was good timing. The infrastructure was stable, the team could operate without me and I had been working maybe twenty hours a week because the company no longer had a serious scaling problem left for us to solve. I had severance, savings and the German social system underneath me.

So I said I would build my own thing.

That sentence sounded much more confident than I was.

What followed was a climate-tech job board, an ERP idea for climbing-hold manufacturers, YC co-founder matching, DevOps as a service and cloud-cost consulting. All plausible. None of them became the thing.

The useful part of this story is why someone trained to question assumptions kept building his own future on top of them.

At Contentful, I was one of two people on the security team. We worked closely with an infrastructure team of around seven on things like single sign-on across roughly 200 applications, secrets management and zero-trust access.

It was not me heroically fixing infrastructure alone. The work only moved because security, infrastructure and the teams using those systems worked through it together. Half the job was technical. The other half was finding out how people actually worked before putting another control in their way.

At Workpath, I joined as Lead SRE and later moved into Staff. The infrastructure team built enough self-service that roughly six product teams could ship without waiting for us to handle every routine request.

Inside a company, I knew how to work this way. There were users, logs, incidents, colleagues and constraints I could see. I could ask what was breaking and go look.

Outside the company, there was just a lot of blank space. I filled it with ideas.

In February 2024, a coach named Tamás started working with me on the climate-tech job board. I cared about the space, knew people in it and had already built a convincing plan in my head.

He kept asking one annoying question: had I talked to the companies?

I hadn’t.

I had market maps, positioning ideas and opinions about the two sides of the marketplace. I did not have customers asking for the thing.

This should have been obvious to me. I would never have trusted a new internal system because the diagram looked convincing. I would have talked to the people who had to use it and watched where the assumptions broke.

With my own future, I wanted the answer first.

The job board died. The market was fragmented and there were not enough of the right buyers in one place. Then I tried the climbing ERP. Then co-founder matching. Then DevOps services. Then cloud-cost work.

At one point I had several reasonable businesses and no business.

Things only started changing when I stopped trying to choose the right identity from a list and spent more time talking to people. I posted what I was learning. I went to events. I had hundreds of coffee chats. I built communities. Slowly, the same kind of conversation kept finding me: someone capable was working hard on the wrong problem and needed another person to see it with them.

In April 2025, I sold the first version of that work.

Life after Staff Engineer did not reveal a consulting practice that had been hiding inside my title. That would be a much cleaner story.

It looked like more than a year of wrong ideas, long bike rides, awkward outreach and admitting I did not know what came next.

The engineering skills came with me. Direction did not. Finding somewhere honest to point them was a separate job.

If something in here landed — there’s probably a real thing underneath it. I run 90-minute Founder Bottleneck Diagnostics. DM me “diagnostic” on LinkedIn.

Keep it simple, keep it fresh, smile and let it go. — Yours truly, Trung

Leave a comment