The Kitchen Call That Ended My 10-Year IT Career
And Why I Wasn't Scared
I took the call standing at my kitchen counter, a mug of lukewarm coffee going cold beside my laptop. I was ten years into my career at a foreign IT company, and at that moment, technically not even working — I was on parental leave.
On the other side of the screen was my manager, based in India. His face didn’t change once during the entire call. Not a flicker. He delivered the news the way you’d read out one line item on a long agenda: the company was offering voluntary redundancy, and I was on the list.
I closed my laptop. And the feeling that rose up in me wasn’t panic. It wasn’t even sadness.
It was relief.
It felt like standing at the edge of a cliff, gripping a fraying rope with both hands, refusing to let go — and having someone reach over and quietly cut it for me.
“How Could They Do That to Someone on Leave?”
Every time I’ve told this story, people react the same way. Their faces harden.
“You were on parental leave. That’s awful. How could a company do that?”
They’re not wrong. There is something undeniably cold about a redundancy notice arriving while you’re home with a newborn or a toddler, your maternity leave barely begun. But the cruelty of the timing isn’t actually what this story is about.
The real story starts five and a half years before that phone call.
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I Wasn't Starting From Zero
Here’s what nobody watching that video call could see: I had, in a strange way, been preparing for this exact moment without fully admitting it to myself.
For five and a half years — squeezed into commute time, and into the dark, quiet hour after the kids finally fell asleep — I had been quietly building a second life. Not because I knew the layoff was coming. I didn’t. I just hadn’t had the courage to walk out the front door of my old life. I only had the courage to start building a new room onto it, one board at a time, in the dark.
There were two small, ongoing experiments running in the background of my “real” job the whole time.
Experiment One: A Trading System With Actual Rules
This wasn’t dabbling. It wasn’t following tips in a Telegram group or reacting to headlines. I spent months — genuinely months — building a rules-based approach: clear entry points, position sizing I didn’t deviate from, and fixed stop-loss and take-profit levels I wrote down before I ever opened a trade.
By the time the redundancy call came, the gains were modest. Small. But they were consistent. And consistency was the actual point — it meant I had built a system that worked without me needing to be lucky or brilliant every single day. It just needed to be run.
Experiment Two: A Blog I Couldn't Put Down
The second experiment was writing. Not a project I’d started because I suddenly had free time — I didn’t have free time, that was the whole problem. I’d already been writing for five years by that point. It wasn’t a side hustle I picked up. It was a habit I’d never managed to let go of, even when I probably should have, for the sake of sleep.
So when the axe fell, it didn’t land on an empty field. It landed on two engines that were already quietly running — unfinished, unscaled, unprofitable in any way that would show up on a resume, but running.
Signing the Papers
I signed the severance agreement. I didn't agonize over it for weeks the way I might have five years earlier. The question I'd been circling in my head for months anyway — what does my life look like after I go back to work? — finally had an answer forced onto it. The decision I'd been too afraid to make myself, circumstance made for me.
Looking back, I don't think I was brave that day in the kitchen. I think, without quite realizing it, I had spent five and a half years quietly removing the danger from the fall. So when the rope finally snapped, I didn't crash. I landed. That landing eventually led my family to a six-month deliberation about moving to Jeju, and to a spring spent nervously waiting on an international school application — but that's a story for another post.
Ninja Nutri-Plus Personal Blender
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Tips: If You're Quietly Building Something on the Side, Read This
- Start before you need to, not after. The point of those 5.5 years wasn’t the money — it was that by the time I needed an exit, one already existed.
- Build a system, not just a hustle. A trading system with fixed rules (entry, position size, stop-loss, take-profit) removes decision fatigue. The same logic applies to a blog, a shop, or a freelance practice: define your rules once, then just run them.
- Protect the boring, consistent wins. Small, steady progress that nobody’s impressed by is exactly what makes a sudden ending survivable. Flashy isn’t the goal — durable is.
- Treat your quiet hours as R&D, not rest. The commute, the hour after bedtime — these aren’t wasted time if you’re deliberate about how you spend them.
- If the call comes, don’t confuse relief with coldness. Feeling okay — even good — about a layoff doesn’t mean you didn’t care about your job. It might just mean you’d already started building the next one.
