RIFs, scenario planning, and post-secondary school

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• What are RIFs and how are they different than layoffs?
• A brief history of being RIF'd
• Adjusting in the aftermath
• Revisiting the scenario plan
• Transitioning to summer school
• Starting a degree program
• Conclusion

Introduction

Months after launching this blog with a post about how to generate a mantra, I realized how hastily everything had been put together, with not even a simple "Hello, World!".

My first attempt at an introduction turned into blogging in the age of AI that briefly mentioned returning to school, but without any detail. Now that it's been a few more months and I have a bit more distance, this post will discuss getting RIF'd as a middle aged person after working in tech for decades, the reflections that followed, using scenario planning to help decide what to do next, how I decided to go back to school, and some impressions as an older first-time university student.

First, though, let's start with defining RIFs and how they differ from layoffs.

What are RIFs and how are they different than layoffs?

I was introduced to the Reduction In Force (RIF) at my most recent job and can reasonably say that they occurred at least once a year while I was there, coinciding with emails from the CEO talking about changes in strategic direction. I bring this up because, unlike layoffs which historically happen during the off-season, there is nothing seasonal about RIFs even if they do seem to precede quarterly earning reports. Also unlike layoffs, RIFs do not carry any promise that the positions will return in a few months once business bounces back.

Instead, RIFs are similar in intent to rightsizing which was the term used at my previous employer. They indicate investments into certain teams or technology that a company has decided won't pay off, and are easier to cut than reassign and/or retrain. At least, the first part is how it's often presented. The reality seems to be more nuanced. Maybe the reductions are a bit more surgical, impacting a certain percentage of each team's headcount that matches the costs a company needs to trim to meet revenue goals. Maybe those impacted by the reductions all happen to be senior and on the higher end of the pay scale. In any case, it's entirely possible that a company will still have job openings when RIFs occur, since these reflect new investments in areas where the company still has confidence. Impacted employees are welcome to apply but they're on their own.

For the purpose of this post, I'll use RIF and layoff interchangeably because the latter rolls off the tongue a bit better. I'm also not an MBA and won't pretend to be an authority on this topic, but had seen enough of these cuts over my career to recognize the script and to see some patterns before I was impacted myself.

A brief history of being RIF'd

Like many others in the tech industry, I was impacted by a RIF in 2025. Since the economy seemed (and still seems) to be going to hell as I write this many months later, taking some time out for self-improvement felt like a reasonable approach. How I decided that self-improvement meant university takes a bit of explaining.

A few years ago, I was off work for a bit related to COVID. During this time I did some reflecting on life and largely concluded that there were some limits to how hard I could push myself going forward. Almost immediately after I returned to work, the company had a RIF which impacted whole teams and colleagues who were close to me. That led to even more reflecting and reinforced a personal desire to keep my head down and focus on quality of life improvements so that time spent at work was as productive as possible, rather than wasting time going through the motions.

Some months later, the company announced that another RIF would be rolled out soon. This was bad news for everyone and scared me into frantically thinking about a Plan B. To avoid catastrophizing, or at least put the anxiety to better use, I attempted a layman's version of scenario planning by spelling out the most obvious scenarios: the best case where I kept my job and the worse case where I lost my job. Then I added another scenario where I lost my job but started going to university. Why university? While I did go to technical school many moons ago and accrued a bunch of debt in the process, getting a degree has always been a goal somewhere in the back of my mind.

I once again avoided the RIF and started work in a new team which was full of smart people, outside of my comfort zone, and offered a lot of great challenges. However, the anxiety leading up to this change on top of all of the previous RIFs meant that my spirit felt pretty much broken. Stranger still, I felt disappointed that I was still employed because it meant that I didn't have the opportunity to do a full reset, at least without making really hard choices of my own. I was still keen to do my best in the new position, but I also decided to explore that third scenario and applied to a certificate program at the local university. It was well suited to part-time studies, the courses were all interesting, and seemed like a good foundation for a degree if I got that far. I also suspected that some of the courses might help me identify when the MBA folks were talking nonsense.

A few quarters later, I had been accepted to the program and was balancing work, which involved learning a bunch of new stuff in its own right, with school, where I was only taking one course at a time but putting the work into getting a high grade. There was also another RIF but this one got me!

Adjusting in the aftermath

Being let go felt a lot like a breakup, a feeling that was confirmed by another coworker who was also RIF'd some months later. More specifically, as another blunt friend pointed out, it's a lot like getting dumped. Despite not being the only one impacted, I still had plenty of thoughts about “why me?”

The fact that I'd been putting a lot of time into class work in my non-working hours didn't help with that train of thought. Maybe if I'd invested all of that extra effort into the job, I would still be employed. Thankfully, I had the benefit of friends and some skilled (now ex-) coworkers who had been RIF’d themselves at previous times to provide the more balanced perspective: there's no rhyme or reason, it's not a reflection of skill or talent, etc.. Whatever the case, the reality was that I'd survived RIFs for my entire career up until that point and now found myself facing a shaky job market in tech, with hype around AI adding a lot of extra pressure on employment.

I started thinking of advice imparted by a cafe owner that I worked for many years ago, after I graduated from technical school: “going directly after what we want" was a much better idea than taking an indirect route. Even though I proceeded to ignore it for most of my adult life, it was still good advice that I started reconsidering given my new circumstances. Two questions came to mind related to school:

1. What does it mean that it felt like I prioritized grades that no one else cared about over work that I was getting paid for?
2. If the time that I put into classes did come at the expense of my job, then shouldn't I justify that decision by doubling down on academics?

Even though that sounds like pretty clear rationalizing in retrospect, I started panicking about tying up loose ends from the job, doing really well in my current class, and switching to full-time studies as soon as humanly possible. It was time to consult my trusty scenario plan once again..

Revisiting the scenario plan

It felt like university was in the cards for me but there was a world of difference between the idea of being a student and actually doing it, so I wanted to review the bigger options before committing to anything.

The major scenarios that I had in mind were:

1. Find another job - This was the obvious choice as a responsible adult but I had mixed feelings in light of being laid off, despite liking work and being interested in many aspects of technology.
2. Attend university as a full-time student - I was already enrolled so this felt pretty attainable, even if I wasn't explicitly planning a career change.
3. Start a company - What better way to avoid future RIFs than to be my own boss, and put effort into exploring any path that I choose.

In all cases, there were a number of factors to consider like certainty, cost, time, interests, and fulfillment. Certainty was arguably more about feelings than numbers but after many years working in the shadow of RIFs, I was exhausted not knowing where I would be working or for how long, and craved some stability in my life plans.

Cost was the most obvious factor since life is expensive and I still hoped to retire one day. I had an emergency fund that would keep me going for a while and lived in a city with a medium cost of living (MCOL), i.e. reasonably affordable. I was single which meant being on my own if things went south but also that it'd be easier to minimize cost if I chose to live like a student again, or like a bootstrapped entrepreneur. It was possible that being a student might help by providing health insurance which I needed, student loans to help a bit with living expenses, and the possibility of scholarships if I did really well. Going the entrepreneur route might yield some success but that potential upside also carried a lot of risk and I didn't have any problems in mind that needed solving.

Time was another big one. While not ideal, I could work indefinitely unless something horrible happened, and ironically could be forced into this situation if I exhausted my savings (and future earnings through loans) pursuing higher education or trying to be an entrepreneur. On the other hand, being middle-aged, it felt like there was limited time to study as a full-time student. To start, I would have limited years to realize gains from a second career. This problem would be magnified if I studied part-time, since I had close to zero credits and it might take a decade to get a degree if I completed a few courses per year. On top of that, it felt like I had even less time to be a full-time student. If I got another job and reconsidered school after five years, the time pressures would be that much greater. That also assumed that circumstances would still be favourable, which was anyone's guess, while presently being single would make it easier to focus on studies. Lastly, a single class took a lot of effort to get a decent grade so I wasn't sure about balancing a full-time course load on top of working a job, whether for someone else or as my own boss.

In terms of interests, I still loved working in technology and had plenty of ideas for AI even if that felt like a bubble being used to gut skilled workforces across the board. I also had other interests, from accounting to art to math to philosophy, that hadn't been nurtured in years. Beyond the hope of earning more money with a better education, I was also thinking about getting some fulfillment pursuing personal goals and figuring out how little I know about the world in ways that might have stopped seeming obvious through my adult life.

Another way of looking at these was using a decision matrix to approximate a value showing how each scenario addressed a factor (3 for clearly addresses, 1 for not at all).

It seemed like the factors were best addressed overall by attending school, followed by working for myself, followed by getting another job.

Thinking through all of this left me with a short list of concerns which mostly boiled down to money: exhausting savings in pursuit of school, struggling to get back to a decent financial footing after being out of the workforce for a while, and the loss of lifetime earnings even with a shiny new degree. I found data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that education still pays as of 2024. There was also some suggestion that public schools provide the best return on investment which supported my feeling that any university education was better than none, with caveats based on specific degrees.

There were also a bunch of things that I wasn't worried about: being an older student, not being the smartest person in the room, or finding out that school wasn't everything I'd hoped for and changing my mind. Overall, it seemed to be a trade-off between taking on debt to attempt a speed run through university or studying part-time to avoid debt and risk not completing the degree in a reasonable timeframe.

My tendency to focus on one thing at a time suggested that first option was a better fit, which left the concern about money. I decided to hedge my bets and lean into Scenario B - attending university as a full-time student - for a year to see what it was all about. If it went well then I could make a new decision at that point based on whatever options opened up. If it wasn't a good fit, then I'd be down some money but would know a lot more than I did going in. I could also switch to part-time studies while finding a new job.

Transitioning to summer school

Now that I'd decided to study full-time, the question was how quickly I could possibly start. After a lot of back and forth with my advisor, it became clear that the certificate program was incompatible with full-time studies over the next year. On the upside, it gave me access to some interesting courses in the meantime. The next step was deciding on a degree program to support full-time aspirations and I quickly encountered what's called the paradox of choice.

The paradox of choice is a concept introduced by psychologist Barry Schwartz which suggests that the more options we have, the less satisfied we feel with our decision. This phenomenon occurs because having too many choices requires more cognitive effort, leading to decision fatigue and increased regret over our choices.

I couldn't help but think that if it was hard for me to decide on a degree, having decades of life experience to guide me, I could only imagine how hard it'd be for kids getting out of high school! This indecision might be partly why I never applied in the first place. To help me make sense of the options in the most practical way that I knew, I broke out a few trusty tools including a spreadsheet and a Pivot Table.

To start, I identified a few degrees that seemed interesting and copied their required courses - along with those for my certificate - into a table. The goal was to quickly see which courses were common across which programs and hopefully spot a trend. This was the second most time consuming part and I ended up writing a JavaScript snippet (used in the developer console for simplicity) to scrape data from relevant web pages:

const foo = [...document.querySelectorAll('.course')].map(el => {
    const data = [
        el.querySelector('.code-number').textContent,
        el.querySelector('.title').textContent,
        parseInt(el.querySelector('.credits').textContent),
    ];
    return data.join('\t');
});
console.log(foo.join('\n'));

Having the options nicely laid out suggested that I could pursue a few very different paths - anywhere from art to commerce - and deciding among these took a whole lot of time. In the end, I opted for a regular old Bachelor of Arts (BA) with a Business minor because this gave me the most flexibility to pick a major while exploring different subjects and to change my mind later. I quickly sent in my application and enrolled in courses over the summer that would transfer over to my new program.

Summer school was a big adjustment on two fronts: first, going from one course to multiple was a lot to handle as expected; second, having a regular course delivered in half the time was great for focus but intense. Business classes also felt like a funny way to process having been laid off, some covering subjects where I had decent exposure through work that apparently didn't translate to straight As. What came to mind was Stringer Bell taking economics courses in The Wire, presumably also listening to young aspiring future bankers who have it all figured it out. The obvious difference is that I've never had any street game and instead was just reminded of once being so young and confident.

My time management skills were also worse than I thought and managing inflexible course expectations made me realize that work is in some ways easier than school. If a deadline is unrealistic given competing priorities, you typically have a manager who can adjust dates or scope. Professors have too many students to make exceptions like this.

Remembering that I might be compensating for being laid off, I also started to regularly think that “if I put as much effort into work as I have into school,” that I might not have been cut. This didn't help anything but reflects how much time was going into schoolwork. What was useful was remembering how much of work was grinding and falling back on these old habits helped. That said, it still felt like school should be easier and that I had a lot of room to improve study habits beyond what I remembered from high school.

Thankfully, I got to know and work with classmates at various places in life. This provided some evidence that however I felt about the overall situation or the advantage of youthful energy, the people getting the best grades were putting the work in. Either way, I did what I could and completed finals with decent results.

Starting a degree program

It's now a few months later and I have finished a second semester. As I wait to hear back about grades and enjoy some winter vacation, I once again wonder: was going back to school a huge mistake or is it the start of something wonderful? As with many questions, I’m sure my answer will depend on the day that I'm asking it. For now, I’m content to be putting the time in and learning how much I don't know about the world around me. While I’m also very definitely paying for the certainty of being a student, it is reassuring to have the future broadly spelled out in four month intervals and that beats waiting for another RIF to drop on a similar schedule.

That said, I still have long-term concerns. There's not enough time for all of the electives that I’d like to take although that's a good problem to have. Student loans don’t seem too bad in retrospect but I still need to be careful about avoiding a lot of long-term debt. It's also entirely possible that school doesn’t pan out and I head back to the job market sooner than later, whether in tech or otherwise. In any case, it's impossible to predict the future so I'll continue to pick the best option from those available, knowing that I can reassess at a later point.

Conclusion

If you’re in a similar situation, please know that I see you - figuratively speaking, anyhow - and I'd like to hear about your experiences. Hopefully this post helps you to plan a few scenarios of your own and provides some reassurance that life is likely to fall between whatever extremes we can imagine.

If that sounds like a bit too much, though, you can also just spin a wheel.